Good morning and welcome to another edition of What’s Pissing Off Jenny Today: the death of Roe v Wade, the Texas’ bounty-hunting forced birth bill and other atrocities against women There are a million and one reasons to be outraged by this draconian, tyrannous BS, but I’d like to focus in on just one (because it’s my favorite) – how unconscious gender inequality makes the world a shittier place for all of us.
Let’s start with how there is actually a McCarthyesque hotline for people to report women who accidently become pregnant and don’t want to give birth (for any and all reasons-none of which are your business). FYI if you are a guy and can’t get pregnant – it happens really, really, really, easily but only with your help. Just to be clear, fertility is not a female character flaw. The involvement of a man and his fertility is pivotal in all conception. Yet men are not held responsible by this law. In fact, they can now turn around after impregnating someone and collect the $10,000 bounty creating stunningly disturbing new career options for men.
So let’s break these gender double standards down into easy bite-sized pieces:
Double standards of gender expectation regarding fertility
Women:
- Responsibility for birth control
- Responsibility for birthing a child
- Responsibility for medical costs
- Responsibility for the cost of raising child to adulthood (a cost estimated around $230,000)
- Responsibility for adjusting their lives/jobs to accommodate a baby
- Okay I’m gonna stop there because who are we kidding. This list would go on for days!
Men
- Police women to make sure they are forced into all of the above
And while this is all highly problematic and hard to even fathom there is yet another level to these expectations around the idea of taking/controlling life that suggests such power is a male entitlement not allowed to women. Women who want to have a clump of cells removed from their body to maintain their own autonomy are seen as murders. (Don’t come at me with your heartbeat nonsense. That’s such BS – and you know it! – that we are not even entertaining that discussion anymore.) Women who have abortions are not murders. Yet, women who become impregnated by men (very often through the violent dehumanizing experience of rape/incest) are expected to love, nurture, and birth a child that they don’t want.
Double standards of gender expectations regarding having children:
- Women should want to birth, love and sacrifice for their children
- Men…*crickets* – no such expectation
Women are regularly villainized for not wanting to be pregnant. Trust me, I know. I’ve never wanted children and have no regrets for not having them which according to society makes me Cruella Deville. (No problem! Happy to wear the t-shirt.) Now swap genders and imagine (just for a tiny moment) if a man was raped and forced to give birth and care for the child. Tons of men are outraged about losing their bodily autonomy around having to wear a mask. They are also indignantly refusing to get a shot in their arm because they believe in their right to that choice while they (gender double standard) expect women to push another human being through their birth canal then love and support them for 18+ years. While we still have massively ineffective laws to hold men accountable for child support (gender double standard). How would men feel about being forced to birth? Come on! We all know if men could get pregnant, you’d be able to get an abortion at the McDonald’s drive through window.
So, here’s some fun (gender double standard) facts: women are expected to nurture and protect life, but men commit more than 88% of the murders that occur in our country daily. And men have committed 100% of the wars that have resulted in millions of deaths. Men have committed 100% of the acts of genocide. Men have committed 98% of mass shootings in the USA.
And now we come to the special little place where my rage goes off the charts: reporting, policing. and bounty hunting. People report these violent, murdering men all the time. And not only are they not rewarded with $10,000, they are totally ignored. They are told by the police that the man with homicidal ideation hasn’t committed a crime YET so we all need to wait for his inevitable, socially sanctioned violence. Please come back and make your police report after he’s killed you. The social message being that men are entitled to violent behavior on the bodies of others with relative impunity, but also have the right to police women’s bodily choices (gender double standard).
There are just a shit-ton of male terrorist out there posting on facebook, on incel chatrooms, reddit and subreddit, threatening people with guns in their hands, acting like all kinds of violent fools about to take lives and there are no hotlines to report them. No laws to protect their innocent victims. There are actually laws that protect them from being investigated as domestic terrorists. There are no financial rewards for saving lives by reporting them. And you know why? We have different expectations around acts of violence based on gender. Let’s break it down:
Expectations for women:
- Always be loving and nurturing to everyone around you.
- Don’t ever get mad or people will call you a bitch and shame you.
- Don’t become physically aggressive or you will be labeled as psychologically disturbed, medicated, and shunned by society.
Expectations for men:
- None. You are not responsible for your anger and if you get violent, we will make an excuse for you. That guy who just gunned down his entire family was just stressed at work.
And our social systems support this message. Men are adjudicated for reported rape only 9% of the time. In case math isn’t your strong point that means 91% of men reported for rape (a much lower number than men who actually rape because rape reporting numbers are so low because the adjudication rate is so low….too tired to go on…) experience no consequence for violently dehumanizing another person.
So, what I am pissed off about today is why is the right to aggress and murder other humans an unspoken male entitlement? Where is the complete and total moral outrage around this? Why don’t we have more effective laws, and hotlines and bounties to hold men accountable for their aggression that destroys lives, but we hold women accountable for having some unwanted cells removed from their uterine lining. Let me be totally clear. I am not saying that abortion is murder. I don’t believe it is. But people who support forced births suggest that it is. So, based on their logic why are they not holding men accountable for murder? Why are our double standards around gender, personal autonomy and concepts of control and violence so completely disproportionate? And again, I’m not suggesting women pick up assault rifles and head on down to the local school yard. I’m just suggesting we have a bit more moral outrage at the fact that men do use assault rifles than we have about women having abortions, because while women are destroying a lump of cells, men are destroying real humans with lives and relationships and hopes and dreams. Yet we just don’t seem to be holding them accountable for those heinous behaviors.
So here is the point I am making. I don’t want to hear the self-righteous ramblings of one more man about a women’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy until you start making laws that hold men accountable for aggressing, raping, and murdering actual human beings on a regular basis. Until bounties are put on the heads of dangerous men the Texas law is just another new and exciting (sarcasm) form of misogyny that puts us one step closer to witch burning.
And with that I will conclude before I am arrested for writing this post. Because a woman speaking out against male violence is always a bigger moral outrage than the man and the violence he commits. And that’s just another shining example of how gender double standards make the world shittier for us all.