Friday, October 12, 2018

Ladies, No Talking, Please!

There is of course a direct correlation between democracy and the status of women in any given society. So it should come as no surprise that in a country such as the USA that is, and has usually been, run by a minority group of older white men, women are not only badly represented, but are actually in danger. According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, America is the tenth most dangerous place in the world for women, with only places like Syria, Yemen and Somalia ahead of it. S, if your hormones run along a differential between oestrogen and progesterone instead of being defined by testosterone, America, according to the best statistics, is just a dangerous place for you to live.


This is the backdrop for the spectacle that has been dancing all around our living rooms for the last few weeks in the nomination and then investigation and then confirmation and then congratulatory slap on the back from the old guys for supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Despite evidence from several women and his former room-mates that this is not the kind of honourable person that is supposed to sit on the supreme court, the Republican senators chose to turn a blind eye and confirm him anyway.  Before the final act played out, I absconded to Scotland, where, much to my dismay, the same spectacle, courtesy of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was doing its dance all over my native country too.


Brett Kavanaugh and his dance with the white-haired men of America is not anything new. It is  simply the most recent iteration of a tedious two-step that is really a one-step in which women are consigned to seats along the wall and the dance continues without them.
Anita Hill sits there, as do any number of overlooked female personages of note. It is not for no reason that the term "wall flower" connotes the feminine sex. Now Dr. Blasey Ford sits there too, sipping her punch, which we hope has not been spiked, not talking, because that apparently is not allowed. We are silent wall flowers in this dance. We have been silenced.
But, Ladies, the good news is that these jokers and waltzers, these wizened emperors-with-no-clothes  perning in their gyre, are old. Their dance is wearing thin. We must bide our time. The passage of history is in our favour, and when it curves back towards us, we will dust ourselves off, clear out the dead bodies, and we will perne in our own gyre and be the singing masters of our own souls.  

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