More pearls of wisdom from I Blame the Patriarchy.
Bill Napoli Is A Fucking Perv
State senator Bill Napoli of South Dakota, the state that recently claimed occupancy rights to the citizenry’s heretofore privately-owned uteruses, has been watching too much “Law & Order: Mutilated Women Unit.”
As you know by now, South Dakota, in a perverted bid to appease the Virgin Mary by revoking human status from its female citizens, has banned abortion. This is quite a spectacular ban. It features an added stupidity that makes it sparkle merrily against the backdrop of plain old regular bans. The added stupidity is this: it precludes abortions even for the hard-luck cases—victims of rape and incest, and women whose health is put at risk by pregnancy— that occasionally tug at the heartstrings of those on-the-fence anti-choicers who, after a few drinks, become moved by the pathos of such a woman’s suffering, almost the way they might be moved by the suffering of a dog, causing them to declare, “Aw hell, it’s kinda mean to make her give birth to her own sister; let daddy’s little rape victim have her abortion.”
In a free society a woman would be able to terminate with absolute ease an unwanted pregnancy for any reason that strikes her fancy. But we do not live in a free society. We live in an oppressive misogynist theocracy. It is from the aforementioned “tragic” exceptions that abortion rights have been dangling in the breeze for some time now. They dangle, precariously, because of the prevailing godbag sensibility that women, who by popular decree must always sacrifice themselves to the common good, should suffer the tortures of the damned before they are allowed to exercise basic human rights. And the aforementioned Napoli jagoff, when asked on The News Hour about the circumstances under which he would personally condescend to allow a woman some modicum of human dignity, sums up this godbag zeitgeist thusly:
A real-life description [of an exception scenario] to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
Note the ease with which he describes this horror as “real-life,” the clarity with which he sees his heroine as a protegée of the Virgin Mary, the relish with which he gratuitously adds the piquant pornographic details. You can practically see his dick swelling with patriarchal pride.
See also Rene’s illuminating comment from yesterday’s post; she actually saw this interview on TV, whereas I only read the transcript.
South Dakota and Libya: Blood Brothers In Misogyny
March 5, 2006
A significant portion of the patriarchy-blamer’s ideological day is spent pondering the subject of rape. Rape is, as we have seen, the founding principle of patriarchy and the model from which patriarchy’s most popular form of propaganda, porn, takes its inspiration. Rape isn’t just a subset of unrelated incidents perpetrated by a fringe contingent of sickos. It is, as Susan Brownmilller asserted, “a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
If you are a man, and you don’t rape women, well, goody for you, but if you email me with some inane vituperation about how your personal noble restraint invalidates Brownmiller’s statement, you will only embarrass yourself. No matter what kind of man you are, you benefit in a thousand different ways from the violent sexualization of women’s subordination. Actual rapists have got the initial shock and awe covered, but they’re only the infantry; it’s up to the rest of you to finish the job.
You do this by demonizing feminists, by renting women for lap dances, by letting rapists off the hook in court, by buying cheap crap Victoria’s Secret thongs for your woman, by congratulating your girlfriend on her boob job, by ignoring mass rapes in Rwanda, by passing along the URL to Paris Hilton’s fuck video, by ogling that girl at the bus stop, by letting your mom do your laundry, by “giving away” a bride, by voting control of women’s uteruses over to godbag politicians, by pressuring your girlfriend to take it up the ass because all your friends are doin’ it, by having an opinion on the size of human labia, by arguing that stripping is “empowering,” by claiming you’re “hardwired” to be turned on by women who emulate the ludicrous fashion practices of strippers and centerfolds, by your inability to conceive of sex without dominance, and by refusing, despite 30 years of intelligent, educated women telling you otherwise, to concede that you don’t really, truly view women as human beings in anything approaching the same light in which you view yourself.
But women, you might be inclined to argue, having heard somewhere that some men have started doing housework, have it so much better now. You think so? Then how is it that an American woman is raped every couple of minutes, and that 78% of these rapists are husbands, boyfriends, or dates? Less than 16% of these rapes are reported. Less than half of those are prosecuted. The average amount of time these few convicted dickwads spend in the clink: 11 months.
The dehumanizing groundwork laid by these rapists forms an excellent foundation upon which to build many a creatively misogynist cultural practice. The women of South Dakota, some of the first casualties in the impending gynocide, have been bought and paid for by some lunatic bid to overturn Roe in the Supreme Court. Such a thing would not have been possible in a culture where women are viewed as you are viewed: as something beyond the essence of sex.
Is the connection between rape and modern civilization’s Xtreme Mxogyny still too fuzzy for you? Then let’s check out Libya, where they don’t pussyfoot around. It’s crystal-fucking-clear in Libya. Like in the US, getting raped in Libya is a crime. The difference is that in Libya they dispense with the charade of joke trials for rapists that really punish the rape victims. in Libya, you go directly to jail. I’m talking about the victims, not the rapists. Getting raped is punishable by indefinite detention without legal representation.
That’s right. According to the Human Rights Watch, Libya actually imprisons women for the crime of “moral misconduct,” claiming it is for their own good. Like uterus-owning South Dakota, which is protecting women from themselves, or rapist-loving Illinois, which lets rapists go free despite videotaped evidence, Libya cannot trust women to make their own decisions, or put rapists in jail. So they just lock up these inconvenient women in “rehabilitation centers.”
“We let the ones with good behavior work, the ones that don’t raise their voices, the ones that sleep quietly.”
Who are these women? Rape victims, women who have had unapproved consensual sex, “illegally” pregnant women, prostitutes, homeless women, or, as one Libyan attorney puts it, “anyone with families who … want to get rid of their daughters for any reason.”
Nada Mounir, seventeen, was brought to [the Benghazi Home for Juvenile Girls] on April 21, 2005 after the death of a relative who tried to rape her. She attacked him with a knife in self-defense, and he subsequently died of complications. She told Human Rights Watch, “[h]e tried to rape me but he didn’t succeed. My parents were in another house. He came from behind the house. He kissed me. He had a knife. He pulled me down by my hair and said he was going to do it but I took the knife and stabbed him. I told my mother about it. She took me to the police station. They [the police] took me to the prosecutor who brought me here.” Her family refuses to visit her or agree to take custody of her. She does not have a lawyer.
Once they’re in, the only way out is for a male family member to “claim” them. This claiming requirement applies even if the woman in question is an adult and has committed no crime other than that of having been raped. Because male family members generally want nothing to do with them, they are left hanging until some stranger agrees to marry them. This results in male fuckwads lurking around the detention centers looking to score some prison pussy.
Libya feels it is on the cutting edge of progressive thought when it provides prisons for these women instead of just letting their families kill them outright. “In the street there is no protection for them,” they say. But in Libya, “protection” means they are locked up, handcuffed, held in isolation, forced to sit through religious lectures, deprived of education, of hygiene, and of contact with the outside world. They are forced to endure invasive “virginity examinations.” If they escape, they are brought back.
In South Dakota, rape victims who get pregnant aren’t thrown in an actual prison, but it’s hard to think of compulsory pregnancy in any other way. Unless you’re a guy.
