Call the white house comment line today, August 9th, on the 50th
anniversary of bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to protest any nuclear
testing and to say you support the comprehensive test ban treaty and join
forces with many others doing the same.
202-456-1111 (speak to an operator)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Margaret R. Saraco
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Aug 10 13:21:16 1995
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Date: Wed, 09 Aug 1995 03:42:08 -0500 (EST)
From: "Al Rushanan TAL (904)487-1855" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: birth control
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Posting-date: Wed, 09 Aug 1995 04:43:00 -0500 (EST)
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Mary M.:
Women are not chattel. Precisely. And one of the points
Riane Eisler makes is that male domination of women, the "barefoot
and pregnant" culture, is greatest among less educated and less
developed societies. And this oppression extends to children. Who
does most of the work in large families in less developed
societies? It ain't the men! Wake up, Mary. Cultural pressure
for large families stems from the patriarchal system. The men are
suckering you again.
Such cultural pressure will continue even if developed countries
reduce their per capita consumption to undeveloped levels. The
human misery would continue. And so would environmental
destruction, albeit at a slower pace. (Fishery depletion,
desertification, etc.) Capped by an economic depression.
Al
Another excerpt from Eisler's "Sacred Pleasure": (pp. 213, 214)
"Sexual and Political Repression
"Clearly involuntary servitude is slavery, whether the services
are sexual or not. But the erotization of domination has
conditioned us to accept the sexual enslavement of women by men as
not only normal but exciting. And it has also obscured the fact
that the sexual enslavement of women has historically and
cross-culturally gone hand in hand with the political and economic
enslavement of BOTH men and women.
"To illustrate, in some fundamentalist Muslim theocracies, where
the most repressive provisions of the Shari'a (Muslim 'divine law')
are still (or again) in force, to this day women are effectively
imprisoned by men who are legally allowed to severely restrict
women's freedom of movement. This was vividly brought out during
the Gulf War when a handful of courageous Saudi Arabian women
defied the prohibition against their even driving cars -- for which
they and their families were later to pay dearly. And not
coincidentally, such rigidly male-dominated societies are also
places where absolute monarchs and/or coercive priestly hierarchies
rule both men and women with an iron hand.
"Similarly, the brutal genital mutilations designed to make sure
women do not sexually 'stray' are characteristically found in parts
of Africa, Asia, and the Near East where dictatorial governments
rule their people through fear and force. In the same way, the
enforcement of women's sexual slavery through 'honor killings'
(found in parts of Latin America as well as Asia and the Middle
East) is also characteristic of places where repressive regimes see
nothing wrong with using physical violence to deprive both women
and men of political freedom.
"This too is not coincidental. Men who think it honorable to
kill their own wives, daughters, sisters, or even mothers for being
too sexually free have learned that freedom is at best a selective
matter, one that 'inferior,' 'weak,' or 'dangerous' people (in
their eyes, people like women) are not entitled to enjoy. In fact,
how male contempt for women transfers into contempt for
'effeminate' enemies was dramatically illustrated during the Gulf
War, when after the Iraqis were defeated, Kuwaiti men expressed
contempt for Saddam Hussein by putting lipstick on (and thus
feminizing) an Iraqi poster of him.
"The denial to women of free access to contraception and abortion
-- still another form of sexual slavery -- has also historically
and cross-culturally characterized politically repressive regimes.
This too is not coincidental. For men conditioned to see nothing
wrong with depriving their 'loved ones' -- their own wives,
daughters, sisters, or mothers -- of freedom of choice even to the
extent of forcing them against their will to get pregnant, or once
pregnant against their will to give birth to an unwanted child, can
far more easily be conditioned to accept the curtailment of other
freedoms, such as freedom of speech and assembly. Thus, both
Hitler's and Stalin's renewed emphasis on criminalizing abortion
when they gained power was not only a matter of wanting larger
populations (and thus more men for gun fodder) but of dominator
systems dynamics. We see the same dynamics even today in the
United States, in the fact that those who would return us to the
'good old days' of authoritarian control by religious hierarchies
(as well as to 'holy wars') have been waging a no-holds-barred
campaign to once again deprive women of abortion and reproductive
freedom of choice."
