Misogyny--As American As Apple Pie: Tallying Up The Bill Of (Women's Human) Rights (Violations)

I’m in one of my Andrea-Dworkin-I’m-A-Feminist-Not-The-Fun-Kind moods having already been called a feminazi twice this week by well-meaning folk who were just being witty on account of my relentless tendency to call out misogyny when I see it.  Also I’ve been having TMJ issues which I think are in part due to my jaw hanging perpetually open at the multiple insanities that we seem to be sinking in of late.  We run around trying to put out so many fires that we become disconnected, when the real problem is that all of these things are connected.  So let me string a few together for you:

1.  Despite what the men’s rights groups think, women are still the overwhelming  victims of intimate violence:

A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics released Monday said its victimization survey showed 652,000 incidents of overall violent crime inflicted by intimate partners in 2008.

More than 550,000 violent incidents targeted women; 101,050 targeted men.

Most of the incidents were classified as simple assaults, but there were 111,530 cases of aggravated assault, 44,000 rapes and sexual assaults and 38,820 robberies.

The number of homicides by intimate partners rose slightly in the past two years, while the cases of nonfatal intimate partner violence continued to decline, the Justice Department report.

2.  While women are welcome to join in the fight against ‘terrorism’, in doing so they face the risk of being terrorized by American men and corporations with the  blessings of not only the Republican Party, 30 members of which voted against the Franken Amendment,

but also the Department of Defense which offered this objection to said amendment (warning–you will need your Berlitz bureaucrat-speak book to understand the following policy statement):

“The Department of Defense, the prime contractor, and higher tier subcontractors may not be in a position to know about such things. Enforcement would be problematic, especially in cases where privity of contract does not exist between parties within the supply chain that supports a contract,” reads the DoD note. “It may be more effective to seek a statutory prohibition of all such arrangements in any business transaction entered into within the jurisdiction of the United States, if these arrangements are deemed to pose an unacceptable method of recourse.”

If??  There is a question of whether binding arbitration is an acceptable method of recourse for addressing the gross violation of a woman’s human rights?  No, really there isn’t and the notion that we have to spend even one second making this determination is repugnant.

3.  As the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) says so eloquently, the health insurance industry’s ideal female customer would believe that:

I don’t deserve health care that meets my needs.
I shouldn’t demand fairness in my health care coverage.
I can’t do anything about it anyway.

A reasonable assessment considering that being the victim of domestic  violence, having delivered a child via c-section are grounds for denial of coverage. One insurance company even told a perspective customer that she would have to be sterilized before they would cover her, telling her that:

In a new report entitled, Still Nowhere to Turn:  Insurance Companies Treat Women Like A Pre-Existing Condition,

NWLC also found significant variations in the premiums charged to women and men at ages 40 and 55, within ranges similar to those observed in 2008. At 40 years old, women are charged from 4% to 49% more than men for identical coverage, but at age 55, women’s premiums range from 11% less to 14%  more than men’s premiums.

Maternity coverage continues to be largely unavailable in the individual health insurance market, with virtually no improvement in access to this essential health coverage from 2008 to 2009. NWLC examined over 3,600 individual health insurance policies offered to 30-year-old women living in capital cities across the country for 2009, and found that only 468 of those plans—or 13%—include any coverage for maternity care.

NWLC found that even when compared to male smokers, most individual health plans still charge a non-smoking woman more for coverage.15 In the capital cities of states that permit gender rating, 61% of best-selling plans charge a 40-year-old non-smoking woman a higher rate than they charge a 40-year-old male who reports recent tobacco usage. Among those plans that charge female non-smokers more, the difference in premiums varies widely.

Across the country, 40-year-old women who do not smoke are charged between 1% more (in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) and 63% more (in Little Rock, Arkansas) than men of the same age who smoke.

A woman can be charged 49% more than a man?  A non-smoking woman can be charged 63% more than a man who smokes? In what parallel universe does that qualify as being an acceptable national  health care policy?

So forgive me if I’m not all frilly pink demureness here, but the blatant, systemic and all too often lethal denial of women’s human rights in this country (and these are just 3 examples and needless to say a world-wide issue), done all too frequently with the excuse that the sacred cow of corporate profit trumps all, is truly horrifying.  And worse, it has become normal, even fashionable.  But that does not make it acceptable, and that is why we must, relentlessly, continue to speak out and work to bring an end to the never-ending misogynist pandemic.