2 May 2005 - 2:53pm
The ownership society: men own the womb
I just posted a version of this as my last guest blogger post on Rox Populi (today my stint there ends), but I feel, in my own brand of hubris, that this bears repeating.
I received this announcement via email:
Today marks the beginning of Chastity Awareness Week in Pennsylvania and NARAL Pro-Choice America has an activity for your readers to keep their minds sparkling clean.
President Bush has recently asked Congress to provide more funding for his abstinence-only until marriage programs. Despite the fact that study after study has shown that these very programs are ineffective and even harmful for our kids, Bush has decided to yet again offer us the latest in medieval birth control: Chastity!
What’s in these “abstinence-only until marriage� curricula? Slogans like:
* Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date!
* Don’t Be a Louse, Wait For Your Spouse!
* Would you want a cookie that someone had already taken a bite out of?Click here to come up with your own slogan to enter our contest!
These slogans might be out-of-date but that hasn’t stopped President Bush from providing federal funding – your tax dollars – to buy them to teach our kids.
I do hope you will post on this contest—the chastity of your readers may very well be at stake! To enter, please send an email to GiveUsRealChoices@gmail.com. We will announce the contest winner on May 7th.
Sincerely,
Amelia Field
GiveUsRealChoices.org
Every time we read about the radical right's attempts to control women's reproductive rights, it behooves us to consider how men -- and make no mistake, these radical wingnuts are led by men -- reproduce themselves via culture. Women reproduce with biology. Women are the ones who give birth. There's no taking that away (yet). But men reproduce through culture, whereby they impose their psychological and social markers upon the generations after.
Thus patriarchal churches, for example. Those men jealously guard their power for good reason -- they are protecting their own reproductive rights, their own legacy that, they feel, future generations should inherit. When their cultural memes impose themselves upon the genetic process, they are asserting cultural power over biological power.
I suspect that is why the radical right is against not just legal sanction for a medical issue like abortion, but also against birth control and sex education. They want to control the women, they want to control what they do not have and own. The wombs.
And so, rather than embrace laws and policies that are actually proven to reduce unwanted pregnancy, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, they march on this crusade against women's authority and power over our own bodies. Why? Because they covet that power for themselves.
They want to own "their" wombs. And that means controlling "their" women. (And all women are "their" women.)
Welcome to the dark heart of the ownership society.
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Comments
Women reproduce through biology. Men through culture. You say.
Humans are but one of hundreds of thousands of species of animals, most of which have both females and males. And in many, many of these species females give birth not males. Fertilization is internal.
Following your logic males in those species does not reproduce - since they do not give birth and animals does no transmit culture (with a few exceptions).
I think that both males and females reproduce biologically. And both men and women "reproduce" culturally.
You use the word 'meme'. This term was coined by Richard Dawkins, I assume therefore that you are also aware of the concept of genes, which might be usefull in understanding why also males reproduce biologically. Sure enough in our species, much of the process is internal, inside womens wombs. They have, so to speak, the necessary "plumbing".
But to say that men does not reproduce biologically just foster the esoteric dualism that men are somehow closer to the Heavens and women closer to Earth.
I did not come up with the theory. Nor did I assert that men had no role in reproduction. You also assume that there is no culture in the animal world. I wonder about that. Do they not learn from each other?
Nevertheless, there's no doubting that the main institutions of power in the world are patriarchies where men assert some sort of lasting legacy on the world. The womb-like structures of the Church, for example -- an institution where controlling and restricting women seems to be a primary concern. Historically the female impact upon culture goes unnoticed. Perhaps it is largely unnoticeable.
Few women have ruled kingdoms. Until recently, the men made history and the men wrote history. We look at the founding of the United States, for example, and the only woman mentioned is Betsy Ross.
As for more on men's cultural reproduction, I leave that to the anthropologists who've been writing about this. What's at issue here is men's attempt to control the woman's biology. That is the agenda of the conservatives and their "strict father" view of the world. Chalk it up to control through culture, or simply to the male insecurity of not knowing if they really sired their children. It's a problem, based in male psychology and male culture, that flies in the face of women's equality that our society supposedly celebrates and honors.
The way you wrote it first was quite different and, in my opinion, very oversimplified.
Of course, your are right that a man has an evolutionary interest in making sure he sires his offspring. That is his way of passing on his genes. Maybe you could even say that it is his genes that "have this interest" since they go on, but when the man is dead - he is dead, and, from an existentialist point of view, does not need to care.
The good thing for a woman is that she is always sure that she is the biological mother, the trade-off is, and in nature there are always trade-offs, that she has to do a disproportionally big part of the work. Of course, women as well as men have evolutionary interests. Sometimes the interests are aligned already in nature, indeed most of the time.
Sometimes the interests conflict, and cultural constructs, such as marriage can be seen as trying to remedy this situation.
To simply reduce this to a problem of male psychology, is to overlook, I think, our long evolutionary history.
The way you wrote it first was quite different and, in my opinion, very oversimplified.
Of course, your are right that a man has an evolutionary interest in making sure he sires his offspring. That is his way of passing on his genes. Maybe you could even say that it is his genes that "have this interest" since they go on, but when the man is dead - he is dead, and, from an existentialist point of view, does not need to care.
The good thing for a woman is that she is always sure that she is the biological mother, the trade-off is, and in nature there are always trade-offs, that she has to do a disproportionally big part of the work. Of course, women as well as men have evolutionary interests. Sometimes the interests are aligned already in nature, indeed most of the time.
Sometimes the interests conflict, and cultural constructs, such as marriage can be seen as trying to remedy this situation.
To simply reduce this to a problem of male psychology, is to overlook, I think, our long evolutionary history.
Sorry your comment was caught.