The Persistence of Misogyny

It has been fashionable for as long as I can remember for bitter males, along with a few reactionary female allies, to claim that the feminist movement not only succeeded in eliminating the traditional gender power structure, but inverted it too. Women, they complain, are now on top, occupying the positions of privilege formerly reserved for men, while the latter, thanks to affirmative action and male-bashing, are reduced to the status of persecuted victim.

Never mind the impressive blinders one must sport in order to ignore the systemic discrimination women still face, such as a persistent pay gap and chronic underrepresentation in both government and corporate hierarchies. It is not even particularly hard to find misogyny of the non-systemic, consciously promoted variety, as in this month’s horrific assassination attempt by the Taliban in Pakistan against fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai who dared to speak out for girls’ education, or, just this week in Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner opining that it is not “modest” and therefore forbidden for women to stand for election to the Knesset.

But these events are halfway around the world. What is happening closer to home?

Here in North America, the misogyny du jour usually finds itself not far removed from the issue of abortion. Thankfully in Canada, even with a Conservative majority, our Parliamentarians had enough sense to reject an underhanded attempt to ban abortion by redefining the point at which life begins.

In the United States, however, things are never so easy. Stephen Colbert was good enough to provide a montage of quotes from Republican politicians on the subjects of rape and abortion (click here to watch in Canada or here in the United States), which ranged from the insensitive (“even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape … it is something that God intended to happen”) to the ignorant (“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”) to the outrageously offensive (“some girls, they rape so easy”).

Then there was the case of Amanda Todd. Earlier this month, the fifteen-year-old committed suicide after sustaining years of bullying, cyberstalking, sexual harassment, and physical assault, which started when she was manipulated by a grown man into flashing her breasts on a webcam and blackmailed with the screen shot.

Todd’s death has rightly received a large amount of media coverage, but not always of a kind that puts her anguish in context. She was a victim of a porn-infused online culture that distorts the way people think about themselves and each other. In this world, men and boys feel entitled to sexual gratification, which women and girls are expected to supply without reservation.

Yes, boys are bullied too, and it is always a horrible occurrence no matter who is targeted or why. But what girls go through is pressure and torment of a qualitatively different nature. Sexist double standards are real. We must recognize them among the causal factors that killed Amanda Todd and others like her.

It is in this spirit of acknowledging the wrongs of misogyny that I end with a widely circulated video of a speech by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She may not be a perfect politician in every respect, but is it ever fun to watch her hold her head high while laying into the hypocrisy of her country’s Leader of the Opposition right to his face!