Women: We let our guard down
It’s Friday, International Women’s Day 2024. Let public joy be confined, possibly under a weighted blanket. We are not doing well. Women let their guard down. We will need to be tougher than ever in this fatal era.
It has been decades since women’s rights were withdrawn so precipitously around the world. We expected feminism to expand exponentially. “Now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” as Matthew Arnold wrote in 1867 of the decline of religious faith post-Darwin.
Women had been warned and yet it happened. Iranian women were brutalized in their black bag garments. The backward male U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade is metastasizing. Now manspreading MAGA Republicans running many U.S. states don’t just seek to end abortion but to hound anyone who helps pregnant women: doctors; husbands; cabdrivers; parents.
An Alabama Supreme Court Christian ayatollah ruled that leftover IVF embryos were actual children. And Louisiana bans their destruction, so they’re shipped to another state. What if embryos are then banned from crossing state borders, tiny spots nervously hitchhiking with their little pastel backpacks?
On the brighter side, we turn to France, a nation I admire with reservations, sick of being groped and threatened by men on the streets, in elevators, in stores, everywhere. France is made for men, as NobelPrize winning Annie Ernaux has written in her many novels about growing up female, hated in the nation.
And yet the Macron government made abortion a constitutional right, a fantastic achievement, a joyous example for women worldwide.
Can Canada follow France? No. Our Constitution’s notwithstanding clause — the one that dumb premiers have used for their precious pronoun-same-sex-marriage-religious-hats issues — will always offer an out to primitive misogynist provinces. We have the same States’ Rights problem the U.S. has; central government can’t overcome it.
I remain puzzled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s well-intended obsession with transgender issues, which he sees as a unit, a woven rope. But the rope contains many strands, some of which damage women’s rights. Good people may agree with him out of an automatic amiable liberalism I generally share. But I’m not so sure on every count.
Women see the world differently than men do. Men must accept this. Feminist journalist Caroline CriadoPerez singles out a recent American study about how people walk through university campuses at night. It produced heat map images of where men and women focus their eyes as they approach parks and tunnels.
“While men are mostly focusing on the path ahead, women are scanning the peripheries, keeping an eye on bushes and dark areas,” Criado-Perez writes. “(They) scan for potential threats, looking for their escape route if needed.” Diagrammed, the male gaze is a central blob, the female gaze a dispersed blast of dots.
I do this too. Activists who fervently believe Toronto homeless encampments or safe-injection sites are no danger to locals should consider the women. We are alert to dangers that men brush off.
For instance, I don’t favour drag queen story hours for small children. I don’t think women’s breasts and bums, dresses, hair and makeup should be exaggerated publicly. It sets a bad example for boys and distorts girls’ view of themselves (it did mine).
I don’t like transgender athletes blocking biological female athletes’ chances in sport by using the bigger, stronger male bodies they were born with. Transgender athletes should have their own category.
In 2024, women’s rights are vanishing. Feminist women and their male allies no longer have the luxury of going along to get along, of playing nice against enemies. Consider Trump II. Prepare.