I'll start by asking everyone to imagine that for millennia female babies have been born with a unique birthmark: a target. It appears in conjunction with female reproductive organs, female body configuration, and/or female identification of queer and transgender people. It appears regardless of race, ethnicity, geography, or century. The target mark has been accepted for thousands of years as feminine a characteristic as the ability to conceive and bear children.
We have to imagine, because humankind would have died out long ago with this encouragement of those who consider women to be targets even without the permission of biology.
There's a point to this. Read on . . .
I'm not looking forward to tonight's discussion of this diary. I didn't want to write this particular diary; I dreaded writing this particular diary; I couldn't not write this particular diary. My hope is that those who have not considered the life and death foundations of feminism will understand better where feminism comes from, even if feminism as a force that literally fights for women's lives isn't germane to their own.
Simply, I want everyone who isn't a feminist--male or female--and everyone who IS, to think about where the need for women to stand up for themselves originates. It starts in the most primitive desire to live. History reeks of women's slaughter; probably this isn't a new idea. But think how many women have died, die, and will die for no other reason than THEY ARE WOMEN. Period.
Quickly, a rundown. Sporadic persecution of women blamed for adverse conditions--witches (Many were killed for supposedly inciting men to do the actual foul deeds, but because they were women a way was found to blame them and exterminate them. New England witches were almost 100% female (one of my ancestors was sentenced to hang but her husband was well-connected and she was grudgingly allowed to live. Anne Hutchinson's religious crime was finally "proved" because her uterus expelled what was called a "demon" and she was accused of having sexual intercourse with the devil. It was either a malformed uterus, or, probably, an unusual but not unknown even now formation of uterine warts. She was banned from her church for her religious views, but chose banishment over hanging for the evidence of her womb).
Infanticide of females over the centuries, most recently in China because male children are preferred by many who are limited to one child. Bride killings, usually carried out by in-laws (there is no counterpart of husband killings, no matter how unsatisfactory they may be). An unfortunate tendency of many "civilizations" to choose punishment, often death, for only the female participant in adultery. St. Paul's warnings for men to "beware the widow" having been used to blame women for men's transgressions (see "witches," above). The instinctive avoidance of free choice after dark--women know that they can be chosen to be violated in many ways, and often killed, simply by choosing to be a woman alone in the dark. And relegation to living conditions that kill; women have historically ended up with hard, dangerous work for low pay if they could not depend upon a man for support of them and their children. Dangerous working conditions kill, and low pay leads to malnutrition, lack of medical care, below standard living conditions, death.
A good example of this is in a article I found on the Net about the Juarez killings of hundreds of young women. A reporter felt constrained to mention that four times as many men were killed on the border as women--men involved in drug trafficking. However, Diana Valdez has investigated the Juarez femicide for years and written a book about common knowlege on the border--that the women have been killed as the ending act of their use in parties as objects of "entertainment;" sexually used in many ways, including torture and murder. High level men of the Ciudad Juarez area are involved, and nobody is trying to bring them to justice. But a young woman on the street in Juarez, no matter why she is there, is looked upon as perhaps the next victim. Just because she is a woman--the ghouls and perverts who have used and killed probably 700 women in the last decade or two are only interested in using a female body.
That is why five little girls in Pennsylvania died. A man wanted to molest little girls. He didn't WANT to want to, but he wanted to. He let everyone else go; he was ready to molest. Before and after, he blamed the existence of little girls for his misery. They died because he had a problem, and because--NO OTHER REASON--they were little girls. To get rid of them was his reasoning; without little girls, he wouldn't have his problem.
Feminism today doesn't deal with death on the surface very often in this country. It deals with the aftermath. How often do we think about how vulnerable we really are--because we are women, or even because we appear to be women. How often do men, even sympathetic, empathetic, and involved feminist men, think about the bottom line need for women to be considered equal and strong--to make it clear that the target should not be there. It starts with wanting to stay alive, with NEEDING to stay alive.
There is so much more to say. I have literary criticisms, news from all over the world, and many more graceful and convincingly written analyses of this subject. I've purposely not read a recent column by Bob Herbert that looks to be covering the same subject matter, but wouldn't you know I can't find the link right now; I'll get it for you.
And here are some more on the Juarez killings ("femicides" all, because the reason they were murdered was that they they were women).
www.truthout.org/issues_06/090606WA.shtml (that looks weird; you can Google "Texas Journalist Patrols Grisly Beat")
www.cjr.org/issues/2004/burnett-mexico.asp?
www.npr.org/templates/story.php?storyId+1532607