With the issuance of the Dobbs decision, the Supremes aka White-Christian-Nationalist-Extremist-Catholic-Judges decided the time had come to remind women about their place and primary purpose in the patriarchy.
That is, (1) to embody the subservient less-than-human position in the gender-binary-patriarchal-hierarchy, and (2) to function as the means of production for human (male) and less-than-human (female) beings
On December 10th 1948, 74 years ago, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that outlined basic guarantees for all human beings. Bodily autonomy -- the capacity to make decisions about one’s body, personal life and future – undergirds these guarantees and demands gender equality and universal access to reproductive health and rights for girls and women.
And yet, two decades into the 21st Century, America’s white supremacist patriarchy, increasingly driven by white Christian nationalism, succeeds in sanctifying women’s status as less than fully human within the institutionalized gender binary hierarchy – the hierarchy of oppression where women are seen as vessels for childbearing.
The rapid reframing of public discourse language designed to obfuscate the meaning of the Supremes’ decision. Using their “post-Roe world” byline, mainstream media are hiding -- literally papering over – the grim consequences: that women’s human rights are thoroughly denigrated, that women have no right to control their bodies, that women have no right to decide when to have children.
Misogyny is the disabling, demeaning and destructive enforcer of our gender binary hierarchy that allocates power and defines who is less-than-human. Potential challenges to the gender binary hierarchy are dealt with the requisite degree of ruthlessness appropriate to the challenge. Privileged women who have the means to manage the “post-Roe world” are nonetheless terrorized by the potential for deadly consequences should they lose their footing on the patriarchy hierarchy.
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