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The Strange Erasure of Women’s Rights
“Never pass up a clean, safe bathroom” is one of the timeless rules, especially in female life. Yesterday, my husband and I were at the Maine College of Art together, looking at an exhibit, and we decided to use the restrooms before leaving. Down a corridor, we found two of them. One was labeled “Men” and the other was labeled “All Genders.”
Got that? There weren’t two all-gender bathrooms, nor three — a men’s, a women’s, and an all-gender. Nope. The only choice that I, as a woman, was offered was a bathroom in which a man (any man, not just a man who identified as a woman) was expressly permitted to enter into and share with me.
As it happens, I am quite accustomed to sharing bathrooms and much else with men. I work in a predominately male field, after all. And beside, I’m 55 years old and the mother of six, three of whom are men. So it’s hard for any bathroom arrangement to make me uncomfortable.
But what if I was an 18-year-old art student? Or maybe the 11-year-old daughter of another gallery visitor?
Wayyyyy back in the mists of time, when being a feminist meant advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, the Stop-ERA anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafley conjured dark and (I thought) absurd visions of a future in which laws protecting women would be abandoned.
As one educational site sneeringly describes Schlafly’s points: “Those opposed to the ERA even suggested that single-sex restrooms would be banished by future courts!”
Modernity being what it is, there are no longer all that many places (or “spaces” as we are now supposed to say) in ordinary life where anatomy matters. Up until recently, however, bathrooms were among these, along with locker rooms at the gym.
And once a female athlete had changed into her gym clothes in the all-female locker room, Title IX meant she could have opportunities to compete at a level earlier generations could only dream of. The result has been a lot of fun and satisfaction for girls and women, and some pretty wonderful play for spectators to enjoy.
The same transgendered movement/fad that found me … um … attending to my personal hygiene needs in an “Any Gender” bathroom has brought chromosomally male athletes into direct competition with the chromosomally female.
“They’re women!” activists insist. “How dare you say otherwise!” But a 20-year-old who has spent two decades as a male does not magically become physiologically female by changing the costume, the name, or the pronouns. Even hormone treatment and surgery can’t change the fact that a transgendered soccer player, say, is going to have a significant advantage in size and strength over a soccer player who has been a girl all her life. There have already been instances in which female athletes have been defeated and even hurt in competition with stronger, heavier transgendered opponents.
Naturally (and I use the term deliberately) the same is not true of female-to-male athletes; even a lightweight mixed martial arts champ like Conor MacGregor isn’t going to get stomped by a fighter who grew up female in the way Tamikka Brents was defeated — and badly injured — by the transgendered Fallon Fox.
There are scholars now suggesting that having separate teams for males and females is simply sexism; all teams should be co-ed. The proponents of such schemes do not appear to be jocks. I suspect it’s an idea that sounds fine to academics who, at most, might occasionally play pick-up softball with other middle-aged desk-potatoes. But forcing Venus Williams to compete against male tennis players would mean, simply, that Williams would lose. And instead of watching (and marveling at) her superb play, we would all end up watching … men.
Perhaps the theorists and advocates genuinely don’t realize that the losers in this utopian scenario will be, inevitably, women. Yes, there may be a few top female athletes who make it onto their high school co-ed soccer team, but girls who aren’t superb but merely good (and enthusiastic) players will find their opportunities constrained and even the great female athletes will be stymied. Again.
Just the way they were back in the day, when if you wanted to compete at a high level in just about any sport, you pretty much had to be male. When it comes to the utopian visions of the social justice crowd, notice who ends up with the short end of the stick?
My husband might be disconcerted to find himself sharing a bathroom with a woman, but he wouldn’t feel threatened. Our daughter would feel threatened, for the very good reason that she might actually be threatened. But guess who is expected to take one for the team? The co-ed team, that is. The one she would not have been able to play for in the high school of progressives’ dreams because, although she was a good soccer player, she wasn’t as strong and fast as even the merely pretty-good boys.
Is it “unconscious sexism” that makes the advocates for social justice fail to notice that women are already being victimized by all the virtue being slopped about? I thought about this when reading of the recent sharp increase in sexual violence against women in Europe.
Though the governments of the affected countries did their level best to conceal the fact, the perpetrators of these crimes were overwhelmingly foreign-born men; members of the wave of migrants that has washed over the continent in the past couple of years. Contrary to popular impression, most of these migrants were not refugees or legitimate asylum seekers. The majority were economic migrants, mostly unattached young men. This may or may not make a difference in how you feel about whether the welcome Europeans extended has been a moral necessity or an act of continental suicide.
But what we might want to notice is that it is women and girls — along with LGBTQ and Jewish Europeans — who have been put at risk; women and girls who have been asked to sacrifice their own well-being in order to provide a refuge for men who might not even have been endangered.
Helpful authorities have offered women and girls paternalistic advice about, you know, dressing more modestly so as not to provoke the rapists. Why does that somehow sound familiar?
Young women might not know this, but anyone my age or older knows that it took a long time, and a lot of effort to gain the power and possibilities that American and European women now enjoy. Does it strike anyone else as odd and ominous that new calls for social justice seem to require compromising women’s basic safety without which it shall be difficult for us to enjoy the rights and responsibilities we fought so hard for?
Published in Culture
No.
It makes sense intuitively, though.
Adventurousness? Energy? Willingness to risk? Less at stake reproductively? Some property of testosterone?
Or just because, as a biologist friend of mine described it, a developing fetus is traveling on a superhighway towards femaleness, and getting to maleness requires taking an off-ramp.
By that, I do not mean that the xy chromosome isn’t destiny, only that if the kid misses the off-ramp, there are likely to be consequences.
Of course not. They sleep sometimes.
Seawriter
Let’s go back to gestation for a moment, and get all state-of-nature about it.
We’re driven to propagate our genes: as the saying goes, a hen is an egg’s way of making another egg. In women, the desire to reproduce has to be balanced with the practical reality of gestation and its demands. A woman can have at most a couple of dozen children, and her investment in each is enormous. Prudence requires that she make some effort to make each opportunity a good one, choosing mates who will contribute to the survival of her own genes in the child.
This isn’t necessarily a conscious or rational process. It’s how we’re wired.
We men have no such burden. We can, in theory, have thousands of offspring, none of whom cost us very much. So our standards can be… lower. We can afford to have lots of sub-optimal children, because the sheer number will make up for deficiencies in individual quality. So the drive for sex — for reproduction — need be much less throttled in men, less bounded by practical concerns.
Women have to say “no.” Men don’t.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if all aspects and expressions of sexuality are exaggerated in men, and particularly those that are related to stimulation and desire, such as cross-dressing and trans-sexual experimentation.
Not when the game is on, or we’re playing cards.
Good point. We can be distracted for one to three hours. (Except for when the cheerleaders come on of course.)
Ok. Because, ten or fifteen minutes might be closer to the truth.
This is an oldie but a goodie:
“Men, The Gender Wars Are Over – We Won!“
Honest answer? Probably not that often. It depends on the guy though. I’ve known some guys that always seem to be thinking about it and some who just don’t seem to give it much consideration at all (although they could just be better at concealing their thoughts). I think the real factor though is not how often we think about it but how easily we do. It doesn’t take much at all for our minds to go there. We’re visual creatures, and sometimes the slightest visual stimuli can trigger a passing thought.
Great answers, all!
I remember thinking (perhaps writing?) that if men really are thinking about, or at least easily-distracted-by sex so often, it makes their accomplishments even more impressive. I mean, there y’all are, working out the value of Pi, painting masterpieces, analyzing capitalism, composing a symphony or engineering a cable-arch bridge…while constantly being interrupted with thoughts of nookie.
Do they sort of fade into the background? Do you pull off the Buddhist meditation trick of recognizing the thought but letting it pass by without attachment?
I sound like I’m making fun, but in fact I’m interested in this. It seems like it should be a great advantage to be able to go for hours and hours, whole days…weeks? without a single voluptuary twinge. So why haven’t women been obviously better at thinking?
Kate, you’re hilarious. I never thought of it this way.
One word: multitasking. Embrace the power of “and.”
Seawriter
Ah! So it’s not that women are better at multitasking than men are (which is a “thing” I’ve heard, and I have no opinion on that), it’s that men are already multitasking.
I don’t know who’s actually more productive at multi-tasking. I think women are better at worrying about multiple things at once.
Truth be told, if I’m in the middle of a project, like today where I’m replacing a bunch of older computers at work, I’m not thinking about anything but that project.
It’s actually thoughts of nookie constantly being interrupted with working out the value of Pi, painting masterpieces, analyzing capitalism, composing a symphony or engineering a cable-arch bridge.
Kate, I believe this is one of those instantaces that we men should plead the 5th on the right to not self incriminate. Nor give away any secrets on our capacity to both send men to the moon and wonder if there will be any hot lunar babes when we get there.
Sublimation, dear.
If you’re using old-timey Greek speak, not physiology speak, men are horndogs “because” they’re full of eros and thumos. Sex (and for thumos, also fighting) is the natural biological outlet, but civilized, creative people develop other outlets.
Even math can resemble a very refined form of sex, if you’re a mathematician.
In other words, SkipSul’s mind is erotically immersed in that particular project ;-P
The average woman does seem to be “better at” multitasking – which in truth amounts to little more than being less frustrated when called upon to multitask. You cannot really immerse yourself in anything if you have to multitask, hint, hint…
Women aren’t better at multitasking, they’re just more amenable to being pressed into service as multitaskers. And once you let yourself get pressed into that service, of course you’re not gonna be better at thinking. Men’s “selfish refusal” to multitask, their interest in avoiding multitasking because they find it so… incredibly… frustrating… is exactly what’s necessary for deep thought and deep accomplishment.
And women who do choose deep thought or deep accomplishment over being “helpful” multitaskers often come across as selfish or self-absorbed, unfeminine. Male or female, those who accomplish great things while multitasking are a bit freakish. They apparently do exist (though I wonder how much of their “multitasking” might actually amount to cleverly arranging the rest of their lives around blocks of time where they’re able to unitask real hard).
Heh. So, Kate, your husband declined to answer this question for you?
Probably shouldn’t answer this one, either. (-:
Kate,
Well, in all honesty, Kate, it depends on the girl you are thinking about…..wait a minute… I deny I said that.. no, I deny ever commenting on Ricochet…no, I deny ever being born…whew!!
Kate, you are a troublemaker.
Regards,
Jim
How I talk to my computers:
“Listen, I like you. Like you. We are not now, nor will we ever be lovers. And if you go all psycho on me again, I have a soldering iron handy… No! Don’t smile like that. What, you like being teased that way? Phreak.”
They’ll go blind doing that, just sayin.
Ah. Yes. This is true. And possibly baked into the cake, because what else can you do when you have little kids around other than multitask?
When I was a new mother, and my state trooper husband was on the night shift, night time was when I got to write. I’d nurse the baby around 9:00, drinking a cup of coffee at the same time. The baby would sleep for six hours or so, and I would stay up until the 3 a.m. feeding or whenever my husband got home (whichever came first). Looking back, this seems crazy, but I wrote a whole book that way.
My friends used to tell me they did housework after the baby went down for the night. I didn’t. Housework was for multi-task time, meaning if I couldn’t do it during the day, half-asleep with one hand while the baby sat on my hip, it would not get done.
That is impressive. And you did it by carving out unitasking time, being willing (and apparently able) to withstand a great deal of sleep-deprivation in order to do it. Which sounds about right.
I just came in here to Kate’s post to say, this is my 2,000th Comment.
I will use it to point out that one of my earliest Posts on Ricochet was my story about why I still boycott Target. They started this BS on a national level, along with the NCAA, because North Carolina tried to do something logical.
Kate, I disagree that this had anything to do with radical Feminism. This was all about the radical homosexual lobby trying to force their views on the world and force acceptance of it.
I have never known a woman who wanted to share the women’s bathroom with men, have you? I definitely do not want women in mine, but grudgingly make exceptions at crowded rock concerts and sporting events. Ladies need to take their son in the girl’s bathroom with them? Fine. Dads have to take their daughter in the boy’s room? Fine, after clearing out the room. Grown men using the girl’s room? It’s punch in the face time.
The people running the Maine College Of Art need to be 100% boycotted for forcing you to accept men in your bathroom.
Women are going to always get the bad end of this deal until they start standing up for what is right. No men in the girl’s room. Ever.
I’m honored to have received the 2,000th comment, JcTP!
Is this ultimately, simply leftism doing what it does? That is, it could be an actual conspiracy to Make America Unpleasant Again, or just a variant of the old dance, the reflexive cha-cha between righteous grievance and guilty acquiescence starting up wherever there is a dance floor open?