Don't Confuse Hate With Fear

It's all over the news. Women-hating, war on women, assault on women, misogyny.
It's in anti-female laws that are being introduced and enacted right and far right.

• Laws that would restrict women's legal right to determine their own reproductive destiny.
• Laws that denyequal pay for women who perform the same work as their male counterparts.
• Laws that permit rape by transvaginal ultrasound as blackmail for a medically unnecessary procedure in exchange for a constitutionally permitted and otherwise legal abortion.

It's from radio shout hosts who slander and demean females who speak publically about the need for certain types of female-related healthcare coverage, or food accessibility based on socio-economic segments of society.

It's everywhere these days, or so it seems.

But I believe what's going on isn't hatred, despite what it looks like or sounds like.

I believe it's fear.

I truly believe that the men engaging in such behavior and proposing these laws do not hate women. I believe they are scared of women.

Scared? How so?

Based on the one thing women do that men cannot do. Procreate.

Given that only women can get pregnant and give birth, these men who are engaging in repression and degradation of women, in their infinite sense of insecurity and inadequacy, must control the when, how and under what circumstances women get pregnant and give birth. Otherwise, they fear the inevitability of becoming irrelevant.

This fear is certainly nothing new. It's centuries old.

Consider the current contention that requiring employer-provided heath insurance to cover women's contraception might violate employers' moral or religious beliefs. And consider that those moral/religious beliefs are defined in terms of women's reproductive lives.

Just who, pray-tell, dreamed up those religious beliefs in the first place and who continues to dictate them and enforce them on threat of excommunication from their religious institution?

Men.

Not women.

Men.

I'm far too conservative to believe that anybody should be able to use their ideology or religious dicta to deny anybody else her personal freedom or individual liberty.