A World in Which Women Are Cartoons, Not People

The Vatican's demoralizing, dehumanizing view of women grabbed a lot of attention around International Women's Day, when the church pushed back against women's basic rights by ex-communicating the mother and doctors who saved the life of a nine-year-old rape victim.  The doctors performed the abortion on the rape victim after discovering that she was four months pregnant after what turned out to be a history of being raped by her stepfather.  The sexual violence and pregnancy were only discovered because the 80-pound girl complained of stomach pains.   

Outrageously, but not surprisingly, the Vatican did not excommunicate the rapist. Spend enough time around sentimental pro-life rhetoric, and it becomes clear that a 4-month-old fetus is indeed more valuable than a 9-year-old girl.  Anti-choicers spin lurid fantasies about how abortion providers are in this business because they enjoy child rape, and that they perform abortions to protect the rapist and hide the crime.  This case shows us the truth--abortion providers perform abortions on rape victims to spare them the further violence of being forced to bear a rapist's child. This fact that should be easy to remember if you remember that women and girls are people.  The rapist, the girl's stepfather, is sitting in prison where he belongs.   

Putting rapists higher in the moral order than their victims (or at least victims who dare survive) is the sort of thing that crowds out other offenses -- those that fit more into the "no, really?" category than the "what immoral patriarchal monsters" category.  That's why this irritatingly sexist and classist jab at women flew under the radar.

The washing machine has had a greater liberating role for women than the pill, the official Vatican daily said in an International Women's Day commentary Sunday. 

"The washing machine and the emancipation of women: put in the powder, close the lid and relax," said the headline on the article in Osservatore Romano. 

The article has an odd definition of what makes a woman "liberated"--basically the shine of her appliances and presumably her pearls. 

While the machines were at first unreliable, technology has developed so quickly that now there is "the image of the super woman, smiling, made up and radiant among the appliances of her house," wrote Osservatore. 

These two slights against women--condemning a 9-year-old girl's mother to hell for saving her life and insinuating that all women need is more time to watch soaps while the laundry does itself--differ dramatically in magnitude, but they come from the same bewildering belief that women are cartoons instead of real people. I suppose, from the point of view of the authors, that it really is no big deal for women to be pregnant all the time if we are as devoid of thought, ambition, or desire to do anything but sit on our rumps all day.   

The most generous reading of this is that the washing machine and other labor-saving devices freed women up so they could have their own jobs and incomes.  In order to believe this, you have to have very little understanding of the shift from an agrarian society to a capitalist one, but I digress.  As Pamela Merritt pointed out to me when we talked about this, the assumption that machines untied women from the household so we "could" work ignores the fact that many women that didn't have middle class advantages had to work, laundry machines or no.  Just by sheer numbers, the pill had to have liberated more women, because it relieved the burdens of both working and middle class women.  Working class women who have to work need more time for themselves, and an ability to choose how many mouths they have to feed even more so than women who get to choose housewifery.  

Because you know what will cause you to have more laundry than you can keep up with, even if you have the shiniest washing machine of all?  Having a dozen children like the Vatican wants you to.   

But that's just the most generous interpretation.  Really, you get the sense that some of the people who write stuff like this for the Osservatore don't even know any women, much less know anything about their lives.  How else would you legitimately think that all women want to be liberated to do is watch more soaps?  How else could you forget that even all western women do not fit into the same cookie cutter image of Mrs. Cleaver pushing around a mop in her pearls?   

It's a telling fantasy, in its way.  If you truly believe that most women are "liberated" to watch some soaps and eat some bon bons, then it's much easier to believe that it's no skin off our backs to spend our lives either pregnant, getting pregnant, or currently in labor.  What else do we have to do with our time?  It's not like we use our minds for anything, or have feelings that matter.   

And so even though the washing machine insult and the gross violation of a 9-year-old rape victim's basic human rights differ from each other in magnitude so much that it's hard to see how they're related, they are.  The Vatican's out of touch with women's lives and seems to have a hard time grasping that women have minds and feelings similar to those of men's.  If you can't even grasp the basics like that, it's a short jump to dehumanizing women and girls in other ways.  Stay out of touch long enough, and next thing you know, you're unable to grasp what should be obvious, which is that little girls count, rape victims count, and protecting the lives of people that do exist--yes, even the female people--counts more than the lives that exist only in possibility.  And oh yeah, that there's something deeply, deeply wrong with you if you grant a man who rapes a little girl more moral status than people who save a little girl.

Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte