Posts tagged society
Ladies, please: less greedy, more breedy
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In the news today we are treated to the kindly ‘advice’ of one well-meaning (male) OB, in which he encourages women to become “better at resolving the conflict” between career and family and have their children when they are biologically meant to, between age 20 and 35. Instead of picking apart everything that’s wrong with this advice, let’s turn it around and say what should have been printed but was (as always) completely ignored. [Note: The article's text has been partially copied and pasted with wording changed for satire. Italics indicate text I have added. Copyright of the original article remains with the author].
“The message that ages 20 to 35 are the best for a woman to have a child should be taught to all genders in schools and governments alongside education about the realities of and societal need to support teenage pregnancies and contraception parenthood, the leader of the UK’s maternity doctors has said.
Dr Tony Falconer, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), warned against the pronounced trend towards older motherhood discouraging women from having children in their most fertile years by making it difficult for them to be mothers and work/go to school and said women and couples politicians and business leaders have to become “better at resolving the conflict” between their careers profits and family plans decency as human beings.
“It’s never our responsibility business[as doctors men] to tell people women when they should have their family, because there are all sorts of patriarchal constraints and societal pressures,” he told the Guardian in his first major interview since taking up the post in October.
But he added: “There’s no doubt that between 20 and 35 is the time to have your children. We are building up a difficulty for ourselves as a society by people’s expectations capitalism’s sexist limitations that they women will would be prudent to wait until they are older. That’s a very complex issue (and one few men in power care about), but it is a problem.”
His views on what he sees as the increasing problem of women waiting to have children society forcing women to choose between or compromise on matters of family and career could cause controversy.
But Falconer said there is strong evidence that women who leave starting a family until they are 35 industries that refuse to place any value on or make provisions for employees simultaneously undertaking pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and parenting will have reduced fertility credibility and so find it harder to conceive hire and keep employees, even more so once they hit 40 men are required to more fully participate in childrearing.”
Now that, my friends, would actually be a radical concept in a progressive newspaper. Telling us we should have our babies earlier isn’t news, it’s recycled sexism with a big dollop of duh.
Provocation and a culture of violence
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Peter Harvey, a 49-year-old science teacher in England, was acquitted yesterday of attempted murder charges for the attack he launched on a 14-year-old boy who had “provoked” him in the classroom and who was “badly behaved.” Mr. Harvey dragged the student down to the ground by the neck and struck him on the head twice with a dumbbell, fracturing the boy’s skull, while shouting, “Die, die, die!” According to the article:
After the verdicts, Judge Michael Stokes QC, who had earlier questioned the decision to prosecute the teacher, said “common sense has prevailed” [emphasis mine]. He said Mr Harvey would not be imprisoned or face a suspended jail term when he returns for sentencing on 21 May.
The teacher never denied assaulting the boy and his case hinged on the argument that, already mentally ill, he was driven to breaking point by an unruly class of badly behaved pupils at All Saints’ Roman Catholic School in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, last July.
Mr Harvey, who admitted causing grievous bodily harm without intent, told police he felt as if he was watching himself on television as he beat his 14-year-old victim twice about the head. The teenager suffered a fractured skull and spent five days in hospital but has since recovered.
Now, I do have some sympathy for Mr. Harvey in that he was obviously struggling emotionally and mentally and was seeking help for this but, nonetheless, his violent outburst cannot be justified and should not be excused. I have to wonder if even just one variable were changed if the outcome of his case would have been different. What if, for example, the child had been a girl? What if instead of a teacher, it was the child’s mother who attacked him because she ‘snapped’? What if the teacher had done this to his wife, not a student? Somehow, I think the sympathy would have been much less in any of these situations.
The message being broadcast is that male-on-male violence is acceptable, even inevitable. Young boys are learning that negative or undesirable behaviour can be punished with aggressive retaliation. They are learning that some of the adults closest to them, responsible for their very safety and well-being, can physically assault them — be it through spanking, smacking or beatings — and that size and strength are proponents of power over those of lesser size and influence. They are learning that we do not always protect the vulnerable and, instead, protect the ‘common sense’ approach to violence which is, ‘If they deserved it, it’s okay.’ They are learning that using their bodies to resolve situations in which they are angered is an appropriate response and that so long as they felt that the person in question had deliberately incited them, all will be forgiven, or at least understood.
Shifting blame from the attacker onto the victim is something that feminists are already familiar with, in our campaigns against domestic violence and sexual assault. Advocates have worked tirelessly to spread the message that ‘provocation’ as a justification for violence is never acceptable, especially when dealing with someone smaller and/or more vulnerable than oneself. It is not acceptable to strike your partner across the face, no matter how spiteful or offensive her words. It is not acceptable to beat your child unconscious, no matter how stressed you were or how badly he was behaving. It is not acceptable to rape a woman because she ‘provoked’ you with her short skirt and flirtatious smiles.
Let’s stop blaming the victims and address the real problem — a culture that tells children not to hit but then models violent behaviour, essentially handing them a big Stick of Justification with which to attack anyone who ‘provokes’ them later in life.