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The War Against Women
A Dispatch from the West African Front
Kailahun, Sierra Leone -- Greetings from a war zone that's not Iraq. And not Afghanistan either.
I'm checking in from West Africa, where I've been working with women in three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire. The Iraq debacle has monopolized attention and obscured these "lesser" wars -- now officially "over" -- but millions of West African women are struggling to recover. For them, the war isn't really over at all, not by a long shot. This is the war story that's never truly told. Let me explain.
Surely you remember these conflicts. Liberia's war came in three successive waves lasting 14 years altogether, from 1989 to 2003. Sierra Leone's war started in 1991 when guerillas of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, trained in Liberia, invaded their own country. The war drew many players and lasted until January 2002, a decade in all. In Côte d'Ivoire, a civil war started in 2002 when northern rebels attempted a coup to oust President Laurent Gbagbo, but by that time the international community had decided to act to prevent any further destabilization of the region. French, African, and later UN peacekeepers stepped in and a treaty was signed in 2003.
So, officially, these countries are no longer "war zones." Accords have been signed. Peacekeeping forces are on duty or close at hand. The UN and international aid agencies are assisting "recovery." Some arms have been surrendered; some refugees have returned from exile. Some men are making mud bricks and building huts to replace the spacious houses of embossed concrete and tile that once graced towns and villages throughout the region. Officially, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire are now designated "post-conflict zones," but they are so fractured, so traumatized, and -- especially in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone -- so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said to be securely at peace either. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as the poorest country on the planet and, like Afghanistan, it is a nation of widows.
Visit one of these countries and you'll see for yourself that, at best, real peace will take a long, slow time to come. The destruction in Sierra Leone's Kailahun District, for instance, is as shocking as anything I ever saw in the devastated Afghan capital, Kabul. UN officials and an array of international aid organizations like to use the term "post-conflict" for such places in such moments. It sounds vaguely hopeful, even if it designates a desperate place embarked on a difficult period of "recovery" that may or may not be recognizable after a decade or two, or even a generation or two, as peace.
That's what our leaders don't bother to mention (possibly don't even grasp) when they talk blithely about war and peace as if they were simply opposite sides of the same coin, attained with equal ease with a heads-or-tails flip. Any fool can start a war swiftly with a shock and awe assault -- as George Bush did from the air in Iraq or the RUF did on the ground in Sierra Leone -- but peace is no sudden acquisition.
Just last month, the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague resumed proceedings begun last June against Charles Taylor, the charming American-educated sociopath and former president of Liberia. Taylor faces 11 charges for war crimes related to matters including terrorizing civilians, murder, rape, sexual slavery, amputations, and enslavement. These atrocities were committed not against his own country but against his neighbor. It was Taylor who backed RUF rebels as they terrorized the populace and augmented their numbers by abducting civilians.
Both Taylor and RUF leader Foday Sankoh reportedly received tactical training in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, who aimed to disrupt the West African region. Yet these wars were largely not about ideology or even politics. They were about greed, about the power to control and exploit the natural resources of the region -- Liberia's primal rain forests and especially Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds." Political scientists and military historians may eventually advance other theories to explain these wars -- though they'll be hard pressed to find any redeeming features, any "just cause" -- but West Africans will tell you that they took place simply because a few "bad, bad men" craved power and wealth. When Foday Sankoh's RUF forces invaded Sierra Leone, they numbered no more than 150 men, but what they started laid waste to a promising country.
Here's what I want to remind you of, though: When you think about these men who start wars, remember what they've done not to soldiers on either side, but to civilian populations -- especially to women. Today, it is civilians who are by far the most numerous casualties of war. Each successive conflict of recent times has recorded a greater proportion of civilians displaced, exiled, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed, killed, or disappeared. In every modern war, most of the suffering civilians are women and children.
In many wars, maimed and dead civilians are counted (if at all) merely as "collateral damage" -- like the estimated 3,000 innocent citizens who died in the initial American bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. In the West African wars, civilians became the designated targets. Foday Sankoh intended to conquer Sierra Leone, but having only 150 fighters, he resorted to forcible recruitment. Like Charles Taylor's forces in Liberia, Sankoh's destroyed whole villages, murdering most of the residents and taking away only those who might serve them as soldiers, porters, cooks, or "wives." Again, many of the dead and most of the abducted were women and children.
And here's a little-known reality: When any conflict of this sort officially ends, violence against women continues and often actually grows worse. Not surprisingly, murderous aggression cannot be turned off overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be convenient targets. Here in West Africa, as in so many other places where rape was used as a weapon of war, it has become a habit carried seamlessly into the "post-conflict" era. Where normal structures of law enforcement and justice have been disabled by war, male soldiers and civilians alike can prey upon women and children with impunity. And they do.
So I'm writing to you, here in "post-conflict" West Africa, from an active war zone. I'm writing from the heart of the war against women and children.
Counting Casualties
Listen to this report from Amnesty International. It describes the least of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Côte d'Ivoire:
"The scale of rape and sexual violence in Côte d'Ivoire in the course of the armed conflict has been largely underestimated. Many women have been gang-raped or have been abducted and reduced to sexual slavery by fighters. Rape has often been accompanied by the beating or torture (including torture of a sexual nature) of the victim... All armed factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence with impunity."
Human Rights Watch points out that "cases of sexual abuse may be significantly underreported," because women fear "the possibility of reprisals by perpetrators... ostracism by families and communities, and cultural taboos."
The Amnesty report documents case after case of girls and women, aged "under 12" to 63, assaulted by armed men. The more recent and thoroughgoing report by Human Rights Watch records the rape of children as young as three years-old. During the civil war, women and girls were seized in their village homes or at military roadblocks, or were discovered hiding in the bush. Some were raped in public. Some were raped in front of their husbands and children. Some were forced to witness the murder of husbands or parents. Then they were taken away to soldiers' camps to be held along with many other women. They were forced to cook for the soldiers during the day and every night they were gang-raped, in some cases by 30 to 40 men. They were also beaten and tortured. They saw women who resisted being beaten or killed by a simple slicing of the throat.
Many women were raped so incessantly and so brutally -- with sticks, knives, gun barrels, burning coals -- that they died. Many others were left with injuries and pain that still linger long after the war. Many who had been scarred as girls by "excision" or FMG (female genital mutilation) were literally ripped apart.
The Amnesty report coolly says: "The brutality of rape frequently causes serious physical injuries that require long-term and complex treatment including uterine prolapses (the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond)" -- one has to wonder what lies "beyond" the vagina -- "vesico-vaginal or recto-vaginal fistulas and other injuries to the reproductive system or rectum, often accompanied by internal and external bleeding or discharge." It notes that such women usually can't "access the medical care they need." Some still find it hard to sit down, or stand up, or walk. Some still spit up blood. Some have lost their eyesight or their memories. Some miscarried. Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. No one knows how many of them died, or are dying, as a result.
And many are still missing, perhaps dragged across borders when rogue militias from a neighboring country went home. Perhaps slaughtered along the way.
War and Its Sequel
Historically, women have long been counted among "the spoils of war," free for the taking; but, in our own time, women in large numbers have also been pawns in deliberate military and political strategies intended to humiliate the men to whom they "belong" and to exterminate their ethnic groups. (Think of Bosnia.) The Amnesty report traces the wholesale violence against women in Côte d'Ivoire to December 2000 when a number of women were arrested, raped, and tortured at the government's Police Training School in Dioula -- because their presumed ethnicity and political affiliation allied them with the opposition. According to Human Rights Watch, this was but one of many such cases incited by government-sponsored propaganda before the civil war even began.
No man responsible for any of these crimes has ever been brought to justice.
Next door in Liberia, by the time fighting ended in 2002, 1.4 million Liberians had been displaced within the country. Almost a million others had fled. In a country of three million people, that's one in three citizens gone. At least 270,000 people died. That's nearly 10% of the population. And here again the easy targets were women. A World Health Organization study in 2005 estimated that a staggering 90% of Liberian women had suffered physical or sexual violence; three out of four had been raped.
Typically, ending the war did not end the violence against women. A study in preparation by the International Rescue Committee -- the organization for which I currently work as a volunteer -- and Columbia University's School of Public Health concludes, "While the war officially ended in 2003, the war on women continued."
Well over half the women interviewed in two Liberian counties, including the capital city, Monrovia, had survived at least one violent physical attack during an 18- month period in 2006-2007, years after the conflict had officially ended. Well over half the women reported at least one violent sexual assault in the same period. Seventy-two percent said their husbands had forced them to have sex against their will. A 2003 IRC study among Liberian refugees in Sierra Leone found that 75% of the women had been sexually violated before they fled their country; after they fled, 55% were sexually assaulted again.
For women, war is not over when it's over.
Women Like Me
Countless women will never recover from the assaults they suffered during the war. I met many such women in Liberia.
On a visit I made to Kolahun, in Lofa County, where fighting had been heavy, one showed me her scars: a series of parallel horizontal ridges starting just below one ear and moving toward the throat. Some guerilla in Charles Taylor's army had locked this whisper of a woman against his chest and slowly, inch by inch, laid open the flesh of her neck in ribbons of blood. But that wasn't all. Taylor's men had broken all the fingers of her left hand so that they now point backwards at seemingly impossible angles. They slammed her back so forcefully with rifle butts that one leg and one arm (the one with the useless hand) are now paralyzed. She can still walk, leaning on a homemade wooden crutch; but that leaves her without a good arm, and she can't carry anything on her head, having lost the ability to balance. She has five children, some of them fathered by rape. The soldiers held her a long time. How many raped her she cannot say.
In the tiny village of Dougoumai I met a woman people refer to only as "the sick lady." She lay on a bed in a one-room mud-brick house. As I came in, she managed to sit up with great difficulty, using her twisted hands to move her swollen, useless legs. Her sister says she was captured by a militia fighting against Charles Taylor and gang-raped repeatedly by ten men. Nobody can say how long they kept her. They rammed their gun butts into her back -- evidently a common technique -- paralyzing her legs. She cannot walk. They smashed her hands. She cannot hold anything or feed herself or comb her hair. Her mother and two sisters, who luckily survived the war, feed her by hand, their lives too now dominated by the consequences of the violence done to this woman.
Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) surveyed surviving women in Lofa County, the center of Charles Taylor's operations. More than 98% said that, during his war (1999-2003), they lost their homes; more than 90%, their livelihoods; more than 72%, at least one family member. Nearly 90% of them survived at least one violent physical assault; more than half, at least one violent sexual assault. No one inquired about the number of women now caring for the permanently disabled.
In Sierra Leone, where terrorizing the civilian population was the main tactic of war, the violence against women and children was, as Human Rights Watch has reported, even more brutal. All parties to the conflict committed countless atrocities. Official reports document appalling crimes: fathers forced to rape their own daughters; brothers forced to rape their sisters; boy soldiers gang-raping old women, then chopping off their arms; pregnant women eviscerated alive and the living fetus snatched from the womb to satisfy soldiers betting on its sex. A brother is hacked to death and eviscerated; his heart and liver are placed in the hands of his 18-year-old sister who is commanded to eat them. She refuses. She is taken to a place where other women are being held. Among them is her sister. She sees her sister and other women murdered. Their heads are placed in her lap. These crimes, which violate primal taboos, aim to destroy not just individual victims but a whole culture as well; yet the individual victims are important in their own right, and in most cases they are women and children.
Perhaps the worst crime of the bad, bad men has been turning children -- mostly boys -- into armed guerillas as bad as themselves. In his bestselling autobiography A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah vividly describes his life as a boy soldier. Separated from his family by the war, he was captured by soldiers in the army of Sierra Leone, trained to fight, kept high on drugs (as all soldiers were), and forced to kill. When boy soldiers begin to rape and murder girls and women willingly at the instigation of men, civilization has collapsed.
Crimes Against Women
In recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group -- Albanians, let's say, or Tutsis -- or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we could recognize what goes on as a kind of "gender cleansing" or mass femicide. But we don't speak of crimes against women in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of "crimes against women" at all?
Interviewed for a TV documentary on mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a smiling guerrilla says he's "made love" to many women. The interviewer asks if all the women were willing, and he laughs. He admits that many fight him, and he says -- still grinning -- "If they are strong, I call my friends to help me." Despite his use of euphemisms, he knows just what he's doing. When the interviewer labels his love-making "rape," he typically insists that rape happens in wartime and that when the war is over, he won't do it anymore. The state of war excuses men's crimes against women because rape -- so the claim goes -- is something that just naturally occurs in war.
The war against women in West Africa and elsewhere is different from other wars -- whether driven by ideology, politics, greed, or personal ambition -- in that every faction, every side, makes war on women. They all abduct and rape and force women to labor. They all murder women. In West Africa, only the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) in Sierra Leone refrained for a considerable time from rape. They were traditional hunters, recruited by the government to defend their own areas from the rebels. Their customs kept them from sexual intercourse, believed to deplete a warrior's power, and they operated close to home, where they were known; but, as the war went on, they, too, began to act like all the other fighters. Their initial restraint was important, however, offering evidence that rape does not have to be something that "just happens" in war, but is instead an elective, wildly popular choice.
After war, in the "post-conflict" era, even some international peacekeepers have joined the war against women. Human Rights Watch and others have documented cases of rape by peacekeeping soldiers in West Africa, but none have been prosecuted. Perpetrators are simply repatriated or moved to a new post. Human Rights Watch also reports on the widespread practice among peacekeepers of using children who have turned to prostitution to survive. (There are few other options for girls who have been orphaned or rejected by their families, and many of these child prostitutes had already been used as sex slaves during wartime.) But apparently the peacekeepers recruit many girls themselves.
Here in Kailahun District, the place where the Sierra Leone war started and ended, women are upset and angry about the sexual exploitation of their adolescent daughters. Parents in this part of the country -- many of them war widows -- take seriously the advice to send their daughters to school, which costs more than most can easily afford. If a girl student becomes pregnant, she is required by law to drop out. (Consider the impact on a small village struggling to recover from war of the loss of even a few prospective teachers, nurses, or social workers.) If the father of the expected child is a fellow student, he can continue his studies, denying all responsibility. Often, however, it's not the boys who are to blame. Many still-virginal girls drop out of school early to escape predatory teachers, and women report that the incidence of teen pregnancy drops when peacekeeping forces leave town.
Even then, however, rape and child rape continue, largely unabated. It's hard to tell with certainty just how high this is, because raped women and girls are normally too shamed by the crime to report it. In war time, it was somewhat easier because they had so clearly been forced by armed men; with the war "over," rape once again becomes a woman's own fault. Nonetheless, angry parents in this region of Sierra Leone, increasingly report child rape to authorities. Here in Kailahun District, women mobilized to force the local magistrate to hear the case of a 7-year-old rape victim. The magistrate, apparently related to the admitted perpetrator, had prevented prosecution by postponing his trial, again and again.
Domestic violence -- wife-beating, marital rape, emotional abuse, torture, economic deprivation, and the like -- is common. Impoverished women with many children to feed have no choice but to endure "normal" levels of violence. But as in wartime, habitual violence invites the thrill of excess. Just the other day, a man in Moyamba District killed his wife and cut off her head.
Bad Men Make Good
For bad, bad men, terrorizing civilians holds advantages -- beyond the immediate gratification of the rush of power. Such acts can land them important posts in government. When atrocities become sufficiently conspicuous and horrific -- such as the notorious amputations of arms and legs in Sierra Leone -- the international community steps in to initiate a peace process. Usually they bring to the negotiating table all the bad, bad men who have been causing so much trouble and buy them off with positions of power in a new "interim" or "transitional" government. Witness, in another part of the world where women are notoriously badly treated, all those well-known warlords the Afghan people wanted tried for war crimes who somehow wound up in President Hamid Karzai's cabinet, or -- after elections advertised as democratic -- in parliament.
Foday Sankoh had been condemned to death for treason when he was summoned to just such peace negotiations. From them, he emerged as the head of the government commission in charge of managing Sierra Leone's natural resources, including the diamonds that financed his war. Charles Taylor, while committing mayhem and rape in refugee camps for displaced persons, was elected president of Liberia. Voters seemed to figure, as battered women often do, that the best way to stop the man's violence was to let him have his way, though this is a path to certain disaster.
Bad, bad men are quick to learn from the rapid advancement of their brothers elsewhere. Laurent Kunda in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), widely recognized as a prime candidate for trial before a war crimes tribunal, is now said to be jockeying for a high position in the government of the DRC in exchange for laying down his arms. The current rapid descent of Kenya into "tribal warfare" owes much to the same theory. Raila Odingo, having lost a clearly suspect presidential election, exploits genocidal violence with good reason to hope that international intervention will usher him into office by the back door.
Although UN Security Council Resolution 1325 calls for women to be included in all peace processes, they are rarely invited to the table. With men in charge of governments almost everywhere, the fearful fascination with bad, bad men continues and the perverse preference for predators trickles down. In Sierra Leone, ex-combatants were rewarded with motorcycles. The theory was that violent young men would be less dangerous if they could serve a useful purpose and make some money carrying passengers on brand new highly-chromed bikes in a country where most cars had been torched. The result? Every public square in the dodgiest districts of Sierra Leone is now dominated by a motorcycle gang consisting mainly of young men already surely skilled in the sexual exploitation of girls. Perhaps in the end, the transport scheme will work out; but in Sierra Leone most women and girls still walk.
Here in Kailahun District, women tell the story -- possibly apocryphal -- of an old woman who was huddled over her cook fire when RUF rebels entered her village. She was frying some tasty frogs. Rebels surrounded her, peering into the pot to see what she was cooking, and one of them said: "We are freedom fighters of the Revolutionary United Front. We have come to save you from the government." The old woman -- unafraid -- replied: "Then you must go to the capital. The government is not in my pot." Women in Kailahun District tell that story over and over, and they laugh every time. They are so proud of that lone, bold, old woman who told those rebel men off. That's the spirit of survival, still alive in them, though they must know that the rebels probably shot the woman and ate her frogs.
Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on a special project for their Gender-Based Violence (read: Violence Against Women) unit called "A Global Crescendo: Women's Voices from Conflict Zones." Her blogs about the project can be found by clicking here. She is the author, most recently, of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books), a report from another war that's not over.
[Note on sources: A number of the reports discussed in this piece, all PDF files, can be read on-line: Amnesty International, "Targeting Women"; Human Rights Watch, "'My Heart Is Cut': Sexual Violence by Rebels and Pro-Government Forces in Côte d'Ivoire; The World Health Organization; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the UN Fund for Population Activities, "Women's Reproductive Health in Liberia, The Lofa County Reproductive Health Survey"; Human Rights Watch, "'We'll Kill You If You Cry': Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict"; UN Resolution 1325.]
© Copyright 2008 Ann Jones
85 Comments so far
Show AllSo why isn't the US in West Africa, trying to save the oppressed people there?
Wow, that was a stupid question!
Oh boy, don't you just love full spectrum dominance? ronSuskind's 1% Doctrine has an interesting and sensible discussion of space debris and its dangers. Between that and the recent attempt to twist Europe's arms and make travel to the U.S. much more cumbersome, nasty, and painful, makes you really want to go out and buy an airplane ticket.
What planet are these guys on?
So far, their attempts to shoot down anything have failed, even when they knew when it would be launched and when they tried to hit it right after launch, let alone trying to hit an income rocket or a large asteroid or whatver!
Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Junk!
Heart-rending article.
Those men victimizing women and children are not human - they are psychopaths!
Their true, ugly, evil selves become obvious when they put on a uniform, which reminds me of the rape and killing of the 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers. I wonder how many unreported rapes of Iraqi girls and women have been committed by the illegal occupiers.
This story makes me wonder whether combat veterans are more likely to come home rapists than those of the same age who never went to war. Anyone out there have reliable statistics?
militantliberal- they were rapists BEFORE they got there and it doesn't matter if the women are Iraqi or their fellow female US soldiers. We rape and murder our own women (and children) all the time. The number one cause of death in murders of women in the USA is from a spouse or boyfriend.
The truth is, war just makes this situation worse. When there are no civil structures present to help prevent or punish these actions, they proliferate. Look at countries that have thriving sex slave trades, a nation does not even have be at war for these actions to happen. As much as men like to thump their chests about the sufferings of war and combat, women and children fare far worse and often have no say whatsoever. Sometimes death is better than other alternatives. In a testostorone driven, might-is-right world, women have much to fear.
Civilization is a very fragile thing. It gets real ugly when it is weak, unjust or not around.
Those men victimizing women and children are not human - they are soldiers doing what they are told to do! Knights and other warriors at least have ethics.
It never ceases to amaze and horrify me, the brutality that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another. For a country that has been at war almost continually since its inception, so few of us have really experienced war or understand what being at war really means. Most of us have never seen war first hand. We've never known the gut-wrenching terror of armed soldiers invading our homes, our communities burned and destroyed, our loved ones carried off, brutalized, maimed or killed while we looked on in helpless horror. Most of us find those images too frightening to even imagine.
Our images of war are of John Wayne-like American officers fearlessly leading their troops into battle; of soldiers who die dramatically with noble words of encouragement for their buddies; of clearly defined and wicked enemies that are merely representatives of an evil idealogy, not human beings; of bombs and bullets that only hit proper, military targets. We see only the aspects of war that make us feel good, and turn a blind eye to the realities of war that make it something to be avoided.
In every war, large and small, it is the civilian population that suffers the most. As this article points out so well, those civilians are primarily the less powerful members of society...women, children and old folks. The men who fight in war also suffer, both witnessing and participating in incredible acts of brutality that cannot help but change their perception of themselves and the world. We look at events like these and feel troubled and sad. If we are honest, perhaps we even feel a bit fortunate, having never looked out our front window and seen our neighbor being held at gunpoint while cheering soldiers rape his wife and daughter.
With few exceptions, Americans have no way of relating to the experiences described in this story. For the majority of Americans, the experience of war is confined to insolated incidents in recent history...the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks on 9/11. We watched in shock as familiar landmarks exploded in flames. We were horrified to see our fellow citizens running in terror for their lives, or perishing before our very eyes. Imagine, if you will, how our perceptions would change if events like these were a daily reality of American life.
At least, then, when our leaders talk about things like "surgical air strike," "shock and awe," "limited engagement," "regime change," "armed incursion," and "taking the war to the enemy," we would all know, beyond any doubt, exactly what it was they were talking about.
This is a superb article by Ann Jones, and highlights the events on the African continent in particular. In response to a recent article about FGM, particularly in Africa, I felt that my comments would be taken as racist. I stick by my assertion, that the majority of Africa has not yet realised it is in the 21st Century, in fact it seems to be adopting the barbaric codes of the dark ages. Women on the African continent are to be used or possessed, they have few if any rights. They seem to exist simply for child bearing, or as some kind of prize, to be claimed by the warrior, or head honcho of a tribe.
The West has not attempted to introduce true democracy, law or morally founded principles, but instead, installed puppet governments to insure the safe passage of assets, and wealth from the said states.
Um, Riverman, the system you keep trying to promote, wherein only the select few get to vote or hold office, describes the Dark Ages to a tee.
You need to spend a lot less time trying to exercise your limited reasoning skills. You're going to hurt yourself. I would advise taking up something less strenuous, like reading, or crochet.
But thanks for the chuckle.
It is easier for men to harm women because most cultures the world over embrace the concept of hierarchy. Hierarchy over land. Hierarchy over animals. Hierarchy over children. Hierarchy over females.
Hierarchy roots are firmly rooted in worlds most popular religions. But the oldest religions (beyond what we are encouraged to study) were NOT rooted in hierachy and dominance, but were about our wonderful dance with nature. Humans use to love being part of something wonderous and wonderful.
Recommended reading to learn more--
"When God Was A Woman"
"The Chalice and The Blade"
Questioning Afghan Justice
A 23-year-old journalism student has been sentenced to death in Afganistan. His crime? Downloading a document that suggests women are equal to men. Is this a country that really wants democracy, which Canadians are fighting and dying for? We ask the federal government if it will intervene.
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2008/02/021008_2.html
The usa cannot even save the women from the pervets who roam the web or the so called spousal love of husbands and boyfriends.
Muslim Girl - a teen magazine published in the States - it sometimes shows girls wearing hijabs on the cover and other times girls not wearing hijabs:
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2007/07/072207_1.html
RE: - Those men victimizing women and children are not human - they are psychopaths!
RE: - I wonder how many unreported rapes of Iraqi girls and women have been committed by the illegal occupiers.
RE: - We rape and murder our own women (and children) all the time. The number one cause of death in murders of women in the USA is from a spouse or boyfriend.
Seems like misogyny exists in all cultures and societies - as does the fight against misogyny.
Whether woman is portrayed as a virgin or a bratz doll, in both cases our ultimate purpose on earth seems to be to make ourselves pleasing (and nonthreatening) to men. What about the old fashioned idea of someone liking us for being us?
It shocks me that you find a decent guy who sticks up for women and the other men try to shut him up.
I am sure that every time a soldier or "contractor" rapes someone, there is at least one man forced to remain silent about it or, at least, not interfere.
I am sure that every time an aid relief worker expected "fringe benefits" in exchange for providing food to a starving woman or child that some man is made to keep his silence about what is going on through the use of threats.
If one's wife, or children or sister or cousin or friend is abused, does it really matter if one is male or female? If a stranger is being harmed and you can do nothing about it, does being male rather than female ease your guilt.
Was Maria Lauterbach an isolated incident?
thevideowoman
Most tiles in that category have been discredited - and mainly by women scholars. When I studied anthropology, and during my talks with professors in the field, mentioning the 'time of the goddess' was met with raised brows, grimaces, gecks, and/or rolled eyes by the women on the faculty.
It's a re-writing of history akin to those that insist that the Americas were a kind of Eden before the European, or that European conquerors totally misrepresented African cultures, and that the only reason there's violence in Africa is because the Europeans taught it to the people they subjugated.
Surprise! All humans are capable of the same depths and heights, given similar circumstances. When women are in charge, they exhibit the same sorts of tendencies as the ruling/governing men of their time/culture. (Anybody want to call Margaret Thatcher a warm and fuzzy, sweet and nurturing, head of state? Do you think Hillary Clinton would be?)
Here's something to ponder: suggesting that female = peaceful is an echoing of the kinds of idiotic cries of 'wimp,' or 'girly man,' etc., that are hurled by warmongers at men who prefer peace.
riverman101, have you considered using the spell and grammar check option on your computer? It works very well. If there were a global IQ test to determine who could vote, I doubt you'd be allowed to. And since the world is ruled by men now, things would not change at all.
Grumpyoldlady, I appreciate your subtle use of satire. It will go over riverman's head, but then, what doesn't? The dominant patriarchy sees no reason to change. They like things as they are.
I had to make myself read this and the links... it's so awful to contemplate. America needs new priorities. "Our interests" have always been, in fact, the interests of exploitive, extractive transnational corporations.
Human rights is our Sunday Sermon... it ends there.
I can see by the comments above that other people are as baffled as I am by such horrific conduct... but on an institutional scale like this? It's completely unfathomable.
I know it's men that do this. As a man I should "get" it... so far, I've tried and failed. What is it in ME, that's akin to THEM? I have been testosterone toxic, irrational and wrong in my life... but these acts? mind-boggling.
If anyone wants to refer me to some literature that could truly help me understand (in layman's terms), I'll read it, I promise.
I wrote Sen. Obama a letter, regarding the abuse of women and children, refugees from Iraq. I also talked a bit about the slave trade... BEGGING him to take America in a new direction when he becomes president.
I feel like I'm whistling past the graveyard... so entrenched, even cellular level, is the inhumanity of mankind and the power structure of this world.
"militantliberal- they were rapists BEFORE they got there "
totaljoke: You were asked for a citation for an accusation such as you make here. Do you have one or not? I think not.
riverman101, Did you even read this article? If men had their way without any constraints from women, the species would quickly be doomed. I find it utterly bizarre that you would make a claim of male superiority when the article was largely about men incessantly raping, torturing, and mutilating women. So much for the superiority of men.
I found it interesting that ascott claimed that "when women are in charge, they exhibit the same sorts of tendencies as the ruling/governing men of their time/culture" Claiming that all genders are equally capable of exactly the same behavior really neglects - and tends to make invisible - the larger forces which have created an unbalanced situation to begin with.
The vast majority of cultures today are patriarchal where might makes right; only those people who behave as if this were true are going to reach the upper levels of power. So in my opinion, Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton are women who have taken-on male patterns of thought and behavior, otherwise they would have been marginalized and considered unworthy, as most women in this world are today. By and large, only male-acting women in positions of power and women as sex-objects are highly valued today. That is, it is femininity, empathy and nurturing that have been considered worthless, not female personhood per se.
I see some responses to this article to be a recognition of the loss of balance between masculinity and femininity in many cultures. Both are needed for balance, but whenever one is considered superior to the other, all sorts of havoc happens. The desire for more emphasis on femininity seems to me to be a enantiodromia, where the over-valuing of masculinity is creating a counterbalancing desire for an increase in the value of femininity. This seems to be a good thing and way overdue.
'West Africa', hell...report out of Detroit, where the homelessness is greater, and 'real-food' is in shorter-supply...
And ALL Rhodes-scholars and Ivy-league educated-dummies are 'sociopaths' -- if not an 'entry-criteria', they subsequently Major in such. [I think they call it 'neo-Lib'?]
Ask one of the Clinton's...
A 'war against women' -- are you joking? In England and America, we have 'warriors who are Thatcherite-women' -- all to be lead by Bill's "Amazon of the Clean-Knees"...and that Royal-hag who couldn't keep the Bank of England 'non-Kosher' (Gore and his new 'Baroness' thinks that is 'spiffy', though -- Carbon-taxation, here we come!).
[Well, you all wanted to 'Save the Planet', didn't ya? Just don't freeze from jacked-up Oil (or BDR's purloined-Uranium, depleted-or-otherwise) during all of this 'Global-Warming' due to 'misuse of Peak Oil'!]
C5H8 + O2 = CO2 + H2O -- just like when you 'hold your breath' -- and, "how long can-you", btw? Longer than you 'can't drink'?
Buy a now-cheap SUV, and run it on always-cheap/clean LPG -- just like Schwarzenegger does in his Hummers -- in a CARB-state where HE is the only-one really 'legal'! There IS no Peak-Oil (just Peak-Refineries since JDR monopolized them, and an 'Arc of made-Unstable' elsewhere), there is also no 'Global-Warming' (just 2,000 above-ground 'Tests', unregulated Utility-Co's, and a great-big HAARP electric-bill since '92), and oil is 'worth' exactly $0.60 cents-per-barrel, dumbass...(oh, and Ethanol uses more Oil than burning-oil, wrecks your engine, AND reduces your MPG by 10% while starving your grandchildren -- so let some-other Dumbass Mandate it for you!).
Crap -- why was EVERY 'child left behind' in America? Even UncleTom taught some Literacy, didn't he? [Guess I can hope Uncle Obama might...NAH!] Gore will be the perpetual Clinton-shadow -- and you guys in CD thought Cheney was 'bad'!]
culicomorpha
I named Thatcher and Clinton to show that women are capable of anything that men are capable of. You ignored the entire point. It is not whether a militaristic stance is correct - it isn't.
The point is, women are capable of anything/everything that men are. The very fact that Thatcher and Clinton act like the worst of the male politicians proves that there is nothing innate in women that prevents them from being so. I also said that women will be just as likely to act like the men in their time/society as the men.
So, in trying to disagree with me or correct me - or whatever you thought you were doing, you have in fact, proven my points.
Thank you.
Would you please be quiet? I am working hard trying to pay off my 7000 sq. ft. mansion, my bi-annual remodelings, my vacation condos in the Bahamas, Cancun and Hawaii, my yacht, beemer, SUV, and child support to my two-ex wives, my two mistresses, child support for them, plus a divorce coming up and three ivy-league college educations for the kids plus their three beemers.
Common Dreams needs to have their IT people look at this Edit function
culicomorpha
I did not ignore 'the larger point' of the article: I was comenting on s bit of silliness about the Time of the Goddess nonsense.
For some bizarre reason, there are people who insist that one segment of humanity is somehow innately superior to another.
My argument is, there is no reason to assert that a female-dominated culture would necessarily be that different. My reasoning is that women are capable of everything that men are capable of. The most intelligent of them are as intelligent as the most intelligent men. The stupidest of them are as stupid as the stupidest men. The pettiest of them are as petty as the pettiest men. The nicest.... The cruelest....
Do you not get it? The larger forces are not related to sex: they are related to the nature of human beings - and the fact that we have not managed to weed out the selfish and violent tendencies within the species.
If women are capable of everything that men are capable of, why do some women (and some men) insist that a female-dominated society would somehow be more peaceful, fair, humane, just, or....?
I was raised by my grandparents. My grandfather was a great guy: intelligent, quiet, fair-minded, non-violent. At the same time, he was very strong, both physically and psychologically. My grandmother was very different: spiteful, vindictive, closed-minded, jealous, and lying - and violent toward me. (Her tendencies went unchecked when he died.)
In short, he was everything that some try to say that women are, and she was everything that some try to say men are. The truth is, they were the way they were neither because of nor despite their respective sexes. They became what they became because of other internal mechanisms unrelated to sex.
If people are as they are because of sex or society, how could one explain the wide variation within each sex and every society? If I am as I am because of my sex and/or my society, why am I so different from a neoconof similar age? or my male cousins? or my Catholic relatives?
To say that one sex is innately better than the other is to deny that sex's full humanity. (That's humanity as in 'human-ness,' not as in 'humane-ness.')
It is you who have missed my point.
Culicomorpha,
You make some excellent points. Very astute observations.
Cranky_Chatter,
Your compassion and honesty are incredibly moving. Bless you for not "getting it."
Ascott,
"The point is, women are capable of anything/everything that men are."
Well, not quite. Unless you're prepared with specific examples of groups of female soldiers repeatedly raping boys and men, or cutting the fetus out of a man's body to satisfy a bet on its sex. Can women be just as brutal and cruel as men? Of course they can. One characteristic that all human beings seem to share is our capacity to be inhumane.
It's a historical reality that in most cultures throughout the world, it is men who possess and wield the lion's share of power...in terms of the social, financial, and physical power that forms the structure of most human societies. This is not to say that all men abuse this power, or that all women are therefore powerless. But it does mean that in times of social upheaval, the less powerful members of society (usually women, children, the elderly and infirm, minorities), lacking the power to influence events, become easy targets for unrestrained aggression.
As I said, I agree with you that women are capable of cruelty and violence, just like men. What bothers me is the context of your argument. The article was about the horrific violence suffered by West African women, some of it almost too horrible to read. But, rather than expressing shock or compassion for the plight of these women (as Cranky_Chatter so articulately and movingly did), your only response was a dismissive, "Well, women can be nasty, too!"
Very disturbing.
On a final note: You use the example of exactly two women as "proof" of a behavioral theory which you apply to all women throughout human history. I appreciate that! It just verifies what I've suspected all along...that my two idiot ex's are "proof" that all men are complete jerks!
Grumpyoldlady
Are you trying to be facetious?
Yes, I can imagine gangs of female soldiers raping (slthough it would have to be object-rape. And I can consider female soldiers cutting the fetus out of the body of a pregnant *woman* to settle a bet about its sex. Women are capable of being every bit as bad as men. They are not a different sub-species.
Do you think Goebbels' wife was any more humane than he, just because she didn't have the political power to do what he did? She was the one who killed their five children in the bunker, whereas he could not do it - (although he did allow it).
A collapse of civilization? I agree. A regression into the dark ages? I don't think so. If you extend the behaviour described by Ms. Jones to a logical conclusion there would be no tribe, no civilization, no nothing but dead bodies, yet here we are. It is quite possible that the situation described by Ms. Jones has played out many times in human history but eventually the parties to the act would eventually have to look up and say: "WTF !!!!!"
I wonder sometimes, considering the band of wanderers some 40,000 years ago that left Africa and populated the earth, not so much about them, but the ones that stayed behind. But I know this is just a revulsive reaction to what the author describes, and at the bottom it is about greed, animal lust, and the dehumanizing effects of warfare.
As for riverman101. Methinks the poster is merely a bored prankster who can think of nothing better to do in his (her?) indolence than to type gibberish at their computer. It is hard to believe that anyone so apparently stupid would have access to a computer - let alone one connected to the internet - or even know how to use one. riverman101 you are no better than an adolescent vandal, pulling up shrubbery or removing a neighbors inflatable pool to their rooftop. Are you so insecure you cannot participate in civilized discourse? Prove me wrong.
Hit again b the editing function!
That ought to have read: Given the opportunity, the worst of women will join the worst of men in whatever depravity is on offer. (Lynde England at Abu Ghraib, anyone?)
The final comment was to be:
I used the examples of two women who had attained political power to prove that being a woman, in and of itself, does not disallow one being a militaristic war-monger - and not, as you suggest, to prove that all women are militaristic war-mongers. If you had followed my argument accurately, and with an open mind, you would have seen that.
My point was never that all women are [anything] - but exactly the opposite: women, as a group, are capable of the best and the worst that men, as a group, are capable of. The members of each sex very greatly, and no sex has a lock on any attribute.
Is that clear enough for you now?
And I never got to commenting on the article in any way - because some poster just had to jump all over me for my reply to one post - not the article.
Your entire depiction of what I said is inaccurate. Your bias is showing.
Oh, and didn't I miss "grumpyoldlady's" final crack?
I did not dismiss any part of the article. I did not comment on the article. I reponded only to one post.
Unfortunately, there are those that can't stand to have their balloons burst. One of them responded, poorly, to my post. I then responded to that person, only to come across your just-as-jaundiced comments.
Strangely, I could have said that not all men are [insert any positive adjective], and no one would have objected. But the minute you correct someone who says that everything is lousy because men are in charge **and** brings up the mythical Time of the Goddess when everything was just peachy, so wouldn't things be grand if women were in charge? - then someone takes offense.
I remember when women were struggling to be seen as equal to men. Now the suggestion that they are equal isn't acceptable to some.
Careful: your bias is showing.
ascott, I think it is very important to differentiate what we wish to believe is true from what is actually true. There is a wonderful BBC documentary that examines how beliefs about human nature can very often come to dictate how people behave, because, in effect, it becomes a collective delusion and people become trapped in these beliefs when these ideas become institutionalized. The Trap: http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=152
For my part, I think I can see these differences more clearly than you can because I have actually lived in this world as both a man and a woman. I have experienced the effects of testosterone and the effects of estrogen, and I can tell you definitively that these hormones have real effects. I do not make the mistake of assuming that all people are basically the same, because they are not. In reality, people fall into a spectrum of differences, but that does not imply that the mean is the same for both groups. They are different, and they are both important.
That being said, my main point was that both genders should be equally valued, because it is balance that will alleviate the worst shortcomings of both genders. I do not claim that any gender is superior, but I do claim they are different. But in the present patriarchal context, men have grossly abused women in almost every domain, and what is required is a restoration of balance: a devaluing of masculine traits, and a re-valuing of feminine traits.
Amazing...gender wars...right here in cyber-space...and in Africa...bleeding,twisted bodies and death as a result...
how may I ask is this helping anyone?...
What solutions has come from this lengthy discussion and gender bashing?
WE live in a violent world...and violence comes in many forms...ie...arguing over who is right....balance can be restored only if we start to recognize that all of us have the ability to be and/or become violent...and being "right" is not equal to being happy...
Ascott and Culicomorpha: We now have a problem in the UK (and I haven't really seen it elsewhere), where certain groups of female society, see fit to ape the actions and disgusting behaviour of the male sector. The women in question are called "ladettes", and unfortunately this is not a rare phenomenon, and can be spotted in any town or city, at any time of the day. It used to be confined to the poorer, less well educated members of society, but has spread throughout, and is semi glorified by the media.
It involves young females (usually up to the age of 30, but sometimes older), getting drunk, roaming in gangs, verbally and physically abusing people, and generally not acting in a way which you would associate with being female.
It seems as though these young women, want to be seen as having the capacity to swear more, and be more macho than their male peers.
Having lived under Margaret Thatcher's rule in the UK, I would be very cautious about voting for another female leader. We still have some of the "Blair babes" in Gordon Brown's cabinet, and they exhibit more qualities, which could be termed contentious or combative. They seem to be trying harder to be tougher than their male counterparts.
Am I right in saying that Hilary Clinton is exhibiting the same tendencies, and would possibly be a more impulsive leader, more likely to resort to force than diplomacy, in order to look tough in front of her peers?
I was just reading tonight...
The Army grants six weeks of maternity leave before a new mother must return to her job or training, and four months until she can be sent to a war zone. The Marine Corps and Navy allow from six months to a year before a new mother must deploy.
It seems to me life is something our society doesn't value.
In the matraichal times life was valued. Now you don't have life until you have the money. These are societies values. There needs to be a balance and in my mind there is no doubt that it can be accomplished.
AndyUK --
Your description of the "ladettes" movement is pretty funny. It reminds me of the Python skit about roaming grannies. I'm not totally against it. Maybe in the end it will present a mirror so that all involved will see how stupid gender-based patterns really are.
If women become macho and men become effeminate can a "middle way" be far off? I can envision a day in the future where we just enjoy each other for our physical difference and that will be that. Meanwhile, we'll have to make due with warrior women.
I am a farmer woman and can't help thinking about the fact that too many roosters or bulls or bucks would be a nightmare. They fight each other to the death and destroy the productive females of their species.
We control this by eating the roosters. Chicken noodle soup, in reality, is actually rooster noodle soup. The males, except for a select one or two, of other species are castrated and eventually sold for meat or pets.
Is there some lesson here for the human population?
I don't know. 'Just asking.
braveheart --
I see where you're coming from. Stallions are a pretty useless horse, except for, well, you know. Ultimately it's incumbent upon men to get over testosterone on their own (that's "us" men, in case you're wondering).
Interesting to note that there's a whole class of men who think women are the evil ones ruining everything. Cruise the blogs sometime. What you find will disturb you. Here's part of their doctrine:
- public schools are 80% women and program men, effeminizing them
- suffrage has destroyed the economy by diluting the workforce
- feminism has destroyed the family
- young women only want to humiliate young men and sleep around
- older women want to latch onto a provider and then do nothing
...and so on and on...
The depressing thing for you might be the number of WOMEN who buy into this as well. It's unbelievable but seemingly true. And their numbers are vast.
If our culture would start linking gender to violence stats then we would all wake up to male violence. But sadly, our media resports "violence in schools" instead of "male violence in schools" for example. Seriously, 99.9% of all the mass murderers are male, but our society "politely" avoids this fact in their reporting. "Another school shooting" with never a discussion of the obvious fact that violence linked to male.
This is not to say that women as individuals can not be violent but looking at history one has to wonder just exactly WHERE is all the group female violence?
Along the same line of thought, I would love to have article written switching the gender in the article and get it printed. Every guy in this country would demand justice if men in Africa were being rifle butted in the back and their hands crushed so that women could tear their rectums apart and mutilate their penises. No doubt about this. But since it's happening to women, oh well, that's nature.
AndyUK,
You describe an interesting social phenomenon. We have a similar phenomenon happening here in the U.S., with more young women joining gangs, committing violent crimes and being imprisoned in record numbers. I don't know that there's so much a conscious thought on the part of these women to "act like men" and equal their male peers who engage in similar behaviors. Maybe it's more a response to changing gender roles. For good or ill, these roles have changed significantly over the last fifty years or so, and perhaps this is a natural result of that evolution (albeit, NOT one of the pleasant ones). Those of us who grew up with the Ozzie and Harriet/Father Knows Best view of gender roles seem to be more shocked and disturbed by this turn of events than our younger counterparts. It flies in the face of our picture of women as the kinder, gentler, more nuturing sex. Younger women have grown up with a much different view of women and their role in society, one that has only the vague remnants of the social and cultural constraints their mothers and grandmothers experienced.
Your concerns about women political leaders, in my opinion, reflects this still-evolving social order. For women, it's very much a Catch-22. In our society, female politicians (and, I would suggest, male politicians as well) who are soft-spoken, gentle, and promote peaceful ways over warlike policies are seen as too weak and compliant to be effective leaders. On the other hand, women who are tough, unemotional and militaristic in their views are seen (by both men and women) as "bitchy" and too masculine, having lost their "feminine" qualities. For male politicians, this behavior is often appealing to voters. We just don't seem to find it appealing in women. This persistant double standard creates a real challenge for women aspiring to elected office, wherein they must find a way to balance male-like toughness with appealing femininity.
I would hope that we will not judge all female candidates based only upon our experience with Mrs. Thatcher or other female leaders, or our views of Mrs. Clinton. After all, we've had many, many lousy male leaders. Yet we never seem to conclude, "Well, that's it! I'll never vote for another man again!" Men seem to get a pass on equating their leadership abilities with their gender. Women should get the same pass. I think we're getting there, gradually. Someday, I hope that we'll judge our leaders based upon their qualities, not upon whether they wear pants or a skirt.
The article is a frightening depiction of the breakdown not only of law and decency, but of respect for life. Women are the vehicles through which life grows and expresses. Because war is aimed at the destruction of life, women become easy symbolic targets.
I applaud GRUMPY OLD LADY * CULICOMORPHA for important insights and intelligent comments. Very few men have responded in this forum and it doesn't surprise me. While it's true that specific behaviors have been socialized BY gender, Margaret Mead went into the wilds to return with evidence that biology is not always linear in its gender-based expressions. Many behaviors are learned. I am so tired of otherwise intelligent men in this forum demonstrating their closet sexism by bringing up the usual names, Thatcher, etc to "prove" women are capable of "bad" things. Please! The preponderance of evidence equates MALES and their dominant baboon hierarchies with violence!
ASCOTT, you are so locked into your own paradigm you can't see the truth when it's been placed before you. Shame on you! Beyond the overt differences of gender, each human being is a collection of archetypal energies expressing. The most raw of the collection is that associated with what mystics term the first chakra, astrologers define as Mars. When we only look at violence through the dual prism of male versus female we lose the higher truths.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian ph.D wrote 2 books, one, Gods in Everyman and the other Goddesses in Every Woman. She did a wonderful job of defining the basic male and female panorama of expressive archtypal energies. Because of political systems run by power-based elites, because hierarchy has been the rule and it's been run by powerful males, because wars have been needed to sustain these undemocratic systems of governance, MARS, the principle of violence, competition, raw force, ego, me-first, war over law, etc has come to rule. My best evidence to support this esoteric claim is the US budget now in the 21st century, a so-called modern civilized nation that bludgeons the world with weapons and places NO other priority higher on its fiscal scale.
Just as the shootings in Columbine represented a blowback from that community's defense contractors and their "product," the nation's emphasis on violence now gives rise to females emulating same. NONE of it is natural! Neither gender is superior, they are complementary, the LOVERS of Eden... but when women, love, peace, culture, art, diplomacy over war, compromise over might makes right are put on the back burner a gigantic imbalance results. IT has governed our world for centuries, so much so, that respected gurus of academe claim what we see around us as reality or human nature. BULL SHIT. It is the end result of societies that have placed a belief in a male god and subjugated women, the culmination of societies that have honed their warfare while learning little about spirituality (the kind of understanding that makes war effete). It's like navigating a boat with ONE oar. It can only circle. The frustration that results becomes anger in BOTH genders. The frustration that results is useful in pitting group against group, tribe against tribe so that the CAUSE of pain is never identified, altered or healed... and now, with weapons so advanced, and anger so high in so many people (with good reason given the state of things), the policing forces arise to chain back all that aggression or use it where they wish to channel it. It still lets Mars hold rule... and all of life suffers, for it is in the worship of Mars, the god of destruction & war, the DESTROYER that life is seen as cheap, as collatoral damage, as that which is shoved up the genitals of a woman to destroy her life-giving faculties.
If the gods are observing, if any deity is observing, can you imagine the horror that this gift of Eden, this place for love and lovers, has instead been rendered a blood bath? That, when not polluted by weapons of war, dead zones circling continents as polluting effluents run wild, legions of children maimed by war or orphaned roaming the streets like hungry wolves. A different world WOULD exist had patrirachal religions given to women the same status as men, had god not been fabricated in the image and likeness of white men, had women *(and indigenous tribes, many of which practice more communal values) been invited to decision-making tables. Soon Wall st and Washington will learn the true expanse of their impotence. What are these things when a tsunami races forward, when a volcano erupts, when a hurricane breaks winds loose? Short sighted fools who both lie and have been raised on lies guide the wealthy nations to a precipice, and the poor lands exploited follow the lead of their exploiters and in their rage and folly fall upon one another. The brutality is breathless. In seed state it IS a part of each of us, for everyone has Mars or they would not have an ego. Souls of varied levels of spiritual realization cohabit this planet. It's a shame that the illumined have largely been killed, punished, or silenced while those who profit from war, environmental exploitation, or corruption seem to run things and their poor example is followed by countless others. Nature bleeds for her children gone astray. The karma of so much violence will return to sender(s). I wish it had been Buddhist monks rather than Christian ones who acted as missionaries in so many lands... perhaps the understanding of karma rather than the sense of racial superiority might have altered the fate of those left to clutch broken genitals now. Tragic beyond tragic.
That is the most insane thing I have ever heard riverman. One thing for sure it is NOT progressive.
greece fell also when all people started making their own decisions…democracy in everyone making logic decisions is NOT with natural law..
Say what?
Everyone is given free will and being forced against going against free will is going against the natural law!
Being forced to go against one's own free will is against nature. (Just wanted to clarity myself)
You can tell me whatever it is that you want me to think and just because I don't think that way doesn't mean it is the end of mankind.
riverman101 --
It doesn't matter how many times you say it, it's still just inane. At least spell intellect right.
SiouxRose --
That was a great and impassioned comment. Even though we have brutal tribal or clan origins, when humans became human we acquired the ability to transcend it. The MARS archetype of male governance is one we easily slipped into, but I don't think it's destiny.
Compare with this, from http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12900
"Have you ever seen a man killed?" I asked him.
He glanced down, surprised by the question.
"Have you?" I asked again.
"Yes," he said.
"Was it bloody?"
"Yes"
I thought for a moment. "Why was the man killed? The one you saw?"
"Because he was weak."
"That's all?"
Lolo shrugged..."That's usually enough",
Women are targeted because they are vulnerable. There's no grand scheme, no systematic partiarchialism. They're weak, that's all.
MA_Matriarch,
Pay no mind to Riverman. He can't put together a coherent sentence, but he is good for laugh.
Siouxrose,
A very articulate and thought-provoking post! We do seem to get back whatever we put into this world. Maybe the lesson here is to look to find balance within ourselves, reflecting outwardly those qualities we hope to inspire in others.
" I wish it had been Buddhist monks rather than Christian ones who acted as missionaries in so many lands…"
Interesting to consider how different things might be had this been true! But believing that each person's spiritual path is personal journey, and that the role of spiritual leader is best left to those with deep knowledge and experience in the Path, Buddhists generally refrain from prosthelatizing. Christians do tend to be more aggressive in their desire to convert others to their beliefs. Even with the best of intentions, there is something quite arrogant in the act of prosthelatization and it can have unintended consequences (i.e., the introduction of diseases to Native Americans who had no natural immunity, the destruction of spiritual beliefs without considering their importance to cultural cohesion).
Great post!
Anyone that would kill someone weaker than themselves are more than weak, they are a pathetic excuse for a human being.
RIVERMAN: One of my dearest male yoga teachers learned from his teacher this apt phrase, "Logic limits love." It is not a failure of logic that's produced the weapons of advanced technologies now killing human beings and every ecosystem, it is a failure and lack of love, empathy and compassion that has made this world a hell for so many. So logic may have its place, but is by no means a panacea for what ails us. Your chauvinism is almost Neanderthal.
GRUMPY OLD LADY: Your comments are erudite and wise, as well.
IPENEK: I agree it did not have to be this way, that is, for so much to have come to ruin under a "Mars rules" societal construct. I often argue for the wisdom of heaven's circle, the great "As above, so below" DIVINE equation where all 12 personae, each designed as a counter-balance to the others, is invited to sit at the table. Mercury types, for instance, fill the world with humor and ideas. Jupiter types believe faith can heal all ills, while Saturn types tend to be natural conservatives and great upholders of the work ethic. Our world would be a boring mono-chromatic design without the hues enlivened by each of the 12 cosmic tribes. To honor the diverse expressions that reflect the circle is to build a world holistically, rather than one that bows to war, brute force, one size fits all mantras, fiscal hierarchies or other devices that enslave so many for so few.
Whoa, Riverman! You're multi-posting! Time for your medication!
Hmmm... Well I'm reluctant to bring this up, since I know there is a lot of resistance to the idea, but here goes nothing...
It's interesting that AndyUK brings up the changing behavior of younger women in the UK. Coincidentally, (or not) in 1995, it was discovered that major streams in the UK that are also municipal water sources are highly contaminated with endocrine disrupting chemicals. It was discovered that these chemicals were feminizing male fish downstream from sewage treatment facilities.
http://www.ehponline.org/members/1995/Suppl-7/sumpter-full.html. More recent papers have demonstrated masculinization of females in a wide range of animal species. Exposure to diethystilbestrol, (DES) a pharmaceutical given to 5-7 million U.S. women from 1941-1971, which was purported to increase the probability of full term pregnancy, has since been found to feminize males, masculinize females, and cause a host of other problems. This was discussed in Theo Colborn's book "Our Stolen Future." Definitely worth a read if you want to learn more.
Probably no continent has had more use of pesticides (also endocrine disruptors) than Africa. The salesmen of these chemicals (typically U.S. firms) will go on and on about how many lives they are saving but they never bother to look at the downstream consequences. Recently even Uganda, one of the last remaining countries to use DDT has finally decided that maybe it wasn't such a great idea after all and is phasing it out.
I have been digging into this topic for years, and the question about what is chemically-induced and what is learned has repeatedly come up in my mind. Of course all the social scientists love to talk about the pliability of humans and how we can be whatever we want to be, but how do we really know that? Are we to assume that all these chemicals, some of which are very potent, are doing nothing? The CDC measures a large number of them in almost every U.S. citizen, yet we speak of them as "toxic" when they are better thought-of as behavior modifiers, not toxins. Toxins are thought to lead to death, but it is not death that is the usual outcome from these exposures. The animal evidence is unambiguous in this regard. But in humans we blame the perpetrator of unusual behavior and make up various social theories, without ever trying to understand what else might be going on that could have led to the sorts of acts described in this story. I'm not excusing the behavior, but I am trying to find a better explanation than what I usually hear. Since the limbic system has a lot to do with behavior, messing with this system is going to mess with behavior. And probably for the worse.