This year on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2012, we find a growing World War against Women.
Some expected the next world war to be between nations, but it is clear that the current world war is by misogynists, extremists, groups, and men with a common cause: to oppress, degrade, dehumanize, and kill women. Such a coordinated attack by such an axis forces of misogyny is nothing less than a World War against Women.
In every part of the world, women are struggling for their universal human rights of dignity, equality, liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience. Women are struggling against human trafficking and slavery. Women are struggling against misogyny, violence, rape, and murder. We see women attacked by acid, women raped for seeking freedom, women sexually abused due to poverty, women raped and killed as a military tactic by sadists, women oppressed and abused, women denied education and opportunities, and women treated with disrespect and gutter language around the world – including by extremists in various areas within the United States of America.
Recognizing the World War Against Women
The World War continues on a daily basis against women. In too many parts of the world, women continue to resist those who claim they deserve death in so-called “honor killings” or by stoning. This is not merely a series of “isolated incidents” in different parts of the world, different nations, and different cultures. We must recognize this for the world war against women that it is.
— In Africa, we have seen women the target of genocide in Sudan, rape in the Congo, stonings in Somalia, religious-rationalized violence in Nigeria, and violence and oppression in many countries.
— In Egypt, even after the loss of the dictator Mubarak in Egypt, we have seen our sisters in humanity raped, beaten, attacked and denied rights.
— In Communist China and North Korea, the government forces there have long oppressed women’s rights to have children, their lives, and their freedom, with women of conscience forced to deny their faiths, and women imprisoned, beaten, and worse in concentration camps that harken to the Nazi era.
— In the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, we have seen minority women the target of abuse, murder, rape, harassment, killings, prison, not just of those with minority religions, but also majority Muslim women targeted for oppression, beaten, and killed, simply because they ARE women.
— In Iran, we have seen women targeted by bully forces that seek to deny their freedom of speech, their right to protest against political regimes, and we have seen the sentencing of women to public stoning.
— In Israel, we see young girls and women harassed by religious extremists who seek to deny them the very right to walk in public, to deny them the right to sit where they want on the bus, and who spit on little girls.
— In the United States, we see so-called “honor killings,” and we see a culture where rape and murder – even of little girls – is too widespread and common. We see sexual harassment and abuse, efforts by extremists to seek to deny freedoms to women, and we see too many who tolerate words of hate and disrespect towards women in private and in public – with America’s so-called leaders in every corner choosing to selectively turn their head when it is not convenient. In America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, we see those who still seek to deny women Constitutional equality and we see bullies degrading women without readily felt consequences.
— These parts of the world are not the only ones with such problems; they are merely examples of the world war against women.
Our Response to a Coalition of Misogyny Against Women
The misogynists against women use different rationale for this world war. Some argue male supremacist views, some claim cultural reasons, some claim religious reasons, and some claim political reasons. But across their different rationales, their different identity groups, and their different nationalities, they have a consistency and an informal coalition – united under the disease of HATE.
Our response to this war against women must NOT be to match the violence and hate of those axis forces aligned against women. We must not offer an upraised fist, but an outstretched hand in our strength of LOVE for one another as sisters and brothers in humanity.
A response to the war against women begins with accepting RESPONSIBILITY. It requires a commitment to recognize that this is not just “someone else’s problem,” but it is our shared struggle. This war will not only attack someone else. Ultimately this global struggle will reach us personally – and it will reach our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our mothers, our friends, and our neighbors. This is no place to hide from or ignore this war against women. Unstopped, it will find its way to each of our front doors.
Our shared responsibility also must realize that we have different gifts, different skills, and different opportunities to end the war and free all of our sisters. We must take whatever personal action we can, appropriate to who we are and what we can do. Some will write. Some will petition. Some will speak. Some will march. Some will ensure existing laws are enforced. Some will create new laws. Some will simply provide comfort and courage to our sisters under attack. Whatever we can do, we must do. A war against women is a war against humanity itself, and we cannot afford to lose.
We must methods that reject hate and violence to seek change. We must demand that existing laws to protect women are enforced. Where laws don’t yet exist, we must build such new laws and new relationships to build love, dignity, respect, and equal rights for our sisters around the world.
We must convince the misogynists of this generation of the errors of their ways, and we must set an example for all of our children – boys and girls – to show them that misogynist views are consistently wrong and unacceptable – no matter who they are directed at. No exceptions.
Where misogynists are united in hate, so we must be united in love. Where they destroy, so we must build. We must build relationships based on mutual respect, dignity, and commitment to our shared universal human rights. But the burning flame of hate requires that act swiftly and with conviction. To reverse the destructive power of misogyny, for every relationship the powers of hate seek to destroy, we must build two new relationships. The relationships we build must be based on our shared universal human rights and our shared love for one another as sisters and brothers in humanity.
We Will Win Individually and Together as One Human Race
This brutal war against women is not simply a series of statistics and news stories. This is personal. The faces and the pain. The tears and the sorrow. In this world war against women, it is essential to remember in the vast statistics of global abuse that these women on the front line in the attack by misogynists are our fellow human beings. We know them. They are people we love and care about. They are family. They are neighbors. They may even be our children.
We will win this war by reaching to defend women around the world – INDIVIDUALLY one woman, one girl, at a time. We must try to change one life, then another, then another. Our efforts to support grand schemes and great ideas are meaningless – if we don’t put them in action for individuals.
But we will also win TOGETHER. While we make change one life at a time, we must not neglect the opportunity to also create new laws, change ways of thinking, and stand in solidarity together against outrageous attacks against our sisters in humanity.
Never in the history of humanity has there been a greater threat, and never in such history has there been a greater opportunity to organize, to work together, and the pool our resources to effect change.
While the misogynists have created their unwitting coalitions of hate against women around the world, we must create conscious, deliberate coalitions of love to defend women around the world. We can find solidarity, strength, shared ideas, and great courage in such coalitions. Our numbers exist, but most of us are fragmented, isolated, and frustrated. Imagine what we could do for women if we ORGANIZED. While any coalition is always difficult with diverse groups having different priorities and issues, if we can agree that we must end the war against women – end the misogyny, end the violence, end the killing, and end the hate – we will be on the right path.
Our group, Responsible for Equality And Liberty (R.E.A.L.), will be working to help build a new coalition for human rights this summer, and we will be glad to work with any other coalition that is United for Women’s Rights and Dignity.
When we see the waves of hatred against women in America and around the world, it is often daunting; we can wonder if there ever a chance to really change things. But we must never forget that such change comes one person at a time, one imagination at a time, and one commitment to human rights and dignity at a time. We will turn the tide in the war against women. We must be responsible, consistent, and courageous.
A great American president once said: “In the long history of the world, a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it.”
Those of us united for women’s rights and dignity will accept such responsibility.
To those who have declared war on women – know this – every day that war will be coming to an end.
Our sisters will be free.
