Tea and cakes and things I like

I don’t usually write serious type posts, I am, quite literally, more about the tea and cakes and knitting and the like.
A few things have disturbed me recently though, and I want to get my thoughts out. I’m not massively coherent at the moment. I don’t necessarily present good arguments. Mainly because some stuff I’m so incredulous of that I’m just incapable of it. Anyway, read, don’t read, I don’t mind. I just wanted it out of my head.

I’m beginning to feel that as a society we are regressing. Taking huge, huge steps backwards.

Suffragettes fought for women’s rights to vote. Combine this with the effect of the world wars on the number of men available for work and women started the journey towards equal rights. We’re a long way off equal rights, but we can vote. Huge chunks of the population, male and female, choose not to. Women can work. A lot of the time we may earn less than men, promotions may come more easily to men, and we may still be responsible for the same amount of work in the home as before, on top of our paid work, but we can work. Women being solely responsible for housework, childrearing and cooking is not necessarily the norm. Ms is now in common use, rather than Miss. Women don’t often change their surname if they marry. We were getting somewhere, slowly.

‘Ladette’ culture isn’t a new thing. I can’t really rant about that. I do want to though. There are plenty of people who argue that holding a feminist standpoint means supporting women’s rights to drink heavily, sleep around, visit strip clubs etc etc etc. People claim that women who take part in this are empowered, and those who find it distasteful are prudish and repressed. The young women I see out on the streets on a Saturday night, hammered out of their heavily painted faces, falling off their stiletto heals and flashing their thongs at passing groups of leering young males are not empowered. Teenage girls who go to discos wearing short skirts and no knickers are not empowered. Women who visit strip clubs, accompanying men, in order to fit in, not to appear prudish, not to seem like a spoil sport, are not empowered. They are lacking self-respect. I pity them. I find it incredibly sad that we are bringing up a whole generation of teenage girls, and boys, to believe that this is how to behave; that our worth as a person lies in how much we are prepared to degrade ourselves. I’m not prudish. I don’t believe in abstinence as an option for teenagers, I think that’s ridiculous. Young people are entitled to relationships. Healthy sexual ones at that. I think that women should be able to go out and have drinks with their mates; I’m hardly tee total myself. We don’t seem to be able to raise emotionally health teenagers. Ones who respect themselves and each other.

I was raging about the fact that South Dakota just banned abortion, even in cases of incest or rape. Then I remembered that I live in a country, a whole country, where abortions are illegal. Where I bite my tongue a whole lot around people I don’t know that well. Even people I do know well some of the time. I think the fact I’m angry is that South Dakota just took a big step back. Ireland hasn’t even taken the step there yet. My anger comes from fear. I’m scared that it’s the thin end of the wedge. That this is where we’re heading back to as a society: A time where a woman’s life and well being is put after a bunch of cells. And it’s not just that of the woman in question - how is a child supposed to deal with the fact that they were created from a violent, not loving act? The fact that there’s even a need to have a second point though disturbs me. A woman’s right to choice should need no explanation or justification.

Ultra-conservative right wing America’s belief in creationism/ intelligent design has been well ranted against, and I don’t think it’s even worth me wasting my breath. If Richard Dawkins can’t get people to see sense I don’t stand a chance. America having a dangerously religious president is scary enough, but again, Bush has been well ranted about, by others more eloquent than me. I’ve always kind of figured that although he is arguably one of the most powerful men in the world, and he is undoubtedly doing a huge amount to set back the cause of women across the world (as if various organised religions weren’t doing enough), this crap wouldn’t hit my safe little tea and cakes part of the world. But it has. Schools in the UK are teaching creationism alongside evolution. WTF? In England? Blair feels that he doesn’t have to answer to any of the people he is Prime Minister to about Iraq (and presumably anything else), because instead, he’ll be judged by God. Yeah, that’s how politics should work.

This increase in extreme religious views and regression of women’s rights really, really scares me. It’s not a world I want to live in, and I don’t know what I can do about it. I feel powerless.