Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 440 Editor's Choice: 86
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This is promising.
[Read the article: India's girl shortage]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This actually *is* affording girls some power. Think about it. If you are very valuable to your father, is he as likely to abuse you, teach you you are worthless, murder you for getting raped, or in general treat you like dog turds as if you were not valuable?
Girls being valuable to their fathers *does* directly translate into a small amount of additional status and social protection for women, because parents' attitudes toward their girls have a lot to do with what women are allowed to do in life.
A girl who is raised to believe she will be a burden on her family and they will have to pay a lot of money to get rid of her is in much worse shape than a girl who is raised to believe she will bring her family wealth and help her brothers to get married as well. Admittedly it's still a far cry from sexual equality, but it does strongly imply that the pendulum is going to swing back -- that the status of girls will improve because the status of fathers who have girls is improving, and then men will stop encouraging their wives to have abortions of girls, so the sex ratio will return to normal -- but by that time the status of women may have permanently gotten somewhat better.
I would also imagine that in a society where women are valuable to their fathers for their marriageability, perhaps, just perhaps, laws against rape will shift toward heavy penalties to the rapists, as the rapists will be seen as committing serious property crimes against the families of young women. Societies with honor killings tend to be dowry societies -- you have to pay money to get rid of your daughter and if she's not a virgin no one wants her, so you kill her to get the burden she now represents off your hands. Bride price societies do not murder raped girls (though there is a nasty tendency to make them marry their rapists, and I hope India manages to avoid that.)
This is the first time I've seen any *actual* evidence of something good for women coming out of this sex selection thing.
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Misandry is bad... but it's not the point of Broadsheet
[Read the article: Who you calling a donkey?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Firstly, I would like to state for the record that yes, I find the misandry of popular culture quite disgusting. I am sick and tired of the "funny" trope of men being stupid, ignorant jerks (and women loving them anyway); I feel it does an incredible disservice to both sexes, since it denigrates men *and* then validates men behaving that way (if men are inherently ignorant buffoons, how can you hold ignorant buffoonery against an individual man? Boys will be boys, and apparently, men will be chimps). I don't care if it's men or women perpetuating the stereotype, it sucks, and it's overplayed, and it's *boring*, and in a culture where a. men are in charge b. young men are not achieving academically at the levels women are c. our president is in fact an ignorant buffoon, and yet half the country voted for him, twice, I think the idea that "men are idiots" is actually *hurting* us. Because if men are in charge, and men are idiots, and that's okay, then it's okay for idiots to be in charge, and far more intelligent and sophisticated women will love and coddle and listen to them anyway because isn't idiocy cute.
Blech.
However, *this is not the point of Broadsheet.* Broadsheet is absolutely up front about its biases -- it has *never* pretended to be about sexism in general, only about *women's* issues. So if something is sexist against women, it will be noted. If something is sexist against men, it will not be. That is what Broadsheet does and it has never claimed to do anything else. Asking why can't it highlight misandry is like asking why can't "War Room" talk about celebrities more often. That's not the point.
Robert, if you want to found a blog that talks about sexism as it impacts *both* sexes, I would be happy to contribute. I feel that *Western* feminism has gone as far as it can go in being focused on anti-female sexism only, and that women in the West will not progress until we include men in our struggle, because the problems we face now are generally problems that impact both men and women, sometimes equally but in different ways (for instance, the infamous mommy wars hide the fact that the contribution of men as parents is routinely denigrated and ignored, and that very very few men in the middle or upper middle class feel they have the *option* of staying home and being supported by a spouse to be a full-time parent, or getting flextime at work, or going on part-time tracks.) The rest of the world, now... there's no balance in the fact that Indians are aborting huge numbers of baby girls, or selling adult women into sexual slavery, and an "amusing" comment in a textbook in a society that is that misogynistic is not amusing. When we as Westerners view the rest of the world, we cannot compare the suffering of women there to the sex-based suffering of either men or women here; we've *solved* most of the problems the rest of the world has, in our own society, and now we have new problems to work on.