Monday, September 19, 2016

Hillary's Primaries

"Suddenly there was war and the mothers, they screamed
For revenge and reprisals, for another war"

Wumpscut - War


As Bill Maher and others like to point out, media darling Donald Trump has gotten away with spouting insults and slurs no other politician would have dared voice openly in previous decades. Everybody loves a foul-mouthed motley fool. Then again, it's the derogation which doesn't attract attention which reveals more about a society's biases, its implicit moralistic assumptions. Case in point: feminism. So here's a golden oldie from Hillary Clinton, delivered at a feminist pep rally back in 1998.


"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat."

Boy howdy, that sure sounds "primary" don't it? Oh, I'm so sorry if my being torn limb from limb playing meat shield for you might inconvenience you in some way... For anyone curious as to the endlessly verified truism that men are overwhelmingly victimized by war, you can simply take a look at casualty statistics or pretty much any country's demographics after a war. Here, try Russia's demographics, specifically the seventy-plus WWII section. War, like every other blood sport in history, has boasted a much larger share of female fans than female performers. It takes two to tango, but only one to get pushed down the stairs.

Look, for my purpose in this post, I don't particularly care whether or not Hillary Clinton is actually a feminist. As far as I can tell, Hillary's a Hillarist and nothing else, and banking on the feminist voting block simply profits her. If her various puppeteers told her biting the head off a live bat would get her ass onto the big fancy chair any faster, she'd hop the Crazy Train in a second. No, the real issue here is that nobody takes issue with a politician declaring the lives of half the world's population irrelevant on the basis of their sex.

Imagine the thundering, world-spanning outrage if Bill Clinton, good old slick Willy, had said something like "men have always been the primary victims of breast cancer; men lose their wives, their mothers, their daughters" etc. How quickly would his career have been over? Now instead of the outrage we might all expect at such psychopathic disdain for human lives, at classing one gender as disposable servants to the other, imagine that he'd get applauded for it, lionized and immortalized as a progressive humanistic visionary for such rhetoric. That's the world we live in.

The problem is much deeper than modern feminism. Our very biology has imposed on us for millions of years a higher value for the life of child-bearing females, and though we as a species are long past the need to boost reproductive rates (quite the opposite now) we still carry that instinctive bias. We, both male and female, favor women's safety and dismiss that of men.

Yet we should, by all truly progressive standards, be moving toward a society not of biological units of genetic propagation, but of free sentient individuals with equal opportunities for life and all the other stuff you can't really get if you're dead. We should be moving toward a society in which a politician who dismisses half the population's very right to exist so casually, so serenely, so off-handedly, should be drummed off the stage and preferably into a padded room. We cringe and rage (and rightly so) at stories of societies where women's lives only matter in terms of their service to men. Yet we ignore the much more pervasive truism throughout the world that men are expected to live their lives chained to the needs and whims of their reproductive unit, to prove their worth to women in order to be permitted to mate with women as their life's goal, to provide for women, to protect women, to absorb all dangers and adversities they can in place of women.

That we skim past statements like Clinton's without so much as a second glance proves only how brainwashed we are, and how susceptible by instinct to the malignant diatribes of female chauvinism.

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