Making women’s rights clear
Acolleague who teaches at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and has spent many years working for the Republican party, recently directed my attention to what she called “the most offensive post ever.”
I thought Nancy Bocskor was exaggerating until she referred me to an online piece titled “Why I Am Not Raising My Daughters to be Feminists,” which, even at first glance, makes it sound like raising girls is like raising veal. The antifeminist writer announces, “I will not teach my (three pre-teen daughters) that they need to demand equal rights, because in America, they already have them.” He goes on to declare that he “will not teach them that abortion is about ‘my body, my choice,’ because it is not.”
The piece was written by Mark Tapson who says the thought of his little girls seeing themselves as part of a “victim class struggling to overcome imaginary oppression” is just terrible. He will “teach them to find validation as productive members of society so that they don’t have to seek it marching with a juvenile, vulgar mob in (vulgar) hats.”
Tapson sneers that women face only “imaginary oppression” yet simultaneously wants his daughters to “defend themselves — with words, martial arts, and yes, with guns too — so that bad men will think twice about, or deeply regret, messing with them.”
Apart from what my friend Sarah Appleton calls “life-long Daddy issues,” the father of these girls isn’t offering his daughters much. While there might be more offensive posts out there, this one is chilling. He is not offering his daughters a workable perspective on women’s lives. Sure, you’re a woman who wants to own a gun, you can own a gun, but you don’t have to; you want to bear and raise children, you can, but you don’t have to.
I put Tapson’s ideas to my friends on Facebook who took him up on several points.
Amy Hartl Sherman asks, “If it’s all ‘imaginary’ why does he have to teach them to fight?”
Michelle King echoes Amy’s point, “Are they treated equally or do they need to be taught to defend themselves because, in reality, they are not equal?” Anti-discrimination laws, argues King, don’t create equality. “Laws do nothing to ensure equality but state that you cannot discriminate against women in hiring practices, housing, credit, etc. Laws simply provide legal recourse if you are discriminated against — IF you can prove it.”
Remember why women marched in cities across America wearing vulgar hats? Because our president was taped saying that randomly grabbing women between the legs was fine because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Let’s say it wasn’t the protesters who were “vulgar,” just as the women who are describing what they allegedly endured with Harvey Weinstein aren’t being “vulgar.”
Teaching someone to defend themselves is fine, agrees George Sebastian-Coleman, “But when your goal is not prevention but only that their attacker ‘will ... deeply regret, messing with them’ you are not seeking to protect your daughters, but putting a price on their being hurt. I’m sure his assaulted, beaten, 75-cents-on-the-dollar daughters will deeply appreciate that the men of the world thought twice and deeply regret their condition.”
Few of us started out as feminists. Playwright Patricia Wynn Brown said that while her father taught her to fight, injustice in life taught her that “Change requires words, demonstrations, legislation ... and helping women like his daughters find solidarity with women like me.”
There’s no feminist orthodoxy except making sure that girls and women are guaranteed rights over our own bodies — and the right to make our decisions.
If you want to be an astronaut, a librarian, a mechanical engineer, a corrections officer, a chef, a senator, a dog-walker, an artist, a stay-athome-parent, a bus-driver, a dressdesigner, an architect, a teacher, a coder, a nurse, a pilot, a doctor, a real estate agent, an attorney, a therapist, a butcher or the president, you can but you don’t have to because nobody has the right to force you into any of these roles against your will. Nobody. Not your daddy or mommy or religious leader or teacher or partner or boss or anybody. You get to choose for yourself.
As my friend Lisa Adams puts it, there is hope. Tapson’s daughters, she said, “Won’t find feminism. It will find them.”