Abortion: The Ultimate Insult to Male Authority

[seabeyond]

Last edited Mon Jul 2, 2012, 01:05 PM - Edit history (1)

The biggest difference by far between men and women, the only one that's
really important - is that women can bear children and men cannot. I
believe that difference, in one way or another, directly or indirectly,
accounts for virtually all the oppression against women we see in the
world today. What it all comes down to is sexuality. We need to have sex to have
children (unless you can afford to do it in a petri dish.) How we
express ourselves sexually, or more accurately, how we're expected to
express ourselves sexually, is closely tied to our cultural notions
about procreation and motherhood - which in turn has everything to do
with oppression against women. Let's go back to our patriarchal history for a moment. The origin of
patriarchy can be traced to the male need to establish paternity of
their children, especially in a propertied society where ownership is
heritable.

*

In ancient human societies, the obvious and most practical way for men
to ensure that they invested only in their own children was to dictate
and restrict women's sexual behavior. Throughout patriarchal history,
society has guaranteed men's paternity by controlling women's
reproductive capacity. Here's a list of some common ways this happened,
and still happens today in various countries:

mutilating girl's genitals to reduce sexual desire and ability later in life.
imposing premarital virginity.
expecting women to be chaste, modest, submissive, and asexual (while men can be adventurous - the classic double standard).
covering up women with veils and burkas so they won't tempt men.
arranging marriages.
implementing dowry systems (which incidentally, leads to sex selection of boy babies over girl babies).
requiring absolute fidelity from wives.
punishing female adultery harshly.
committing "honor killings" of women (e.g., if they marry without permission).
raping women to dishonor their families.
mass rape in war as a way to humiliate the enemy.
forcing women to marry their rapists (or whoever gets them pregnant).
confining women in their houses and chaperoning them in public .
teaching abstinence-only education.
making contraception hard to access.
making abortion illegal and unsafe.
treating women as chattel, the property of men (with harems the ultimate example).
keeping women disadvantaged and powerless, by denying them education, preventing them from working outside the home or participating in politics, paying them lower wages, and denying them equality.

*

According to patriarchy, a woman's consent to sex or pregnancy is
irrelevant, because the overriding concern is that men need to reproduce
and ensure it's their children being produced. That's why it's
acceptable to rape your enemy's women, or any woman that doesn't
"belong" to you, and of course your own wife, but it's never OK for the
enemy to rape your wife (or daughter). The fact that rape victims are
often treated with contempt and disgrace, sometimes even charged with
adultery, or murdered or exiled by their own families, is further proof
that women's consent (or lack of) is irrelevant. Under patriarchy, rape
cannot be a crime against women, who are chattel - instead, rape is a
crime against family honour, male ownership, and the male assurance of
paternity. In the abortion debate, most anti-abortionists allow exceptions for rape
and incest. This makes no sense if all life is sacred, but it fits the
male paternity theory perfectly because these pregnancies represent
unauthorized paternity. Likewise, an important justification for
allowing abortions to protect the life or health of the woman is to
preserve her ability to bear future babies and look after her existing
ones. Anti-abortion laws are patriarchal and have more to do with
promoting rightful paternity than with protecting the woman, or fetuses
in general.


http://www.nomas.org/node/145

[LiberalLoner]

1. Very interesting, never thought of it this way, but it makes sense! Thank you for posting!

[hlthe2b]

18. It certainly does... Explains why some men become as irrational about this as they do when

discussing incidents of women mutilating a man's genitals--as in Lorrena Bobbit.

[zbdent]

2. If men and women equally shared the burden of bearing children

my opinion is that this world would not be facing the population it has now ... there would be far fewer people on this Earth than there are now.

[CrispyQ]

3. Excellent article.

I've thought for years that misogyny was rooted in men not knowing for certain if his children are really his. I had not made the connection to the abortion issue, however. Thanks for posting.

I may re-post a link to this article in our book club thread, since there is a section that applies to the story. How's your reading coming along?

[seabeyond]

4. i was hooked on a trilogy. just finished it and getting back on the book

i am just at the point where i will get to experience the women stepping into the NA life. it is on the kindle so i cant cheat. you know, read ahead. tell me what happens, lol.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

5. Let's not forget the old myth that men plant seed

and women are seen as being as insignificant as a flower pot.

They didn't even track the lineage of female ancestors or even the names of the wives in many cases.

In the Bible they don't even mention the names of the wives of Lot or Noah.

Meanwhile, on the scientific side we have Lucy and now Ardi.

[seabeyond]

6. "Lucy and now Ardi." yes, and in all we are into science, we ignore the significance. further,

i love how evolutionary psychology has picked up on the religious, spread the seed. all of a sudden, we see science embrace religion.

also, pretend women look for ONE older man to get her preg, cause evolution tells us so. though we ignore the mans seed starts denigrating at 24 and hell, the more men that fuck her at the time, the more chance toward preg.

[Scootaloo]

9. Well, on EvoPsych...

It's sort of regarded as a "woo woo" field by the other biological fields; in most cases it really is "just guessing." And it's a favored harbor for all sorts of really stupid ideas cooked up by non-biologists.

As conducted by the actual scientists who are actually trying to make sense of our big dumb brains, there's no "embrace" of religion; just attempts to figure out why we invented the stuff (ask ten EvoPsych scientists, you'll get like thirty answers, though.)

[seabeyond]

11. regarded as a "woo woo" field by the other biological fields; in most cases it really is "just guess

and would you be surprised at the number of men here on du that hold these beliefs close to the heart as fact.... ergo, it is not choice or conditioning, but our biology.

a couple three years ago, this came on my radar and over the years i have spent a lot of time reading about it. when i told my husband about this theory, he really thought i was out there. had a tough time believing anyone really professed this garbage. but, for it to be a branch of science and in universities blew him away.

i understand it is not respected field. i also know that it is promoted and growing cause it is all about male domination and control of women, therefore, very popular.

but, thank you for the post, to allow my rant, lol.

[Scootaloo]

14. Well, it does draw on some demonstrable facts.

All four great apes have "dominant male" hierarchies. This ranges from the gorilla; where a single silverback male rules all, to humans and chimpanzees with competing male "gangs" vying for control of groups, to bonobos where males have an internal hierarchy separate from the matriarchal hierarchy of the overall group (don't let the "hippy ape" idea get you - all social animals have hierarchies of some sort)

In all but the bonobo, the reasons behind these organizations appear to be access to breeding. The silverback is the only male in the troupe "allowed" to inseminate females. Among chimpanzees, only the dominant male of the dominant gang breeds regularly; his buddies get opportunities, but are usually "outcompeted" by the top dude having a higher frequency of intercourse. Humans don't have the "dominant individuals are the only breeders" thing, but the "big man" of a group often gets first pick of partners. Bonobos are the odd one out, as they are apparently without any sort of sexual competition.

What's interesting is that the females of these species usually don't pay any attention to these hierarchies; female gorillas aren't breeding with the silverback because he's "the best," they breed with him because he works to prevent other males from breeding. Chimpanzee females are as promiscuous as female bonobos; they'll put out for just about any male that offers food. As a result the dominant "gang" spends most of their time patrolling to beat the hell out of and often kill any "stray" males they find. Again, humans come in somewhere similar to chimpanzees; read Homer, both his sagas are basically about dudes fighting other dudes for rights to "their" females. Even bonobo males organize into pecking orders, with a "lead" male - it doesn't matter much for greater bonobo society, and that would seem to imply that their male organization is an instinctive holdover from earlier ancestors that serves no modern purpose; a social appendix, if you will.

Make no mistake; humans ARE animals and as such come with a package of instincts that impact the way we act. However humans also have the benefit of being able to ignore instinct. Anyone who says "it's instinct, I can't help it!" is simply a liar. Even animals easily overcome instinct with experience and knowledge, and the great apes clearly do so; if Koko couldn't overcome instinct, she'd just knock Francine Patterson over and take the goddamned banana.

EvoPsych has serious researchers; it's a flimsy field, but there really are real scientists doing real work to try to figure out the roots of why we do the stuff we do. Some of the stuff they come up with interesting, though it's hard to accept without the ability to test hypotheses rigorously. It's not all about male domination at all. In fact most of what I've seen seems to be efforts to explain why we eat weird stuff (for instance; my mouth waters when I smell liver cooking. GOD WHY?!)

What you're seeing though, is these "Men's Rights Activists" and their affiliates trying to hijack some of the notions to justify their own idiocy. The actual science (such as it is) generally DOESN'T back their nonsense - EvoPsych scientists would point out the same thing I just did, that humans are perfectly capable of just ignoring instinct, we're not biological robots.

It reminds me of Richard Dawkin's book, "The Selfish Gene." Apparently he's run into a lot of people who justify their own selfishness with this book, claiming "I can't help it, it's genetic!" - they've clearly never read past the title, however, since the book is about how genes themselves are "selfish," and urge the organisms carrying them towards behaviors like "eating" and "not dying," and has absolutely nothing to do with human selfishness, justified or otherwise. ('Course, I can't blame them for not reading it too well; it's probably Dawkins' driest book, along with River Out of Eden - though the concept of digital genomes is cool, at least)

[seabeyond]

17. it is the whole emphasis

that we put on our animal self, and declaring we can ignore instinct with all that we have progressed in the last 4 decades with sexual freedom has shown us how little that "instinct" has on our life, if we so choose and get beyond the conditioning. conditioning that is never taken into account with evopsych.

it really is irrelevant in the evolution of who we are as people.

[Scootaloo]

21. I'm not sure I understand

You seem to have an issue with the notion that instinct can be ignored? If i'm misunderstanding, please clarify.

[seabeyond]

22. what i am saying is our every day experience,

how we are nurtured, societal conditionings so outweigh any of the "instinct" "animal behavior" of the beginning of time. thousands of years of progression way out weigh any significance of this animal self we are holding onto so dearly. the instincts of the beginning of existence is pretty irrelevant to be of any real importance to behavior today.

[Scootaloo]

25. I actually draw heavy argument with your final statement

the instincts of the beginning of existence is pretty irrelevant to be of any real importance to behavior today.

It has quite a bit of bearing, actually. One of the big ones is tribalism; the effort to define ourselves and our societies by developing degrees of exclusion. Everything from the concept of family, up to the concept of nations, all the way back down to silly things like fandoms, sports teams, or high school dances, comes down to the tribal instinct.

Of course, it's possible to ignore tribal urges just as easily as any other instinct. The trick is though that every human culture and society is built around this particular notion, so no matter how much you ignore it, it's almost impossible to avoid unless everyone around you is ignoring it, too (in which case, you probably just define yourself as the tribe that ignores tribalism. Go figure)

it's not a question of "holding onto dearly," so much as it is simply recognizing that instincts are present and do have some impact on the way we do things. Where instinct is detrimental to our society, we're able to say "Hey, let's not do that," but you really can't pretend the instinct isn't there.

[seabeyond]

26. every tribe (group) had their own culture, social conditioning, traditions that made them unique. nt

[Scootaloo]

27. Yes; They're largely the result of the "tribal" instinct n/t

[seabeyond]

28. or, we are simply a social people. innately part of being human.

and thru time and cultures and traditions and social conditioning, we developed to where we are today. and when addressing the issues of today, we look at the way we were raised, the environment we were in and the societal conditioning we live in.

[Scootaloo]

31. Well, that's what I'm SAYING, lol

The tribal instinct is innately part of being human... In fact it's probably innate to being a primate given that everything from lemurs all the way up to Humans follows the same basic tribe / clan social structure.

When I talk about evolution, i mean it in the biological sense. I have to admit, I wince when I hear people talk of evolution as if it were some sort of sociopolitical construct, like, "people who wear pants are more evolved than people who wear loincloths" (for a kind-of silly example) We are not "evolving" to some sort of "higher state," or "enlightenment" or anything like that. I gnash my teeth over that sort of stuff, and since I have a bad toothache today, please don't push me

I think I get what you're saying; that we can't just throw up our hands and go "Well, it's instinct!" when our instincts are detrimental to our society - for example, that "alpha male" thing that all the apes have going. I agree with that, we have the capability to recognize, ignore, and even subvert our instinctive impulses for better (or for worse; religion may be such a negative subversion of an instinct to listen to one's elders) and are obligated as ethical beings to do so when we have the ability.

However we also have to admit that such instincts are there and do have an impact. if we instead try to pretend that every human action is the result of reason and forethought, the world is suddenly a terribly confusing place.

[seabeyond]

33. no, i do not think you are getting what i am saying.

we look at the apes and how they live and say that is who we are.

that we can't just throw up our hands and go "Well, it's instinct!" when our instincts are detrimental to our society - for example, that "alpha male" thing that all the apes have going. I agree with that, we have the capability to recognize, ignore, and even subvert our instinctive impulses for better (or for worse; religion may be such a negative subversion of an instinct to listen to one's elders) and are obligated as ethical beings to do so when we have the ability.

i read that the reason we ate too fast could go back to the beginning of the time with lack of food. about all it should get in life is a lite, " oh, that is interesting" and get on with life. it is no more of all of who everyone is anymore than any of the other assumptions. some people eat too fast. some people eat really slow. some people eat at a normal pace, whatever that is. and a lot of it has to do with mere habit and not know any better or caring.

we are finding mixes in our dna. we are finding different styles of living that is in complete opposite of this theory. and it is no more who we are today, than a mere, "oh, that is interesting".

more women are not marrying. more women are not having children. with freedom from societal conditioning not to mention science that allows us choices, women have seemed to had an incredible period of evolving that defies all this theory teaches.

for me, it is like a drop of oil in a gallon of water. pretty insignificant dictating behavior and choices.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. hell, the more men that fuck her at the time, the more chance toward preg.

I read an article a while back that said some sperm can actually act as hunter killers for other sperm if the male thinks his partner is cheating and they ignore the egg.

It reminded me of this scene from "Skin Deep" with John Ritter:

[Scootaloo]

16. OMFG!

What the hell was that?!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

24. Sure wasn't a light sabre duel.

[SunSeeker]

8. Paternal lineages never made sense to me.

It was particularly stupid in the ancient world, where it was pretty difficult if not impossible to be sure of paternity. Who the mother was, on the other hand, was unquestionable. Perhaps the earliest form of politics triumphing over fact?

[Spitfire of ATJ]

20. The whole "royal blood" thing following the lines of kings was picked up by commoners

In royalty the common idea of merging two royal families and thus nations was common. The princess that married a prince and future king would ascend to queen. Sometimes a royal female would be taken as a spoil of war and kept as a concubine to humiliate the other country. Neither she nor her children were considered to be in line for the throne and their bloodline will have been broken.

This is why some people act like their sons carry on the bloodline but their daughters are to be married off to someone with money and some of that money BETTER come their way.

[SunSeeker]

7. Excellent post. Thanks. nt

[Major Nikon]

10. So how does this explain why women are against abortion at the same rate as men?

There are no major differences between mens' and womens' stands on the issue. 40% of men believe abortion should be generally available, and 37% of women think it should be. 20% of men think it should not be permitted, and slightly more women, 24%, agree.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-537570.html

[hlthe2b]

19. I find that hard to believe... I'd love to see how the question was asked.

and how the polling sample was conducted.

[seabeyond]

23. not to mention the patriarchy of religion and patriarchy structure within these religious families

that dictate woman thought and opinion.

[Major Nikon]

32. Sounds like you're saying women are incapable of thinking for themselves

But OK, so check the polls in other countries

What about France where only about 10% of the population attends church regularly? Men there are actually more tolerant on abortion than women, although both groups are pretty close.

If a woman doesn't want children, she should be able to have an abortion

Very Much:
Male 44
Female 37

A little:
Male 22
Female 22

Total Yes:
Male 66
Female 59

http://www.thebrusselsconnection.be/tbc/upload/attachments/European%20Values%20Overall%20EN.pdf

[seabeyond]

34. i think religion is a huge factor for people that are anti abortion, yes.

and attending church regularly does not discount those that still consider themselves religious, odd as that may sound. i know many repugs that dont attend church but will spout out the religious reason for dictating certain behavior.

i am not saying that the women cannot think for themselves, any more than men. i am saying either gender adopting the patriarchal conditioning will tend toward this attitude. some of the most militiant anti abortion people i know are religious women.

[Major Nikon]

36. There's no question that religion affects attitudes on abortion

That's because those who disapprove of abortion do so on ethical grounds, which has nothing to do with 'the man' trying to keep women subservient. If this were actually true, one would expect significantly different numbers between men and women both from those who hold strong religious views and those who don't. Even within strong religious groups people don't always believe what they are told to believe. Among Catholics, support for birth control is extremely strong even though the official church position forbids it.

I gave France as an example of what happens when religion is factored out. Religion there is viewed as largely ceremonial and certainly isn't going to affect survey results to any large degree, and STILL you have similar rates of approval/disapproval between men and women with men actually having more tolerance towards it.

[Major Nikon]

29. It shouldn't be hard to believe. That's not the only poll which says the same thing

A year ago, Gallup found more women calling themselves pro-choice than pro-life, by 50% to 43%, while men were more closely divided: 49% pro-choice, 46% pro-life. Now, because of heightened pro-life sentiment among both groups, women as well as men are more likely to be pro-life.

Men and women have been evenly divided on the issue in previous years; however, this is the first time in nine years of Gallup Values surveys that significantly more men and women are pro-life than pro-choice.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/118399/more-americans-pro-life-than-pro-choice-first-time.aspx

[hlthe2b]

35. Well THAT proves my point... Saying "PRO-LIFE" verus PRO-CHoice makes a damned big difference

and Gallup knows full well.

[Major Nikon]

37. I'm not sure what your point was

Regardless of how the question is asked, the approval/disapproval numbers between men and women are consistently similar even when you go back as far as Roe v Wade. If you can point to a survey that says something different, I'd be glad to take a look at it.

[uppityperson]

30. Hey, "Women" are a region!...>>>

ABORTION VIEWS BY REGION
Abortion should be...

Generally available

Northeast:
48
Midwest:
34%
South:
33%
Women:
43%

[ErikJ]

12. Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

In rural Kyrgyzstan men still marry their women the old-fashioned way: by abducting them off the street and forcing them to be their wife. Bride kidnapping is a supposedly ancient custom that's made a major comeback since the fall of Communism and now accounts for nearly half of all marriages in some parts. We traveled to the Kyrgyz countryside to follow/aid and abet a young groom named Kubanti as he surprised his teenage girlfriend Nazgul with the gift of marriage/kidnapping.

[seabeyond]

13. it is disgusting, and nothing acceptable in this. i didnt watch it all. had enough. thank you

for this information.

truly disgusting....