By David Podvin

The police officer put a gun to the driver’s head and demanded that she orally copulate him. To avoid being murdered she complied, after which he provided the choice of victimized silence or fatal reprisal. The woman tempted fate by contacting the district attorney, who used DNA testing to contradict the officer’s denial that any sexual contact had occurred. During the prosecution’s case the accused was proven to have told one self-incriminating lie after another. The defense attorney then played a familiar trump card, labeling the victim a woman of easy virtue “with whom sex was always an implied option”. It took the jury of eleven males and a female less than two hours to acquit.

That scenario recently played out in California. Half a planet away, a young lady in Pakistan was being accused of premarital fornication. Her religiously conservative family reported the offense to the authorities, who decreed that she must be appropriately chastened. The terrified woman was dragged screaming into the village square, whereupon townspeople threw rocks until she could scream no more. The purification process included burning her battered corpse and scattering the ashes to the winds. Having cast out the evil in their midst, the people of the community – including the man with whom she had fornicated – could now resume leading their virtuous lives.

It is open season on females, the only hunting season that begins each January first and concludes six days after Christmas. This ancient blood sport is a global phenomenon that transcends ethnic and religious differences. Jamaican law does not prohibit marital rape, incest or sexual harassment. In Hungary and Nigeria, rape is ostensibly illegal but rarely prosecuted. Women of India who report being sexually assaulted are often killed for having scandalized society. In England, more than a thousand women are annually maimed or slain when they reject arranged marriages. Across the Islamic world, one hundred million females have been genitally mutilated. Throughout China, countless newborn girls are drowned so that the one child quota can be filled by boys.

And then there is the Land of the Free, where the Justice Department has documented that an American woman is raped every two minutes. Fewer than half of victims report the crime because they anticipate being raped again, this time figuratively (but no less painfully) by a legal system that assumes women must have been “asking for it”. DOJ also reports that every five hours a woman is murdered by her husband or boyfriend. According to a study by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the average prison sentence for men who kill their female partners is less than six years. By contrast, the average sentence for committing armed robbery is twelve years. The implicit rationale is that men should receive twice as much time for stealing other people’s property as they get for killing their own.

Even nominal punishment is rarely forthcoming when misogynists merely vandalize their property. DOJ states that a third of American wives are violently abused, while fewer than one out of a hundred American husbands serve time for abusing them. It is not as though the beatings are stealthy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention national survey found that thirty-four percent of American adults have witnessed a man beating his female partner. However, a poll commissioned by Redbook Magazine revealed that forty percent of Americans do not consider “slapping or hitting or punching” to constitute domestic violence. In the United States pummeling Mama is an immensely popular recreational activity, while safeguarding women does not rank very high on the public policy agenda.

In fact, it barely ranks at all. Domestic violence against females is the most common crime in America, but there exists a dissolute silence on the matter. Although politicians declare war on everything from pornography to terrorism to drug abuse they have never invoked a War Against Violent Misogyny, doubtlessly because doing so would alienate America’s vast fraternity of violent misogynists. As a result, women at risk do not even receive the courtesy of empty political rhetoric.

The brutal onslaught against females goes unmentioned during the presidential campaign. That the leading Democrat is a woman has proven irrelevant since the requirement for advocating female rights is possession not of a vagina but of a soul. That prerequisite also disqualifies conservatives from protecting women. Republican candidates are busily courting their party’s theocratic wing that opposed the Violence Against Women Act because it was intrusive, intruding as it did between a man and his chattel. The Religious Right also disdains funding battered women’s shelters on the basis that preventing domestic violence is inconsistent with biblical values.

And it is. Anyone who faithfully accepts the Torah or New Testament or Koran believes that women exist to obey men. Theology is a major factor impeding women’s rights, just as religious faith has long been a facilitator of slavery. There are more human beings enslaved than ever before, and the vast majority of them are female. In Saharan labor camps and in Filipino brothels and in all the best sheikdoms captive women are worked to death or raped to death. Slavery is not just a Third World phenomenon. The Japanese acquire sex slaves throughout Asia, women who are devoid of any rights in Japan. The outcry from the civilized world oscillates between inaudible and nonexistent because when it comes to defending women there is no civilized world.

The United States is the self-proclaimed beacon of liberty, yet in America justice for females remains a poetic myth. The Nicole Brown Simpson case provides a gruesome textbook example. After being serially assaulted by her husband Nicole summoned the police, whose indifference ultimately made them complicit in her demise. The abuser had warned that he would kill her if she ever left, but eventually Nicole could not endure the pain and fled. True to his word, Orenthal Simpson slaughtered the woman he had labeled a “disobedient bitch”. At the criminal trial his lawyers smeared the deceased as being a slut, a lie made all the more galling by the fact that her pathologically promiscuous murderer was actually the slut. Nevertheless, in the antediluvian American legal process when females are accused of sluttiness the accusation usually negates the value of their lives. The Simpson jurors were entirely unmoved by Nicole’s slaying, and some even blamed her for the conflict. It seems that Nicole Brown Simpson had been “asking for it”.

Acolytes of the system claim that the Simpson case was a high profile aberration involving celebrity and money and race, but they know better. American courts are callous to female victims from all classes and races, whether the participants are famous or obscure. Only when women dare protect themselves does the judiciary become indignant. More than half of females who kill their male partners can document they did so as a result of being abused – in other words, these women fought back. The average prison sentence for such nonconformists is fifteen years, or nine years longer than the average sentence for men who execute their female partners in cold blood. The American legal system was devised by men for men and functions accordingly.

Feminist groups do not function at all. Patrica Ireland is president of the National Organization For Women, a group that theoretically promotes the cause of women’s rights. The operative word is “theoretically”. Ireland is a multiculturalist, as opposed to being a feminist (the two are mutually exclusive). She would not condemn Mister Simpson for decapitating Nicole because multiculturalism subordinates ethics to ethnicity. The day after the  criminal jury endorsed Simpson’s murder of his ex-wife, NOW’s Los Angeles chapter angrily declared the issue was “not about racism but about violence against women.” Ireland immediately condemned her subordinates for being “racially insensitive” and she forbid “any further public statements that clearly violate NOW’s commitment to stopping racism.” NOW’s commitment to “stopping racism” negated its commitment to stopping gynocide. As with virtually all self-styled women’s rights leaders, Ireland is a politically correct reprobate whose moral cowardice exacerbates female suffering.

By contrast, when African American football player Michael Vick was implicated in killing pit bulls the People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals immediately began a campaign to make him the poster child for depravity. Meanwhile, in Texas a man convicted of battering his wife was sentenced to attend anger management classes, while a man convicted of battering his German Shepherd was sentenced to attend jail. Female crime victims can only wish that American society would value them as highly as it values pets.

Any woman who witnessed the Simpson grotesquerie would be crazy to expect support from law enforcement, the criminal justice system, or women’s rights groups. During every step of Nicole’s death march she was betrayed by those sworn to protect her…then, she was betrayed posthumously. There are many females who have lived the nightmare prior to perishing in it. In New York, multicultural misogyny struck again when an Asian immigrant who murdered his wife was granted probation after he labeled the victim an adulteress and insisted that by Chinese tradition her killing was obligatory. Traditional family values honor no boundaries.

The long term answer to misogyny is education. Little boys need to be taught in school what so many will never learn at home - that physically abusing females is always unacceptable and failure to honor that principle will incur severe punishment. This country’s biggest problem is lousy parenting, the cesspool from which all other problems flow. When it comes to deterring violent misogyny American parents merit a failing grade, so to achieve a just society the public schools must inculcate boys in civilized behavior. Young males should not be exalting the misogynistic God of antiquity. They should be learning the moral boundaries of modernity and experiencing the consequences of exceeding those boundaries.

Adult males must also learn to dread the consequences of abusing females. According to federal statistics, seven hundred American women will be raped today. Rape was similarly widespread in Cuba until that crime was made a capital offense. As a result, rape has virtually disappeared from the island and Cuban women live without the fear of being sexually molested. Since Americans insist upon having the death penalty it may as well be used judiciously, and nothing is more judicious than freeing women from the specter of being raped.

Motherhood is often lionized as the quintessence of Americanism, so when someone clobbers Mother it is a crime against the nation. Spousal abuse should therefore be a federal offense, which would require violent misogynists to have their cases heard in the federal judiciary where the conviction rate is ninety-five percent. Sentences should be lengthened and recidivists should be incarcerated permanently. Under California’s Three Strikes Rule an offender was given a life sentence for stealing pizza. The time has finally arrived for God’s Very Favorite Nation to declare that – conservative religious dissent notwithstanding - our female citizens merit at least as much protection as the law accords fast food.

There is also an ethical obligation for the United States to confront violent misogynists abroad. Our country loves to sing of its moral superiority, but when it comes to defending females the words and the music just don’t match. America passively assents as most of humanity endures persecution, and such ethical lethargy is hardly consistent with being the “greatest nation the world has ever known!”. Truth in advertising dictates that the USA must take the lead to ensure brutally misogynistic countries are sanctioned and humiliated. Societies that mutilate clitorises do not deserve acceptance from the community of nations; those cultures should be diplomatic and economic pariahs until their barbarity subsides.

Violent misogyny is an enduring plague for which the cure is vigilance. The burden of generating that vigilance falls exclusively upon people who embrace traditional liberal values. It was vigilant liberals who vanquished the malevolence of Nazism and who eradicated the depravity of Jim Crow. No one but vigilant liberals can defeat the scourge of misogyny. Conservatives are morally absent without leave, moderates excel only at equivocating, and leftists perform an ethnicity check before deciding whether opposing injustice is the chic thing to do. Now as always, liberals must champion their stated beliefs or evil will prevail.

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Podvin on Women

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