Monday, June 02, 2014

Have I mentioned lately how much I love this guy?

Except for Krugman, Charles Blow is the coolest person in the NYTimes editorialist pool. I love this guy. His latest:
Yes, we should all be feminists, but too often we believe that the plight of the oppressed is solely the business of the oppressed, and that the society in which that oppression is born and grows and the role of the oppressors and beneficiaries are all somehow subordinate.


Wrong. 
Fighting female objectification and discrimination and violence against women isn’t simply the job of women; it must also be the pursuit of men.
The graphic above doesn't mention another ghastly statistic which Blow mentions later in the article:
More than 64 million girls worldwide are child brides; 46 percent of women ages 20 to 24 in South Asia and 41 percent in West and Central Africa report that they married before the age of 18.
The term "child bride" is so inadequate for what those girls are, and the term that should be used is "sex slave." Child brides don't get to pick who they have sex with - they are sold to a man, often a much-older man, or in some only slightly-less ghastly circumstances, sold to parents on behalf of a son who is close to the girl's own age.

And as you might expect from cultures that treat women and girls like livestock, they never ever get to tell the "husband" they don't feel like having sex with him. He gets to rape her, legally, any time he wishes, just as the masters of slaves in the antebellum South got to rape their slaves any time they wished.

And divorce is of course difficult or impossible to obtain in such women-as-beasts of burden cultures.

The only difference between a victim of sex trafficking and a child bride is that the child bride is forced to have sex with only one man. 

But make no mistake, they never get to choose when to have sex, and with whom they have sex. Other people make that decision for them.

And this is perfectly legal around the world. That's right, sex slavery is legal around the world and it isn't even called slavery because it's "only" women being enslaved by men - aided and abetted by the woman's own family. 

Think about that, if you're the kind of person who denies that we live in a world still dominated by men.