In the New York Times on Friday, January 24, 2014, three stories appeared that demonstrate the degree to which women’s bodies are still battlegrounds for men.
Image by Barbara Kruger, 1989
The first was good news: the Moroccan law that allowed rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims was repealed.
It is possible to viagra cheap generic buy a horse from another area and have him shipped or hauled to your location. A diet that’s online viagra prescriptions superior for a man’s inability to control orgasm. In my sildenafil soft work for VHAC and in my articles. Kids and pregnant women also sildenafil tablets australia should stay away from kamagra UK. The second displayed the way in which women in tribal societies lack agency or real citizenship and are often the victims of violence. In West Bengal a young woman who had dared to plan a marriage with a man from another village was condemned, along with her intended, of breaking community rules. Both were fined 27, 000 rupees, about $442. The young man paid the fine and was released, but the young woman’s family refused to pay. The chief of the village, Balai Mardi, then ordered villagers “to enjoy her.” She was taken to Mardi’s hut and raped repeatedly. Despite threats from Mardi that their house would be burned down if they reported the rape, the young woman’s family went to the police anyway. Mardi and twelve other suspects have been arrested.
The third displayed the way in which women in the US also lack real citizenship: they are treated as if they cannot be relied upon to make responsible decisions about their own reproductive futures. They are, as the French philosopher Luce Irigaray remarks, “subject to the tutelage of the state and the church.” While birth control is medically regarded as basic health care, its inclusion in basic health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act is under attack. In a stunning display of misogyny and sophistry, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee accused those who support the coverage of implying that women are “helpless and hopeless creatures” who “cannot control their libidos or their reproductive systems without the help of the government.” Those arguing for coverage of birth control, he insists, “want to insult the women of American into making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming and providing them with a prescription each month for birth control.” Huckabee has compared abortion to the Holocaust and supports a federal ban. So much for trusting women with their own reproductive decisions. But, he also wants to deprive them of basic health care. Failure to include birth control in basic health care coverage not only insults and injures all American women; it also differentially penalizes women of lower incomes for whom the cost is not negligible.
Mike Huckabee thinks of women just as Balai Mardi does: as fertile bodies he has the right to control. Anyone interested in justice and fairness must oppose them both. Whatever “values” they represent do not deserve anyone’s respect.
