The author of one of the blogs I regularly read–I can’t remember which one–recently mentioned watching Iron Jawed Angels. I immediately put it at the top of my Netflix queue and watched it last night.
First, Hilary Swank is amazing. I don’t know why that always surprises me, because she’s consistently good. Maybe it’s that I can’t get over that she was on Beverly Hills 90210? In any event, her portrayal of Alice Paul was most excellent.
Alice Paul, 1919
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/hec2008008828/
I’m not going to give a synopsis of the movie or the historical events it’s based on. Better ones are available on-line. A couple of things leapt out at me, though, because of things that are happening in the world right now.
First, the illegalization of abortion in South Dakota (the governor signed the bill into law yesterday, and it will go into effect on July 1). Eighty-five years after women won the right to vote, we’re still being treated like chattel. You can watch or listen[1] to a clip of SD Senator Napoli, a creepy man who spends way too much time fantasizing about virgins, rape, sodomy, and shot-gun weddings, wax poetically about the good ol’ days when women knew their places.
BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
If you are a woman and you live in South Dakota and you are raped and you become pregnant, you’d better be a god fearing virgin. You must also prove that you had a particularly brutal rape, as explicitly defined by Napoli (that’s right, you don’t get to decide whether or not your particular rape was brutal). Otherwise, you’ll be forced to carry the baby to term. Worse, Sen. Napoli also wants to force you to marry your attacker.
BILL NAPOLI: When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.
And that’s just rape victims. Those brazen hussies who have the temerity to have unsanctioned sex (you know, the kind that occurs out of wedlock), and who become pregnant, will have no option but to go out of state for an abortion or to carry the pregnancy to term. If folks like Sen. Napoli get their way, those women might also be forced to marry the men they had sex with, whether or not that’s in their long-range plans or even in their best interests.
What it boils down to is control. Women should be virginal and angelic. If they are not, they should be punished. Otherwise, why on earth would the chastity of the victim or the brutality of the rape be a consideration in whether or not a resultant pregnancy can be aborted? If women’s wants and needs were of importance, wouldn’t the law treat all pregnancies that result from coerced sex equally? Not that I believe there ought to be any moral strictures on whether or not a pregnancy can be aborted. If women were truly autonomous, and not just incubators, then we’d be trusted to make those decisions for ourselves. It’s not like you can walk up to someone on the street and demand their blood, kidney, or bone marrow. And those things would potentially save a human being that is here, now. Why should we value a bundle of cells more highly than we do adult lives?
Second, hunger strikes. This is also a control issue. Hunger strikes are a last resort for those who have no voice. The thought that even that would be taken away, in an effort to halt criticism of the way the US is dealing with prisoners (sorry, “enemy combattants”), is gut-wrenching. Even though force feeding is physically and mentally tortuous, hunger strikers at Guantanamo are routinely force fed. The only means of protest those prisoners have is being taken away from them by the US government, in an effort to control them. Onna count of we don’t want our public image damaged. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s a little late for that. The time for protecting the country’s public image was back before it started rounding up everyone and his brother for looking, or being accused of looking, suspicious.
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[1] The relevant portion is about 2/3 into the stream, but don’t watch/listen unless you’ve got a strong stomach, because the way he gets off on describing his ideal of the perfect brutal rape is just plain squicky.
red paper boat 