01 April 2006

The War against Females.

I wasn't going to post anything today because even on the best of days I have problems getting people to believe my posts are not a spoof...but what the hell eh!

According to Johann Hari, a rapist could get away with raping 50 women before it was statistically likely he would be successfully prosecuted.

This got me thinking of the infamous feminist slogan 'All Men are Rapists', what percentage of men in the UK are actually likely to be rapists?

There are 14,100 rapes a year that are recorded in the UK, this is estimated to be 15% of the true total, so that is almost 100,000 rapes a year in total.

If we guestimate that each rapist commits an average of 5 rapes in a lifetime, then that means there are 1.4m past or future rapists in the UK out of a male population of around 28m. So nearly 1 in 20 or 5% of men are, or will become, rapists.

A third of people claim this is the fault of women for wearing short skirts and getting drunk.

Then there are the 1 in 4 women who have suffered from domestic violence.

Maybe the same people think that's women's fault as well?

Melanie Phillips certainly thinks the gender pay gap is women's fault.

Now we have the Tories putting a private members bill through parliament trying to ban abortion supported by a right wing press and evangelicals trying to get rid of abortion piece by piece through concentration on the 1% of abortions at 20-24 weeks and intimidation and distortion of facts.

This is attacking the most vulnerable women. Whatever you think of abortion (and even pro-choice don't like it), banning it won't make it go away. It just punishes the poorest and most vulnerable who can't get around the laws and end up with unsafe illegal abortions, that already kill 80,000 women a year in parts of the world.

A lot is said about South Dakota banning abortion, but people forget that Roe vs Wade guarantees women the constitutional right to choose an abortion in South Dakota and everywhere else in the US (although pro-life (what a joke) terrorists are intimidating and killing as many doctors and clinic staff as they can).

In the UK it is much more difficult to get an abortion, 2 doctors permission is needed (more difficult than you might think when 18% of doctors oppose abortions for religious reasons) and a third of abortions are done private because of the difficulty of accessing NHS abortions disadvantaging poorer women.

This hints at the real reason why the religious and right wingers want to blame women for everything. It is all about control. For the right wing, contraception, abortion, more equal pay and education has given more freedom to females and that is a threat to the male dominance of society so loved by the male media moguls and male religious leaders.

When you think about it, even God hates women. Why else would he inflict the pain of child birth?

7 comments:

  1. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

    That feminism is still necessary?

    That we live in a society that prefers to blame the victim than look at possible structural causes?

    I certainly agree on the abortion issue. I always found it very strange when Andrew Neil kept trying to make it an issue a couple of years ago (stuff like, 'while we're discussing this, in the US abortion is a big issue, why do you think it isn't here? etc). It is particularly woorying as such issues only become truly 'hot' political issues in a context of cross-party economic consensus and orthodoxy, witness George Osbourne on Newsnight on the night of the Budget saying he had NO major objections to it.

    I worry about this country...

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  2. "I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. That feminism is still necessary? That we live in a society that prefers to blame the victim than look at possible structural causes?"

    Both really. But just as the levers of power are controlled by the well off, they are also controlled by males (white well off males at that). So every issue is distorted through a media prism controlled by these people.

    "witness George Osbourne on Newsnight on the night of the Budget saying he had NO major objections to it."

    What does that mean? Does he support women's right to choose or not? Or is he in favour or reducing the limit that will hit the most vulnerable?

    I'm with Clinton on this one, "safe, legal and rare [as possible]".

    I think we also need reminding that we do not have abortion on demand in this country (like they do in the US), we have some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the EU and it is the Tories that are trying to tighten these laws even more.

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  3. The tories really are the party of compassion aren't they!

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  4. I wouldn't trust David Cameron as far as I could kick him (and that's not very far, tho' I would try to kick him as hard as I could ;o)

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  5. It was a point about economic consensus.

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  6. Blue Foxxx:

    In that Labour no longer wants to nationalise industries and accepts the market system then yes you are right there is more economic consensus but in terms of distribution of income and funding of public services there are still significant differences between Labour and the Tories.

    Without new Labour we wouldn't have had a minimum wage and only new Labour will increase it in line (or faster than) the rise in average earnings.

    Tax credits are a bureaucratic mess but they have raised a quarter of children out of poverty so far, with a target of eliminating child poverty (measured by internationally agreed terms 'below 60% median earnings') by 2020.

    The New Deal has been a massive success in that youth unemployment has fallen by 90% since 1997.

    The extra spending on the NHS and education might not be getting the value for money that we want (extra wages for doctors and nurses and more expensive drugs have taken most of the spending in the NHS) but we must not forget that the NHS is on target to reduce waiting lists to an average of just 9 weeks by 2008 when it was 18 months in 1997. Also the NHS has just undergone the biggest building programme in its history. Ditto for Education. No more teaching in temporary huts and outside toilets like there was in 1997. Class sizes have been reduced.

    Aside from economics there is Labour's proud record in doubling international aid and cancelling debt, doubling Kyoto targets for carbon emissions, human rights act, improvements in race relations, gay rights, animal rights, cleanest rivers beaches, water, air on record, freedom of information act, cleaned up party funding (not enough but improvements), banned handguns, and more devolved power.

    There are many disappointments and many many things Labour should be doing, but in no way are they the same as the Tories.

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  7. Just a thought,

    Suppose there was a giant database that linked medical records, crime records and identity records together.

    A potential rapist, could look through that database for women who had unexpectedly had an STD test (e.g. married or cohabiting women), that had either not reported a rape, or reported a rape but not pressed charges. The rapist could then pick out those women and order the results by attractiveness from the photo and proximity to your his location. He's got a very small chance of being caught should he commit a rape, because if she wasn't prepared to press charges last time, she probably won't this time. He also know what she looks like to make it easy to identify the correct victim.

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