"Women have no rights..

[AlienGirl]

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like--like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."--Alice Sheldon (pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr.) in "The Women Men Don't See," 1972

The recent events in Iraq prove, again, how accurate Sheldon's understanding of human nature, and the nature of humans in large groups, was. Alice Sheldon was a world traveller and spy with a Ph.D in psychology. She Knew Things.

(Read the whole story here.)

Tucker

[tk2kewl]

1. Women's rights aren't essential to a democracy anyway

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4415996

:sarcasm:

[AlienGirl]

2. Yes, the US government is also

showing just how prescient Alice Sheldon was.

Tucker

[ironman202]

3. do you suppose if we let the neo-cons and the other extremists

design their perfect paradise in Iraq, the the American neo-cons will emmigrate? That way all the whack jobs would be in one place.

[Fovea]

4. The contrariwise

theme is that women will always have rights as long as they can
'refuse to strech my slippers toward the ceiling." as Aristophanes puts it.

The question is: how bad does it have to get before they go Lysistrata mode? I personally believe that women have other forms of intate power. Maybe not supernal power over men, but they have a power goddess given to them as agents of the creative force, figuratively, and literally.

While men may have greater strength on the main, that has not been the final argument between the sexes since the Orestia. And this is not simply a struggle in the bedroom-- Colonel Colt made women equal, and Empress Livia before that.

The question has always been one of will, and it often takes an extraordinary villianage to convert the natural nurturing of women to mother courage-- drive the Roman bastards out of England mode. This is, I think particularly true in cultures of long term stability.
In those cases, there is still a tendency for private justice, as in Van Gulik's "Chinese Nail Murder."

I therefore believe that while in warlike times, women may be at a disadvantage, they can fight back effectively, when they choose to.
Women who have been raised with victorian morality may be initially hamstrung, but are not entirely defeated by the argument of men's greater physical strength. That society will frequently punish them unequally is a given, but not a deterrent in all cases.