The connection between two current new items is interesting. There is the Aiken flap, the underbelly of which is controlling women's lives, as well as blaming them for being raped, and the news that autism and schizophrenia is heavily determined by the male parent, and abnormalities in sperm as the person ages. We've had decades of blaming women for autism - they didn't bond, they didn't eat right, but the determiner is the male exclusively. The far right is not going to like this science any more than climate change. Because underneath the varied rhetoric of the right is a biblical blame of women for all the ails of the world. Oh, most people know how to be politically correct, but there is virilent mysogyny here as in the rest of the world. Women and children are the slave factory, and like the South, men will fight to the death to keep a good deal. I don't go around saying or even thinking this except rarely, but I know and all women know that the power is with the male, and it would take an apolcalypse to change societal structures. There are men who are careful, because they are conscious of women's situation, to not abuse power or add to the negativity heaped upon women. My husband and sons are aware and sensitive. But underneath the niceties for most men lies hatred of women. Maybe, as Dinnerstein has suggested, because we are fortunate to nurture life and give birth, and men are struggling to get out from under the powerful mothers they were dependent on as babies. I don't know. But, honey, I worked in battered women's shelters for twelve years, and there is hatred abounding. One in three women will be raped in her life. We have no sense of safety, and we are being subtlely or blatantly told that we dressed provocatively or made a bad decision or teased or some such crap. I'm sick of it, and I wish women would wake up and not take this myth as truth anymore. I don't look to men, they will never have the incentive to protect women.
As the Buddha said, "I am my own protector".
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