Unending war and the ongoing violence against women are not two separate phenomena. They are both part of our patriarchal culture. This article explains how and why.

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Anonymes 14 - Destruction du quartier autour du fort de HAM (France) - Prise de Ham, 19/03/1917 - plaque de verre stereo positive by Vasnic64
 

On March 7, 2013, President Obama signed into law the Violence Against Women Act. Originally passed in 1994, this legislation was amended to add protections and services for Gays and Lesbians, as well as for Native American and immigrant women.

How can it be that we live in a society that is either unable or unwilling to provide security from assaults of all kinds to more than half its population?

Thanks to the Women's Liberation Movement that got underway more than forty years ago, the issue of protecting women against violent men became a national concern. The 1969 Redstockings Manifesto explained women's circumstances in the starkest of terms. In the excerpts that follow, it also offered a context for understanding why violence against women has proven to be so difficult to alleviate:

I. "After centuries of individual and preliminary political struggle, women are uniting to achieve their final liberation from male supremacy. Redstockings is dedicated to building this unity and winning our freedom."

II. "Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men's lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.

"Because we live so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition. This creates the illusion that a woman's relationship with her man is a matter of interplay between two unique personalities, and can be worked out individually. In reality, every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively."

III. "We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented. Men have controlled all political, economic and cultural institutions and backed up this control with physical force. They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women." [1]

Today, Patriarchy is Coming Back.

The system described above is called patriarchy. Over the last thirty years, there have been significant setbacks to this system, especially in the West, but it remains powerful in the U.S. and throughout the world.  

Now there is a backlash by patriarchal forces in the United States. Since it serves their interests, they are moving to insure that women, especially married women, are once again completely subject to the legal and physical domination of men.

Central to women's struggle to control their lives is the right to decide under what circumstances they will continue a pregnancy and to have access to a safe and legal means to terminate it if they choose to do so. Forcing women to continue unwanted pregnancies is another form of violence against women.

In 1994, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortions, commented that the decision had been necessary "for the full emancipation of women." [2]

But state after state is whittling away at the conditions under which women may exercise their legal right to choose an abortion. That right is also continuously undermined by religious zealots who congregate outside clinics and call clients names and curse them, by the burning and bombing of clinics, and by the murders of doctors who perform abortions.

A significant reason why there is so much resistance to change is that patriarchs at the top of the social order need more from the males they dominate than simply keeping women in their place. In order to achieve their goals of increased wealth and power, top patriarchs need men to be warriors. To achieve that end, they socialize males from an early age to be violent, to be willing to fight, torture, and kill.

In fact, women in the military have come face to face with the success of this socialization. A larger percentage of them are subject to sexual assaults than are women in civilian life: one in three as compared to one in six. And they meet with the same reluctance on the part of the military command to punish rapists as women have experienced with civil authorities.

Violence Against Women Is Tied to the Need To Make Men Violent.

It is in the military, then, that violence against women and the violence that is necessary to fight a war are revealed to be part of the same system.

The ideal patriarchal male has characteristics that are in direct opposition to building solid relationships with their families. Women and children need compassionate, emotionally healthy, socially oriented men who can abstain from violent behavior and recognize war as the sociopathic behavior that it is. The patriarchy's goal is to cripple the emotional side of men that would endorse the establishment of a humanitarian global outlook.

The negative values of our warrior culture are seen all around us--in the obsession with guns, in overly aggressive play in team sports, in the film industry's gratuitous mayhem and victimizing of women, in violent video games, in the thrill of speeding cars, in attitudes that tell young males that dominating women and treating them as sex objects are part of being a "real man."

When patriarchs declare wars, this socialization leads men into literal violence--into the odious, face-to-face work of bludgeoning other people into submission. Experiencing the hell that is war means coming home physically and/or psychologically broken. It means expending throughout a lifetime an enormous amount of psychic energy in trying to forget war crimes. Meanwhile, the country's elite revels in victory and thanks the young for their "service."

New Efforts To Stop Male Violence Against Women.

A message to stop male violence toward women was heard on March 8^th of this year, on the occasion of International Women's Day. Two-hundred men gathered at the Diplomat Ballroom in the United Nations hotel in New York to launch "Ring The Bell." This global campaign seeks to enlist one million men--one million!--to agree to take some kind of concrete action within the next year to end violence against women.

Hosting the event was Sir Patrick Stewart, the British-born actor, who pointed out, "Every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States." He added, "Violence against women is the single greatest human rights violation of our generation."

Having gotten a similar initiative underway in January, Dallas Mayor Michael Rawlings urged that a man who commits an act of violence toward a woman should be "shamed. You can call a man who hits a woman many things, but you can't call him a man." [3]

As we move toward still another war, can we hope to mobilize not just one million men, but millions of men, in a campaign to persuade our young males to boycott war or, if they are already in the military, to refuse to fight? Since these wars are wars of choice, and therefore illegal, young men have not only a right to refuse to fight but a moral obligation to do so. There are many men who have rejected the patriarchy's ideal, but unless they speak up publicly they are supporting the system by their silence.  

It isn't only women that the patriarchy has in its grip. Men need to be emancipated, too.

Notes:

[1] http://www.redstockings.org/

[2] http://www.fwhc.org/abortion/blackmun.htm

[3] click here

Authors Bio:

Now retired and a writer, I am a feminist and political activist, a radical Democrat (have come to dislike the term "progressive"), and a blogger. Have done political tours of Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, West and East (way back when)Germany, China, etc. Learned a lot about the US through other people's eyes. Wrote about my life in "Discovering America: A Political Journey." And was one of six winners of an international essay contest sponsored by Cuban ministeries.