So, my thoughts have moved on from my recent post about women's rights.
This is not a pleasant post to write. But this is what I have in my head right now. It will no doubt come out in a jumble, because my brain is jumping from thought to thought at lightening speed. This is not a happy post so I understand if you do not read further. That is as close to a trigger warning as you will get from me.
So what am I talking about today? My fear. That women may lose our rights, we just cannot see it yet.
In order to look at where we are now, it is important to look back at where we were.
It is 98 years since all women were given the vote (some women were given that right in 1918 at the same time as men). It is 56 years since the Equal Pay Act was introduced (but was enacted 5 years later). It is 51 years since the Sex Discrimination Act. It is 35 years since rape in marriage was recognised as a crime. (All UK)
Only one of these is in living memory for me. Aside from the vote, all are in living memory for my mother.
In the space of 100 years we have gained the vote, the right to equal pay, the right not to be discriminated against because of our sex or marital status. We have gained the right to have credit in our own name with needing a male co-signer. We are able to report sexual violence by our husbands to the police and it be recognised as a crime.
It is shocking to be honest that it took until 1991 for the last one to happen. Before that, it was deemed that a woman gives irrevocable consent to her husband when she marries him.
Could modern day women even comprehend that the women who came before us could vote, work, have a mortgage and hold our own money, yet access to our bodies by our husbands was permissible until one Judge said different. Because it was one case that changed the law, not an act of parliament.
Therein lies one of the problems women are facing. Unless you are Gen X or older and live in a first world country, you do not truly know what it was like to be treated and deemed as secondary to a man in terms of our worth. Treated almost like a child who needed supervision. Whose bodies belonged to our husbands.
Women today are more independent than we have ever before. We have money, we have equality, we have choices. We can choose to marry if we want, or not. We can choose to have children, or no. We are free.
Or are we?
Because what I have come to understand more and more over the past few years is freedom is an illusion. Because we are not free. You cannot be free if that freedom can be taken away. And it can. And possibly, it will be.
We have already had the precursor. Abortion rights in the US.
I am not starting an abortion debate here. It matters not whether you are pro life or pro choice. My point does not focus on that.
It is the way that the law is being implemented that is the truly terrifying part. Because abortion bans could be just that. An abortion ban, either limited to a number of weeks or none at all. But they have gone beyond that.
There are some women have been prosecuted for having a miscarriage despite evidence that this was the case. Women have died because the fetus inside them was worth more than saving her life. Women have been forced to carry a dead baby to term. Women have been forced to carry a baby that will not live outside of the womb. A brain dead woman in a coma was kept alive until a time when her baby could be retrieved by caesarean.
That isn't about healthcare or the rights of a fetus. Can you even imagine the horror of carrying your baby, knowing that it's survival is impossible, for months, until you deliver and that baby that you wanted so much, is dead.
That is torture.
You also have to look how the actions of some women are blamed on all women.
For example, the girls who have made their career on Onlyfans. I don't agree with it or their actions, and I wonder where their actual self worth and self respect have gone. But the rhetoric is that because some women/girls do this, it is apparently proof that all women are clearly whores when left to their own devices.
I now touch on the Clancy trial, which is a mess from beginning to end. All of it and from every side. I do not agree with the women protesting at the Court house and I think some of the women who have posted about it on TikTok have lost their goddamn minds. But I understand that that is their opinion (and their right to have it and say it). But again, the actions of some women are being judged against all women.
Calls to remove our right to vote. Worry about women being in any kind of important position. How can you be a doctor, a teacher, a solicitor, anyone in charges if our hormones can one day make us go psychotic. This is simplistic, of course. Psychosis affects only 0.1% of mothers and the majority of those get the help they need and they recover.
But we are not judged the same way that men are. And we never will be.
Men commit the majority of violent crimes. They commit around 90-95% of all whole family murders (US stats). What I am afraid to to say is, that it does not matter.
The double standard of not all men, but apparently, yes, all women.
A man commits an atrocity and the response is “Not all men.” Worse, what did she do to provoke him, what was he going through etc etc
A woman commits an atrocity and suddenly there are questions about women's judgement, women's hormones, women's suitability for responsibility, women's emotional stability, women's ability to hold office, women's ability to make decisions.
I mention in the title to this post about there being two elephants in the room. I will touch on the second later.
The first is that, I hate to type this, I hate to think this, but the men who say "take rights from women because ......." are not saying it for mere effect. They understand that it can happen. May happen. Yes, may happen. Because rights that are given, can be taken. And that it what we have forgotten.
We didn't take out rights by force. We fought for them, yes, absolutely. But ultimately, we were still given them. It isn't even just ordinary men (and some women) who are saying that our rights should be taken away. It is some of the people who run the country (US).
Think about it.
Again I look at abortion rights in the US and the examples I give above. Women can vote, have our own money, run our own lives, hold power, run for office, rule the country. Yet in a country where women can have it all and many do, the rights to their bodies were taken.
In an increasing amount of cases, that were nothing to do with the rights of a fetus. And there was nothing that women could do about it.
I hate to agree with what some men say on the matter, because the fact is, we have forgotten that men are stronger physically than women and that is important. We cannot physically defend ourselves and if men chose to subjugate us again, there is nothing we can actually do about it. See above as the clearest example.
Physical strength does not enact laws of course. Power does. And that is why the physical strength comes into it. Because if laws change, we cannot physically fight back as a man can. Our voices will matter none.
Margaret Atwood knew it. Deep down, so do we.
We live on a tightrope that we have forgotten we live on. We have become complacent. And that is a massive fucking problem.
I know what I don't want to do, and never will. I will never look at another woman's actions, thoughts and beliefs and think that that it applies to all women. I believe that each person is responsible only for their own actions.
But what I am beginning to realise, way, way too fucking late, is that this will be our downfall.
Because we do not live in the same world as men.
We have spent decades presuming that every generation of women would have more freedom than the one before it. Perhaps that is the most dangerous assumption of all. Because history doesn't work that way.
Rights aren't a staircase that only goes upwards. They are laws. And laws can be changed.
We do not have our rights because the world finally decided that women deserved them. Women fought, protested, campaigned and sometimes sacrificed themselves for them. Some suffragettes were tortured in prison for it.
Perhaps the thing we have forgotten is not how far we've come. Perhaps it is that we can go backwards.
And we can go backwards. The rights of women will be judged as a failed social experiment.
What do we do with/about what I have said above? I have no clue. That is again is the problem. We are way past the starting gate. We just didn't realise, or we forgot, about the rope that tethered us to the starting gate. That can be pulled back.
We were so concerned about freedom and our rights, that we forgot that we needed to protect them and keep them safe. We shouldn't have to. But the sad fact is that we do. And we may have to fight, all over again.
Women as a whole are not prepared for what may happen. And that is fucking terrifying and makes me angry as hell. That women as a whole are judged on the views of a few. That is not equality. It is a game that was played as part of a whole.
On that point, we move on to the second elephant in the room. That goes way further down the rabbit hole.
The problem actually is not men versus women, women versus men. We have been pitted against each other. And never more so than today.
Because the puppet masters, the people who are actually in charge of this world want us to fight with each other.
They want the drama. They want the distractions. Which go far beyond men versus women, women versus men.
Because the people who are in power can only operate successfully if no one notices the man behind the curtain.
They pit us against ourselves and create new issues for us to fight about (look at the trans debate for example) in order to distract us from the laws they change, the plans they make and want to enact.
While we squabble, the whole world is changing around us and not for the better.
In short, we are all screwed.
Or, perhaps we're not.
Perhaps the first step is simply remembering that the tightrope is there and the majority of the planet are balancing on it. Unlike the circus. we do not have a safety net below us. But collectively, we can choose to get off that tightrope and face the puppet masters.
Stop fighting each other and face the real enemy in the room.
That ship has not yet sailed.
