Isn't it lovely to live in a sexist culture where women aren't considered real humans?

[amilyn]

I've been meaning to post a link to this for a while now. cereta made a post that has spawned lots of thought and discussion that I think is important.

Comments

Why I Am Part Of The Problem

[mylittleredgirl]

Things that embarrass me:

1) Talking about rape. I have been in therapy for a year, nearly a decade after the fact, and still say "that thing that happened." I am able to forgive him and find excuses for his behavior. I still struggle with granting myself that same courtesy.

2. Talking about abortion. And here's why: I'm actually kind of pro-life. This came about for three reasons: the low self esteem that gave me the idea that my life actually has no worth aside from being able to bear children, my beliefs in nonviolence of any kind, and also that, as a teenager, my father told me he would force me to have an abortion if I got pregnant (so in my head, having an abortion = doing something to my body that I don't want to do because someone else wants me to, which is totally backwards

Re: Why I Am Part Of The Problem

[amilyn]

I don't like this idea that *either* you care about women *or* you care about unborn life, and you can't do bothI think the reason it's so often framed this way is that, at the end of the discussion, the woman who is already HERE either a) has agency over her life and body and mind and choices, OR b) she is bound--even with perhaps a few exceptions--to sacrifice the above to a creature that is growing in her body and cannot live outside of her body

Re: Why I Am Part Of The Problem

[lydiabell]

It's just all hard and full of slippery slopes, all of which were forged by tectonic movements of MILLENIA of oppression of women and which we've inherited and trying to find a modern, woman-empowering set of rules within a patriarchal system...it's hard.

This is exactly it. Trying to deal with the subject of abortion without understanding the influence of millenia of patriarchy strikes me as sort of like trying to deal with many of the conflicts in, say, modern Africa without understanding the influence of colonialism.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that only women should discuss abortion, but I do think that only people who understand about the oppression of women can discuss it in any useful way. (Frankly, I think that includes some men and excludes some women.)

Re: Why I Am Part Of The Problem

[elfwreck]

I pray a lot that education, birth control, social services, support, and kindness will ultimately make abortion unnecessary.

This.

Nobody (remotely sane) is pro-abortion. Nobody wants the world to have more abortions. No woman wants an abortion for her birthday.

What we don't want more, is unwanted children, unloved children, damaged children who sap their mothers' bodies and souls, children dead in toddlerhood from lack of medical care or ignorant neglect. What we don't want is more pregnant suicides.

You don't have to think that all abortions are good things, to agree that unwanted or unhealthy pregnancies are not something that can be fixed by declaring them more important than the life of the woman involved.

Re: Why I Am Part Of The Problem

[amilyn]

Well said.