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Our country, the world’s oldest democracy, has a history of oppression based on race, gender, and ethnicity. The United States of America was founded by men whose desire for power and control compelled them to oppress and subdue groups or classes. Yet in 1870 black men gained the right to vote under the 15th Amendment. Since those voters’ rights were established, political leaders and institutions established laws and regulations designed to oppress African-Americans and deter their development as full citizens. Legal maneuvering included literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems and unreasonable Voter ID requirement. (Omi and Winant 2015). For example, in 2011, South Carolina passed a restrictive voter ID law kept more than 180,000 African Americans from casting a ballot. This systematic oppression fueled a myth that African Americans were inferior. A similar process fuels the ongoing oppression of women. Even though the right of suffrage was granted in 1920, a multitude of subtle biases and perceptions have contributed to women’s subjugation in the 21st century. There are many faces to the ongoing oppression of women. The first explanation is simple sex discrimination. Women entering the workforce are met with overt hostility. Women who are more assertive and dominant in their areas of expertise are not seen as brilliant or knowledgeable but as bossy and annoying. Either a woman is barely heard or she is too aggressive. It may not be hostility towards women but preference for men and their interpersonal style. The current male-driven culture does not allow women to succeed. Women’s values and approaches are different, and when entering the workforce, women find that the male culture is not to their taste or are driven off. Those women who do succeed adapt to the male culture. In other words, women need to become like men and not fear any backlash to become corporate executives. Sheryl Sandberg, the chief CEO of Facebook, in her book Lean In (Sandberg and Scovell 2013), defines feminism: “A feminist is someone who believes in social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” She urges women to lean in and become as assertive as men in pushing forward their careers. A recent study by Northeastern University professor Benjamin Schmidt (2015) found that men are more highly praised in professional settings than women. His findings indicated that in the classroom setting women’s appearance or personality were the more critically emphasized qualities in contrast to men’s skill and intelligence. According to Miller, this evaluation carries out of the classroom setting over into the business scene and undeniably into the political arena. (Miller 2015) A study conducted by a Yale psychologist, Victoria L. Brescoll, found that powerful female senators spoke significantly less on the Senate floor because of fear of backlash. After further research, Brescoll found that women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked in comparison to male counterparts are not paranoid but often right. (Sandberg and Grant 2015) Benevolent attitudes have been found to be patronizing and can do as much harm as outright discrimination. Stereotypes create lower expectations for women in the absence of hostility. The foundation of American democracy seems rooted in the concept of white male domination. According to Taylor, man’s instinctual desire for power and domination explains his drive to supremacy. (Taylor 2012)
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The media are an incredibly effective tool for manipulating perceptions and promulgating bias. (Metzl: A Womb of Her Own, Routledge, 2017) Dr. Metzl points out the subtle and not so subtle ways in which the media portrays women. She highlights the emphasis on being thin and, I would add, being beautiful. Female newscasters on conservative news media are almost invariably blonde and beautiful. The media has a huge influence on our perceptions of ourselves and, at this point, it is a view to which most of us can only aspire. The lives and times of ordinary women are left unexplored. I am happy to say that the Emmys of 2017 were a breath of fresh air. The Handmaids’ Tale and other programs about women’s stories were given the accolades they deserve. Dr. Metzl writes: While 80 percent of all purchasing decisions are made by women (Forbes), only 3 percent of clout positions in the mainstream media – telecommunications, entertainment, publishing, and advertising– are held by women. A mere 3 percent of creative directors within ad agencies are women (Advertising Age). The media’s portrayal of female images, the cult of the “thin” culture, negatively impacts girls and women, contributing to self-esteem issues and to eating disorders. According to Dove Self-Esteem Fund (2004), 7 in 10 girls believe they are not good enough or do not measure up in some way, including their looks, performance in school and relationships with family and friends. Television is a highly influential method of propaganda. Many smart and confident female characters have paraded onto the small screen over the past few years. But the more astute and capable the character, the more likely she is also emotionally disturbed. Women are not necessarily portrayed as complicated, difficult, thorny or complex, but rather as volcanoes that could blow at any minute. Worse, the very abilities and skills that make them singular and interesting come coupled with some hideous deficiency. Many shows suggest that a female character’s flaws are inextricably linked to her strengths. According to the Women’s Media Center, co-founded by Gloria Steinem, even Hollywood has waged a war on women. In its third annual Status of Women in the U.S. Media, 2014, the Women’s Media Center revealed that women represented just 28.8 percent of speaking characters in the top grossing films of 2012, had just 16 percent of the top executive movie jobs in 2013, and of the 16 biggest paychecks for actors per film, not one went to a female actress. (Bedard ,Washington Examiner, February 19, 2014) THe influence of the media is enormous in the way that it colors how we feel about ourselves. We are starting with the premise that there really is a war against women. In A Womb of Her Own (Routledge 2017) Marilyn Metzl writes the following: Any war inevitably turns on economics. Money confers power and power wins wars. Equal pay, paid sick leave, family leave, and other basic economic issues are mine-filled battlefronts for women. (Chozick 2015) Imagine a mother of two diligently doing the same job as a father of two. She works equal hours, has equal responsibility, and has equally excellent performance reviews. Yet, according to the National Women’s Law Center, she only makes 78 cents for every dollar he earns. That means she is cruelly penalized for being female: she earns $10, 876 less per year than her male counterpart. She and her family are shortchanged on a daily basis and her future Social Security earnings are also unfairly diminished. (National Women’s Law Center 2014)
For women of color, the pay gap is even more pronounced. Although enforcement of the Equal Pay Act and civil rights laws has helped narrow the wage gap, addressing the remaining pay disparities is critical for women and their families. (National Women’s Law Center, 2014). Yet conservatives appear determined to slash programs that help working people house, feed, clothe, and educate their children. Working-class women are often saddled with jobs that have low pay and little flexibility. One in three American women–42 million women, plus 28 million children–either live in poverty or are on the brink of it (Clark County Prosecuting Attorney ). About 7 million Americans are working two or more jobs today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women are more likely to juggle multiple gigs than men, representing more than half of the total at 3.7 million. (Tahmincioglu, NBC News, March 21, 2010) Female managers and executives face their own struggles. Nowhere are women less equitably represented than in the corporate corridors. The dearth of women in the top business echelons is well documented. Despite women earning 57 percent of the nation’s bachelor’s degrees and despite studies that illustrate women’s great value on Wall Street and as executives, their numbers remain small. Females make up only 16 percent of directors of Fortune 500 companies, 4 percent of chief executives and 10 percent of chief financial officers at Standard & Poor’s 500 companies. On Wall Street, a small number of traders and executives are women. In hedge funds, women manage a mere three percent of assets. According to Kathy Caprino, writing in Forbes (February 12, 2013), “…In corporate America (which remains male-dominated at the leadership levels), the differences in women’s style, approach, communication, decision making, leadership values, focus and energy, are not at all understood or valued. Many organizations still make women ‘wrong’ (consciously or subconsciously) for their priorities and styles that clash with the dominant culture. Further, the emphasis many women leaders place on connection, empathy, emotional cue-taking, consensus-building, risk-taking, mutuality, and questioning are often misconstrued as a ‘less-than’ leadership style.” Caprino contends that women are still “being diminished, sidelined, suppressed, and thought less of because of being women and because they are different from the leadership norm. Further, women are pushed aside regularly when they make their family priorities known or demand time off after having a child (and don’t kid yourself – this is a form of discrimination to be sidelined for prioritizing time off for child bearing).” In a recent study by Northeastern University professor, Benjamin Schmidt (2015) concludes that men are more highly praised in professional settings than women. In the classroom setting, women’s appearance or personality were the more critically emphasized qualities in contrast to men’s skills and intelligence. This mindset carries into business and politics. (Miller 2015) The discrimination is real and it can no longer be ignored! If we think that men and women are not in a war, please consider the following statistics. They are taken from our book A Womb of Her Own. (Routledge 2017) Every 15 seconds, a woman is beaten by her husband or partner. (Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1991). Three to four million women in the United States are beaten in their homes each year by their husbands, ex-husbands, or male lovers. (“Women and Violence” 1990, 12). One in four women report experiencing domestic violence in their lifetimes. Domestic violence affects all cultural, religious, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Despite these devastating statistics, in 2015, Congress opposed the reauthorization of The Violence Against Women Act, the cornerstone of our nation’s response to domestic and sexual violence. Conservatives objected to the act because it also served noncitizens and people in same-sex relationships. On March 27, 2015, Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat, expressed outrage after revealing that she had been the victim of domestic violence and sexual assault. “Violence against women everywhere knows no ethnicity and no socio-economic boundary,” she stated (In Her Words, The Daily Beast, March 28, 2012). In 2015, the act passed. Any war inevitably turns on economics. Money confers power and power wins wars. Equal pay, paid sick leave, family leave, and other basic economic issues are mine-filled battlefronts for women. (Chozick 2015) Imagine a mother of two diligently doing the same job as a father of two. She works equal hours, has equal responsibility, and has equally excellent performance reviews. Yet, according to the National Women’s Law Center, she only makes 78 cents for every dollar he earns. That means she is cruelly penalized for being female: she earns $10, 876 less per year than her male counterpart. She and her family are shortchanged on a daily basis and her future Social Security earnings are also unfairly diminished. (National Women’s Law Center 2014) For women of color, the pay gap is even more pronounced. Although enforcement of the Equal Pay Act and civil rights laws has helped narrow the wage gap, addressing the remaining pay disparities is critical for women and their families. (National Women’s Law Center, 2014). Yet conservatives appear determined to slash programs that help working people house, feed, clothe, and educate their children. Working-class women are often saddled with jobs that have low pay and little flexibility. One in three American women–42 million women, plus 28 million children–either live in poverty or are on the brink of it (Clark County Prosecuting Attorney ). About 7 million Americans are working two or more jobs today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women are more likely to juggle multiple gigs than men, representing more than half of the total at 3.7 million. (Tahmincioglu, NBC News, March 21, 2010) Female managers and executives face their own struggles. Nowhere are women less equitably represented than in the corporate corridors. The dearth of women in the top business echelons is well documented. Despite women earning 57 percent of the nation’s bachelor’s degrees and despite studies that illustrate women’s great value on Wall Street and as executives, their numbers remain small. Females make up only 16 percent of directors of Fortune 500 companies, 4 percent of chief executives and 10 percent of chief financial officers at Standard & Poor’s 500 companies. On Wall Street, a small number of traders and executives are women. In hedge funds, women manage a mere three percent of assets. According to Kathy Caprino, writing in Forbes (February 12, 2013), “…In corporate America (which remains male-dominated at the leadership levels), the differences in women’s style, approach, communication, decision making, leadership values, focus and energy, are not at all understood or valued. Many organizations still make women ‘wrong’ (consciously or subconsciously) for their priorities and styles that clash with the dominant culture. Further, the emphasis many women leaders place on connection, empathy, emotional cue-taking, consensus-building, risk-taking, mutuality, and questioning are often misconstrued as a ‘less-than’ leadership style.” Caprino contends that women are still “being diminished, sidelined, suppressed, and thought less of because of being women and because they are different from the leadership norm. Further, women are pushed aside regularly when they make their family priorities known or demand time off after having a child (and don’t kid yourself – this is a form of discrimination to be sidelined for prioritizing time off for child bearing).” In a recent study by Northeastern University professor, Benjamin Schmidt (2015) concludes that men are more highly praised in professional settings than women. In the classroom setting, women’s appearance or personality were the more critically emphasized qualities in contrast to men’s skills and intelligence. This mindset carries into business and politics. (Miller 2015) The issue of reproductive rights, it seems to me, boils down to the question of who decides what a woman will do with her own body. In a male-dominated society men will decide–as in the white male-dominated panel of the current administration. In a gender-equal society a woman will make the decisions about her own body. In a chapter from our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge 2017) Marilyn Metzl cites the following: A report from the Guttmacher Institute (Media Center, News in Context, January 5, 2012) details the extent of 2011’s war on women’s reproductive rights. The report states: “By almost any measure, issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011. In the 50 states combined, legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions, a sharp increase from the 950 introduced in 2010. By year’s end, 135 of these provisions had been enacted in 36 states, an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009. Fully 68% of these new provisions—92 in 24 states—-restrict access to abortion services, a striking increase from last year, when 26% of new provisions restricted abortion. The 92 new abortion restrictions enacted in 2011 shattered the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005. Abortion restrictions took many forms: bans (6 states), waiting periods (3 states), ultrasound (5 states), insurance coverage (3 states joined the existing 5 with such restrictions), clinic regulations (4 states), medication abortion (7 states).” Further examples include the conservatives in Congress who have tried to roll back access to contraception under employee health plans and have opposed the mandate in President Obama’s health care law. In February 2012, the far-right-led House Committee convened a hearing on the topic and an all-male panel was called to testify. When Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, showed up to speak in favor of the mandate, she was banned from commenting. She was then called a “slut and a prostitute” by conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, as she tried to advocate for a woman’s right to have a safe and protected personal sexual life. Subsequently, Foster Friess, a financial supporter of Rick Santorum, an anti-abortion rights and anti-contraceptive presidential candidate, suggested that “gals could prevent pregnancy by putting an aspirin between their knees.” (CBS News, by Lucy Madison, February 17, 2012) On March 7, 2012, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell supported a state bill requiring that women seeking abortions undergo invasive vaginal ultrasounds. The women health’s organization NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia accused McDonnell of facilitating “an unprecedented invasion of privacy and government intrusion into the doctors’ offices and living rooms of Virginia women.” Such onerous legislation is now supported in many states. The report further states: “More than half of U.S. women of reproductive age now live in states considered “hostile” or “extremely hostile” to abortion rights, compared to fewer than one-third of women in 2000. While radical, head-on attacks on abortion rights capture the public’s attention, conservative legislators and anti-choice groups continue to work tirelessly to quietly whittle away at women’s access to safe and legal abortion.” A very recent example of the continuing efforts to control women’s reproductive lives comes from the CDC guidelines related to alcohol and pregnancy. Katie Gentile (February 15, 2016) points out that the misogynous stance of recommending that all women of reproductive age who do not use contraception should avoid alcohol. This follows closely the recommendation that women in Central and South America should avoid getting pregnant until the medical field can understand and control the Zika virus. This recommendation both attempts to control women’s reproductive decisions and makes them solely responsible for becoming pregnant. It is well known that women in many developing countries have little say about when or if they will become pregnant. The counsel further ignores the possibility that not all women of reproductive age choose to reproduce or engage in heterosexual sex. Gentile goes on to address the laws in many states that criminalize the behavior of women who seek drug treatment when they realize they are pregnant. Instead of providing the needed treatment the women who were often economically disadvantaged African American women were subject to felony charges and their babies were declared wards of the state. Ironically enough, the culture continues to protect the fetus while ignoring the fate of the child-bearing woman. I cannot write fast enough to keep up with the restrictions that are being applied to women’s health care in the US.
Marilyn Metzl writes: (2017. A Womb of Her Own. Routledge) “In 2014, conservatives began a move to cut off US government aid to Planned Parenthood on the grounds that it was funneling taxpayer money to facilitate abortions. The Congressional Budget Office found the one-year defunding would produce about $235 million in federal savings. But Michael Hiltzik (2015), writing in the Los Angeles Times, states that that amount is barely a rounding error, “but that the real costs would be borne by low-income and rural women.” Hiltzik writes. “As many as 650,000 women, chiefly in low-income neighborhoods or communities without access to other health care clinics, would lose at least some access to care. The measure would hamper Planned Parenthood’s ability to provide low-income women with contraceptive education and counseling; pregnancy diagnosis and counseling; cervical and breast cancer screening; and education, testing, and referral services associated with sexually transmitted diseases. Several thousand unwanted pregnancies and births would occur. In early 2015, the Susan B. Komen Foundation for the Cure, the leading US breast cancer charity, also contributed to the restriction of women’s reproductive and health rights by deciding to sever ties with Planned Parenthood. They planned to eliminate $680,000 in grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings and education programs. Later, swayed by public opinion they reversed their decision.” We know that beneath the current political turmoil, the assault on Planned Parenthood continues. Metzl continues: “These lapses in humane medical treatment for women go beyond denying normal preventive health measures. Imagine the social outcry if owners of female dogs or cats ignored their pets’ yelps of pain and if veterinarians consistently undertreated for animals’ medical conditions. Yet women’s pain and symptoms are routinely ignored and undertreated. In their research study, Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law (Hoffman and Tarzian 1995, 13-27.), concluded that women experience and report more frequent and greater pain than man. Yet they are more likely to be less well treated than men for their painful symptoms. The reason? The literature points to gender-based biases regarding women’s pain experiences. Hoffman and Tarzian write: “These biases have led health-care providers to discount women’s self-reports of pain at least until there is objective evidence for the pain’s cause. Medicine’s focus on objective factors and its cultural stereotypes of women combine insidiously, leaving women at greater risk for inadequate pain relief and continued suffering. Greater awareness among health-care providers of this injustice, a readjustment of medicine’s preoccupation with objective factors through education about alternative approaches, and scrutiny by quality and ethical reviewers within health-care institutions are necessary to change health-care providers’ behavior and ensure that women’s voices regarding treatment of their pain are heard.” The assault on women’s access to health care reflects an insidious attack on women’s rights and well-being. It augments male dominance by affirming yet again that the health and well-being of women are not worthy to be accorded the same consideration as that of men. What are the weapons in this devastating and unjust war? How does it restrict and harm women? Can we mediate a cease-fire and restore and increase women’s civil and personal rights? In our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge, 2017) Marilyn Metzl endeavors to examine these questions. She concludes that although the war is led by the right, leaders on all sides are guilty. Identifying the Insidious War on Women On December 3, 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that women in the U.S. military could now serve in combat posts. Some may consider this a victory of equality for women—the announcement that officially authorizes women to fully participate in war. Yet for years, women have been forced into an escalating guerrilla war waged by conservative and right-wing politicians. Women have been thrust onto battlegrounds vaster than the Syrian Desert and more treacherous than the terrorist-riddled mountains of northern Afghanistan. Without the benefits of arms or armor, women have been relentlessly attacked in their most vulnerable arenas. The right wing’s insidious and intensifying “war on women” has been stealthily yet steadily gaining ground. While the wars waged by the United States Armed Forces receive rigorous visibility and heated national discussions, the war on women is often hushed and invisible, secretly plotted and waged by reigning conservative government officials. According to the ACLU, the War on Women “describes the increasing aggressive legislative and rhetorical attacks on women and women’s rights taking place across the nation. It includes a wide-range of policy efforts designed to place restrictions on women’s health care and erode protections for women and their families.” The ACLU cites examples that include restricting contraception; mandating medically unnecessary ultrasounds; abortion taxes; forcing women to tell their employers why they want birth control, and prohibiting insurance companies from including abortion coverage in their policies. American women reportedly are the envy of women in other cultures, having progressed over the past decades in domestic, economic, and political arenas. Yet while international organizations are collaborating on laws that advance gender equality and end the abuse and oppression of women and girls worldwide, a growing group of US right-wing politicians and governmental officials have been doggedly fighting to reverse the gains women have achieved over the past decades. While this battle is a personal, local, and universal conflict, the National Organization for Women (NOW) believes that the War on Women goes beyond our country’s borders. In 2011, they stated that the House of Representatives planned to “cut … international family planning assistance…. [to] include the elimination of all U.S. funds designated for the United Nations Population Fund.” (Statement from National Organization for Women (NOW) President Terry O’Neill 3/8/11) Sadly enough, no one is going to fight our battles for us. There are and will continue to be men who care about justice but it is ours to lead the way. The erosion against women’s rights will continue until women are in positions of political, economic and religious authority. We must set aside our fears and step into the limelight—for ourselves, our daughters and the generations to come. The NY Times (April 3, 2012) made this provocative statement in an article called “US Culture War with Women at Its Center.” The article pointed out that recent political campaigns have focused on restricting women’s rights in the areas of access to health care, reproductive rights, equal pay and domestic violence. That was written well before the current political crisis which has seen an all-out assault on women’s rights. In her chapter The U.S. Political War against Women (A Womb of Her Own. Routledge. 2017) Marilyn Metzl states that women still remain the hated “other” and a disdained minority. Metzl quotes Jessica Valenti (2010) who states, “We’re suffering under the mass delusion that women in America have achieved equality. Despite the immeasurable rights gained over the past decades, women are still being raped, trafficked, violated and discriminated against.” Metzl then goes on to affirm that international organizations are joining together and marshaling their energy to end the abuse and oppression of women and girls worldwide, and to enact laws to advance gender equality. Yet here in the United States, there appears to have been a concerted effort to turn the clock back. We have to face the misogyny at our doorstep and spotlight the systematic gender oppression at the basis of our culture. Whether this pattern of disturbing developments constitutes a war on women is a political argument; that women’s rights and health are casualties of policy is indisputable. There is an alarming regressive assault on gender equality and a surprising lack of outrage at these regressive policies. The signs are there. Wars are fought by opposing sides who clash over land rights, inheritance, kingship, freedom and power. Efforts are made to subdue an enemy into submission, confiscate property, take prisoners and enslave the people. As I have shown in previous articles this not infrequently includes the rape and assault of the women as a way of humiliating a conquered people. Over the course of history much of that war-like behavior has been directed by men against women. We have never called it “war” because it has been couched in terms of law and religion—the “greater good.” But what if it is? What if the cultural and religious dictates that men have imposed upon women are really an attempt to subdue an “enemy?” Of course, if it really is a battle, it is the most complicated war in the history of civilization. There is much fraternizing with the enemy! The combatants sleep in the same beds and raise their children together. They work side by side to make a living. They grow old together. They write great romantic tales which assuredly capture the tender moments that two human beings can experience. It may not be a battle fought by individuals though it certainly can be! I believe it is a cultural war—a battle in which one half of humanity has attempted to subdue the other half. At the very least, it expresses the deep ambivalence that is experienced between men and women. That’s right! It is really not! Mutuality—a union of equals remains elusive between the sexes. There are practical actions that can and must be taken! Education and financing directed toward women in undeveloped countries are certainly essential. Political representation by and for women in every country is indispensable. Birth control, reproductive choice, maternal and prenatal care as well as basic necessities of food and shelter must be available to all. But the modifications and improvement will shift and change with the cultural and political climate unless we address the formidable forces that drive the human male to own and control women’s sexuality. That particular need has shaped law and religion, war and peace, art and philosophy—virtually all of the underpinnings of culture since time began. Women must take up the call to tell the story and weave it into a world view—one that acknowledges in public ways the horrors of rape and sexual exploitation, the joy and sorrow that is childbirth and the gift to civilization that mothering represents. History tells us that when any oppressed group is fighting for freedom they must, if they want to succeed, have help from the members of the ruling class. Women cannot win this fight alone. In the US battle against slavery the abolitionists were of the ruling class and yet they cared and empathized with the plight of the slaves and lent enormous political and financial support on behalf of the cause. In women’s battle for real freedom men, many men will be required to take up the campaign of full equality, again beginning with reproductive autonomy. It will require the support of men like Charlie—“nice” men who say that they respect women but who carry in their rucksack of secrets a place in which women are “things”, objects to be exploited in order to shore up their own self-esteem. It will mean that they identify with women and what they are experiencing when they are raped or abused or denied access to appropriate health care. It will not be enough for them to be horrified at what other men do but to search within themselves to evaluate whether they could or would do it as well. Eve Ensler (1998) in her ground-breaking book The Vagina Monologues, creates a marvelous image that I believe captures the magnitude of the change that will be required for women to be truly free. She states: “We have not cracked the tectonic plate at the center of the human psyche that is more terrifying to love than to kill….It is the culture that has to change—the beliefs, the underlying story and the behavior of the culture.” Patriarchal culture is based on a need for conquest, power and aggression. It depends upon a bond, either spoken or unspoken, between the rulers and the oppressed. Equality among all persons, and in particular between the sexes, demands mutuality and the possibility of love. For women to participate they must become agents and arbiters of their sexual and reproductive lives. We know that the subjective experiences of PTSD can include a feeling of being overwhelmed, loss of a sense of security, fears of injury and death, and emotional numbness. A characteristic and one that is certainly true of women is they cannot assist in their own defense. Women have suffered what might be called “cultural trauma” (Aaron Toronto, personal communication.) They are thus impaired by the symptoms that we all recognize in a person who has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. Individual women may be extremely well-balanced, enhanced and empowered but as a group one can readily identify symptoms associated with ongoing trauma.
Marilyn Charles calls this phenomenon “structural trauma” and describes it as follows: “Prejudice, intolerance and stigma are endemic in human interactions, and yet they can be relatively invisible. These “structural traumas” are often obscured by social convention such that environmental difficulties are experienced as internal deficits. When basic human functions become gendered, disrespect for the more primary ways of knowing associated with feminine sensibilities become internalized. The internalized disrespect threatens to leave us disconnected from sensory aspects of awareness, including the affective signals that are crucial to social development. P. 337” (p. 101) Recurring traumatic experiences may disrupt mental capacities and disturb the capacity for symbolization. Judgment and reality testing may be impaired. Sufferers may experience grief, guilt about anger and destructive impulses and shame about feeling helpless. They may feel, like my patient Michelle, “defensive detachment” and dissociation of affect with an inability to connect negative feelings with the events that gave rise to the trauma. All of these factors in an individual would make it difficult for her to assist in her own defense. An abused woman may identify with the power of her abuser and vociferously defend him. There are, in fact, large cohorts of women who argue for the status quo and the continuance of women’s suppression. We cannot approach this problem with images of women eating delicious chocolates or refreshing baths or even having “me time.” Those activities may be important for individual women but it is the entire group, the half of humanity, that must come together to fight for freedom in all aspects of life—beginning with sexual and reproductive autonomy. When women anywhere are subjected to sexual slavery, genital mutilation, sex trafficking, domestic violence or the like, we cannot be silent. When reproductive rights are not in the decision-making hands of women, we cannot hold back. The battle for self-determination is one in which all of us must participate. |
Ellen Toronto is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Spring, Texas and has been practicing since 1980. In 2017, she was elected a Fellow in Psychoanalysis by the American Psychological Association. In 2016, Dr. Toronto's practice was recognized as one of the top Ann Arbor Psychology practices. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Toronto is married to Robert Toronto, Ph.D., and together they have four sons and eleven grandchildren. |