Are women people? The presidential election has turned into a referendum on whether women are full
(worth the lengthy read about the troublesome "woman question"
Are women people?
The presidential election has turned into a referendum on whether women are full human beings or objects men own
Amanda Marcotte
Are women people?
Rush Limbaugh; Donald Trump; Joe Scarborough (Credit: Getty/Ethan Miller/Reuters/Mike Segar/Getty/Frederick M. Brown/Salon)
With the benefit of hours-old hindsight, it now seems inevitable that, with less than a month to go before the United States likely elects its first female president, the top trending topic on Twitter would be #repealthe19th. The hashtag was started by angry supporters of Republican candidate Donald Trump in response to a FiveThirtyEight analysis by Nate Silver showing that Trump would win in a landslide if women didn’t have the right to vote. That led to this demand, facetious or otherwise, that the United States end women’s suffrage. For good reason, Trump’s rise has largely been attributed to the forces of white nationalism engaged in a backlash against the first black president and growing racial diversity. But the past couple of weeks have demonstrated that this election is also a referendum on the question: Are women people?
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But it also goes back to Trump and his supporters treating women not as people but as objects to be owned and controlled by men. If you look at women that way, the attitudes of Trump and his supporters make sense. Trump gets to grab all the pussy he wants because women’s bodies are objects put on this planet for his personal use. With the Central Park case, the truth of what happened matters less to Trump than the opportunity to use a woman’s body in his racialized drama about the dangers that black men supposedly pose to white men’s women. Even the Republicans who are disavowing Trump do so in language that reinforces this notion that women are objects that men own, instead of people in their own right. Most Republican men who released statements condemning Trump invoked their wives and daughters, framing sexual violence as a property crime against male-controlled female bodies, rather than a crime against people with rights.
Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh’s pique cascaded into a terrifying tantrum on Wednesday, as captured by Media Matters:
You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation, then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.
Limbaugh’s rant really distills the struggle between the women-are-people camp and the women-are-objects camp. Valuing consent is about valuing women’s humanity. As people, women should be able to make their own choices about whom they have sex with and under what circumstances.
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The thread that holds all this together is a disavowal of women’s right to autonomy and an assertion that our bodies and the decision-making power over them should belong to men. There’s an elaborate distribution scheme to handle which men get to control which female bodies: Virgins belong to their fathers, wives to their husbands, some women get categorized as “sluts” and can be manhandled at will. Apparently any man who has the same insurance plan as you gets to view porn about you at will. But ultimately, the decision-making power over a woman’s body belongs to anyone but the woman. It’s not surprising that misogynists feel defensive these days. Anti-rape activism is on the rise and being boosted by a prominent White House task force. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of abortion rights in June, and Planned Parenthood continues to survive multiple attacks. And now we’re going to have a female president.
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Women are people and, as Trump supporters have learned to their consternation, we have the right to vote. It’s a right, I suspect, will be exercised vigorously come November.
http://www.salon.com/2016/10/13/are-women-people/
= new reply since forum marked as read
