Bending the Third Rail
Because We Should, We Can, We Do
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Are Women Human?
That is the provocative title of a new book by leading feminist Catharine MacKinnon. Regardless of your views of her and her writing, it is a thought-provoking article.
MacKinnon's answer to her book's title, Are Women Human? is no. She writes: "If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels? Would we be sexual and reproductive slaves? Would we be bred, worked without pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn't enough or when men tired of us, starved as widows when our husbands died (if we survived his funeral pyre)? ..."
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One gets little sense from reading the book that the lot of women has improved in recent decades. True, she praises Sweden for deciding in 1999 that prostitution was male violence against women and as a result criminalised the buying of sex and decriminalised the selling of sex because "gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them". Otherwise, she contends, unenlightened men still write the laws.
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MacKinnon's book ends with a wonderful rhetorical essay called Women's September 11. It points out that roughly the same number of women are murdered by men in the US each year as were killed in the Twin Towers (between 2,800 and 3,000). But those killings provoked no parallel war on terror.
Written at 5:17 AM by Lynne.
1 comments
1 Comments:
Blogger Deb said...
Great post! If I could concentrate a little longer than I have been able I would read the book, but that was a great quote!
10:05 AM  
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