Patriarchy, Privilege, Babies, and Fish
What happens when boys are taught that the world exists for them
As I was taking my dog on his usual walk around the community greenway this morning, I watched two boys fishing from the spillway between the upper and lower parts of the pond. They looked to be about 12 years old, and one of them had just caught a fish. Our pond has a catch and release policy, but I began to wonder if they knew that. The fish was held aloft as the two boys chatted and the the seconds ticked by, while the fish was deprived of any way to breathe. Both boys were oblivious, consumed with their conversation with each other. The welfare of their prize was never even in consideration. After all, it was just a fish.
In general, I’m not the kind to insert myself into the business of strangers, but I began to wonder if I shouldn’t say something. At last, the successful fisherman started to go through the motions of taking the hook out, but he seemed in no real hurry. His focus was still on chatting with his friend and admiring his catch. The fish’s tail began to twitch, and I tried to remember if I knew how long a fish can be out of water before it dies. I had no idea, so I finally just yelled,
“Put the fish in the water — now! It can’t breathe like that. Stop dicking around talking and put the fish back in the water!”
By this time he did nearly have the hook out and the fish was soon back in the pond. As I walked away, the boys began to mock me, and imitate what I’d said in a high pitched, sing-song voice. Tears sprang to my eyes, not because I care about the opinion of twelve year old boys, but because their behavior was so indicative of how privileged White upper middle-class males are raised. They are continually reinforced in the notion that the world is there for their pleasure and their taking and these children were already under the influence of that attitude. It’s that same attitude that has men who don’t even truly understand how women’s bodies work believing that they have the right to make laws about them.
For such men, the natural world exists to supply them everything from sport fish that they won’t eat to mountains they can strip mine. It is their right to conquer the land and the beings in it, to suit their own purposes. Recently, “coyote whacking” has taken off as a kind of popular new sport in some areas and you can become a YouTube sensation by posting video of yourself running over coyotes with your snowmobile. A recent bill to make this horrendous practice illegal in Jackson, Wyoming did not even make it out of committee.
Manifest destiny!
Not only do the land and the animals exist to serve such men, they also believe that’s what women are also for. Since the on-set of patriarchy, about 10,000 years ago, the role of women shifted from that of being an integral part of a cooperative society to that of a baby-factory, whose primary reason for being is to bear and raise heirs, and to cater to the needs of men.
“The patriarchal systems that emerged brought women for the first time under the direct control of fathers and husbands with few cross-cutting sources of support. Women as wives under this system were not social adults, and women’s lives were defined in terms of being a wife. Women’s mothering and women’s sexuality came to be seen as requiring protection by fathers and husbands.”
The restrictive new laws that have begun springing up around the country, legislating the reproductive functions of women, have nothing at all to do with caring about the lives of babies. If that were the case, there would be an equal number of laws giving meaningful support to those babies and their mothers after they were born. There would be widespread programs to make birth control both affordable and easy to access, in order to try to prevent as many unintended pregnancies as possible. Instead, the authors and supporters of these laws are likely to be the same men who actively seek to restrict and demonize birth control, and demand abstinence-only sex education, if they bother to allow for any kind of sex education at all.
These laws are about enforcing women’s patriarchal role as mother and baby factory. Consciously or subconsciously, these men believe that this is what women are for and they will not stand for any situation that allows women to evade that role. Women who have sex outside of marriage must take their god-given consequences if conception accidentally takes place. Of course, this completely ignores the role of the man in this equation or the reality that the overwhelming majority of women who seek abortions are not promiscuous 20-somethings, but rather mothers, many of whom are already married, and who have at least one child but do not feel that they can support or raise another one because they are struggling economically.
Every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed.
It also ignores the very real horror of forcing someone who has been raped, potentially by someone within their own family, to carry to term the product of that trauma. It ignores the inhumanity of forcing a women to carry a fetus to term when she knows that its birth defects are inconsistent with life and that it will die within hours of delivery or that its life might endanger that of the mother. It disrupts the relationship between a woman and her doctor to determine what is best for her health and wellbeing.
Several lawmakers have already overtly referred to women as “hosts,” confirming that many of them do not view women as actual human beings, but merely as baby-factories, there to serve patriarchal functions. Powerful White men are the most likely to hold these beliefs because they are the most likely to have grown up believing that the world and everything in it is there for their pleasure and use.
Contrary to what some imagine, no-one undertakes to terminate a pregnancy lightly. No-one thinks abortion is a good thing, but sometimes it is a necessary thing. Sanctity of life does not stand apart from basic quality of life.
In 2016, 18 percent of children under age 18 (more than 13 million) lived in food-insecure households, and 1 percent lived in households with very low food security among children (not including households where only adults are food-insecure).
The US has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, a number that has been on the rise in recent years.
“Experts say that about 50 percent of the deaths of women from childbirth-related causes could be prevented if they were given better medical care and that’s a really surprising thing given that we’re one of the wealthiest countries in the world and we spend so much on medical care,” USA Today investigative reporter Alison Young told “CBS This Morning.” “We’re not just talking about the women who die, we’re talking about 50,000 U.S. women who are suffering life-altering harms.”
These men who make these laws; the ones who believe that a woman’s body can shut down conception in the case of rape or who wrongly think that a procedure exists to transfer the fertilized egg into the womb in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, have no business even opening their mouths about women’s reproductive lives, much less deciding for them what is allowed and what is not. But they have been taught since they were children that the world is their oyster. All they need do is to exert their will with as much might as they can muster, and the pearls that are theirs will begin falling at their feet.
Such men have already devastated our planet and the creatures that live on it. “Michael J. Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History wrote in a 2007 book (page 46) that “species are going extinct at thousands of times the background extinction rate,” and we are “thus likely to lose 30 to 50 percent of all living species within this century.”
They do not have any reverence for life; what they have is reverence for power and control in service of their egos.
They have been brought up in a dominance hierarchy that has indoctrinated them with the idea that might makes right. They have been trained to blunt their emotions, and to stifle any empathy because it is seen as weakness. They have created a god in their image which confirms the rightness of their domination of the earth and of those who are weaker and less powerful than they are. They have determined that his will is to save the lives of all babies, although this was not a mainstream protestant stance until well into the 1970s, part of a political strategy to galvanize the conservative base at a time when liberalism seemed to be holding sway. It’s part of a push back on a world that is becoming more egalitarian, and less intrinsically hierarchical.
In 1992, when Americans were asked if the “father of the family is master of the house,” 42 percent said yes. By 2004 the percentage had risen to 52 percent. In other words, while women were advancing at work and earning an ever larger share of household income, the “lord and master” sentiment was actually growing.
This anti-gender equality campaign not only orchestrated a retreat from the advancement of women, but from the basic ideals of democracy. As documented by research across cultures and time, a “traditional” male-headed authoritarian family conditions people to vote for “strong” leaders.
So in 2016 a man who claimed that only he had all the answers, called women untrustworthy and disgusting, bragged about his sexual assaults, incited scapegoating, and condoned violence at his rallies, won the U.S. Presidency.
Misogyny is the policing arm of patriarchy; it is the thing that rears its head if women step too far away from the gender norms that are expected and demanded of them. But patriarchy is not only about men having control over women; it is inherently about the stratification of society, with the strong exerting dominance over anyone weaker or less powerful. It is about turning away from actual love and caring in favor of aggrandizing the self at the expense of anyone who gets in your way. In order to do this, you must numb yourself to the pain of others. You cannot rise if you are too worried about the feelings of those that you step on along the way.
And this is why I cried as I walked away from those boys. They were still children, but already they had learned to not care for the lives or suffering of something deemed less important or valuable than they are. They were young, inexperienced, still trying to find their way. Maybe they will grow up to be men who are kinder and wiser, who truly do honor life in all its forms. In this time of uncertainly and sorrow, we need more men like that. All I can do is to hold out hope.
This just in: Alabama legislator Clyde Chambliss accidentally spilled the beans. When asked about fertility treatments that involve fertilizing eggs, selecting the strongest embryos for implantation and destroying the rest, he assured voters that Alabama’s anti-abortion measure won’t apply to them. “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”
In other words, it’s not about the life of a fertilized egg at all. It’s about controlling women.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.