Female Trouble
March 24, 2005

"Is it just me, or does it seem odd that women make up at least one half of the global population, yet we're given one measly month out of twelve to celebrate our contributions to history? You'll notice there's no designated Men's History Month. The rest of the year it's all about them.

In a truly enlightened world, we wouldn't need to designate a separate month to recognize the achievements of women, or blacks, or any of the other also-rans. As civil rights activism tried to teach us in the 1950s and '60s, separate is not equal. Separate is, well, separate. Different. Not the norm. Other. Alien.

There's nothing like getting assigned a special month of one's own to let you know just how marginalized you really are. Signaling out women, or blacks, or any other alternative color, lifestyle, or nationality, to be recognized for one month suggests it's okay to forget about us the rest of the year. You got your month, what more do you want? Now let's pop a brewski and watch the damn game, already.

Attempts to designate special recognition, however well-intentioned, usually only serve to point out how far the designee still has to go to earn a little common respect. How about the time the Academy Awards designated 1992 "The Year of the Woman?" Batting clean-up at that year's ceremony was Clint Eastwood's grimly guy-friendly western Unforgiven, winner of four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Revival Of A Macho Genre Previously Considered Stone Dead. Its poster art features four craggy male faces and a large, prominent pistola clasped slightly below the Mendoza line. Nary a woman in sight. Emma Thompson won the Best Actress award for Howard's End, beating out a fairly lackluster bunch of femmes, but the most talked-about female role of the year was actually played by a man—Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game. It's easy to fling about honorary designations, but the proof is in the pistola.

So while we're all busy celebrating Women's History—and getting all dewy-eyed over Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, and Amelia Earhart, all draped in nostalgia, now, like slightly mildewed lace, and safely tucked away in the past—let's spare a thought for a more sobering issue: Women's Present.

While we upper-middle-class western women are over-stressed, overtaxed, and just plain exhausted running around trying to have it all, too many of our sisters in what was once called the Third World (and many less upscale regions of our own back yards) are struggling to have any of it. A basic education. A living wage. The right to not get pregnant.

A woman doesn't have to be straight-jacketed into a burkha or subjected to radical sexual surgery to be oppressed by fear-mongering male authority, whether it's an ancient cultural or religious tradition of subjugation, or the latest legal commandment from the Great White Father in the big White House. Since 2001, the current administration has enforced a global gag rule that forbids family planning agencies from even discussing contraception with their clients, or risk losing U. S. funding for critical health services. For all his anti-abortion rhetoric, Uncle W Sam is making sure that vital information for preventing abortions is withheld from the women who need it most. Earth to W: history proves that abstinence alone does not work. But what can you expect from a culture that considers Viagra a miracle drug and the Pill the work of Satan?

The cowboy messiah strikes again, promoting his self-righteous agenda with the only weapon he truly understands: ignorance. In a culture devoted to war, conquest, and the undisputed authority of the Big Guy (on earth as it is in heaven), it behooves the ruling male elite to keep its females ignorant, docile, and available. In the postwar eras of the 20th Century, when new crops of youth had to be seeded in time to grow enough personnel for the next great war, English virgin brides were advised to "Close your eyes and think of England." Nobody was tub-thumping for abstinence in those days. Now that the global population is reaching critical mass, guess who gets sacrificed, as the Bush Doctrine ensures that abortion will remain illegal, criminalized, and unsafe.

Let's be clear about this: nobody is pro-abortion. Only somebody with a y chromosome (and a particularly clueless specimen, at that) could ever believe a woman would blithely choose so psychologically agonizing and physically invasive a procedure because she's too immoral to just say no. The best defense against abortion is information, but that would imply that women have a right to protect their own bodies.

The latest heinous example of a paternal authority mucking around inside a fertile body where it has no business to be is the recent senatorial vote to open the National Wildlife Refuge in the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling. Where are the pro-lifers when millions of protected wild lives will be lost? Mother Nature has no defense against the cowboy messiah. In a shameless display of pure pistola power, the Bush administration is ready to play both rapist and abortionist, having its way with the land and scraping out the results with oil derrick coat-hangers.

Close your eyes and think of General Motors. This won't hurt a bit.