The Handmaid's Tale...or something very like

[DanaC]

I try not to get too down about gender inequalities, on the whole. I used to feel so riled up by much of what I read or heard as a young woman. It honed my beliefs and it directed some of my academic interests, but I really had to work to let go of the anger. It's not a good way to live.

But now and again I read or see something that puts that gnawing sense of iniquity right back in my gut. Sometimes its something truly tragic, like the recent murder of a teenager by her parents for the crime of looking at a boy. Sometimes it's just the sheer scale of it, when the figures show an apparent holocaust of girl babies in some parts of the world. Sometimes it's the theoretical, the sheer unfairness of a mode of thinking that says girls are less valuable than boys. Sometimes it's the still present slights in my own society, like the apparent assumption recently that of course the new head of the BBC would be a man. Or the way the gaming industry and community still treat women as a decorative extra to the real characters' stories. Or the outright assault on women's reproductive freedoms in countries that shold know better, and the denial of the same in countries that are overdue some serious change.

Or maybe the fact that women are the most deeply affected by recession and the ones most likely to do work that society has deemed private and valueless in market terms. That they are several times more likely to face domestic violence than their male counterparts and that the majority of women have either experienced sexual assault or violence, or know someone who has.

All this stuff gets me at a gut level. I get that feeling again, that I used to get when I was 14 or so and had friends whose parents expected them to do housework whilst their brothers were exempt simply on the grounds that they were male. Or reading fiction set in periods where women were less free and had less autonomy. The way all the sport on TV was male, and girls' sports were like a novelty act. And the way in all the American movies (God, I loved American movies ;p) the boys played football and the girls cheered them on. The underlying assumptions that i saw all around me growing up, that girls were peculiarly vulnerable, and that boys were peculiarly entitled.

But most importantly, the fact that none of it made any kind of sense to me at all. Why were the experiences of the world and the expectations of boys and girls so differentiated? I didn't feel overburdened with emotionalism and under endowed with logic. I knew from my own homelife that men could and would do housework, and mums could and did follow a career. My brother and I both washed the pots and hoovered the carpets, we both were expected to pitch in equally. If anything, I got away with less because of general health problems and being the baby of the family. I was raised in a family that believed and practiced (to an extent, for the time ;p mum still did most of the housework and childrearing, and her career didn't start until her 30s after both kids were in school) in gender equality. It wasn't spoken of in those terms, it just was what it was.

So I was always baffled by what I saw in wider society and in history. Baffled and slightly threatened. I felt the contingency of my freedoms very keenly. An accident of birth that put me in one of the few societies, and cultures in the history of humanity in which those freedoms were even possible.

I saw this piece of news this week. And it just made me want to throw up:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20469486

A discovery that Saudi male guardians are automatically getting text messages about cross-border movements of female dependants has caused a Twitter uproar.

yes, you read that right.

They've brought misogyny and female infantilism right slap bang into the modern world.

Attention was drawn to the system when a man travelling with his wife got an alert as they left Riyadh airport.

Saudi women are denied the right to travel without their guardian's consent and are also banned from driving.



Saudi men earlier had the option of requesting alert messages about their dependants' cross-border movement, but it appears that since last week such notifications are being sent automatically.

[eta] I should point out that this has met with a storm of criticism and that a lot of people in the country think it's ridiculous.