More senseless violence: Paris, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino. I live in Tucson and know victims of “our” mass shooting. I respond to incidents of violence personally and viscerally.
What’s a woman to do?
Plenty.
Women can collectively and actively change everything.
The Women’s Legacy Project is not a political site. But women’s very essence is political in that politics at the highest level is simply one of the ways society organizes itself. I’m not going to discuss stratification and power as if those concepts are real things. They are processes and subject to constant change.
Governance of populations and places happens. Politics is one of the ways in which it happens.
Women may not be well represented in current political systems because those systems were developed and maintained by men. Women and men do things differently. But as humans reorganize ourselves into a single interactive society with global instantaneous communication systems we can expect turbulence as all our various systems mix, blend, and recombine in new ways.
Ultimately this site is intended to present information about women’s information systems, about how we do things over the short and long haul.
The official editorial stand on cultural violence is that violence is equivalent to a tantrum by an out of control child. It would be terribly ignorant to allow a child to harm him or her self or others.
I wonder what might happen if all the women in the world decided to respond to violence and ideologies that employ violence from this maternal perspective?
If we could only put those tantrum raving children in ‘time-out’ (maybe that’s sanctions?)
Good idea, but how do we create sanctions against guys like the Planned Parenthood shooter.
I do think that having a womans perspective would add to what we have now. We need both men and women to help solve things together.
Oh yes, I only advocate taking over 53% of the world. Seriously, we all need to work together.
If mothers ran the world there would be no wars. Guns would be difficult to get. Art, trade and business would blossom. Let’s elect more women (but we’d best make them Democratic women).
Well said! We so need an integration of women’s culture into governance!
It’s a sad state our country is in!
I have teared up so much in the last month at all the violence.
New strategies are needed, that’s for certain. New strategies are needed because the old are not working. At all.
At all.
I think we need to monitor guns, like we do cars. Nicholas Kristoff made a brilliant analogy in his column in NYT.
I read his piece and thought it was great. Regulation is not a bad word.
I’ve often thought about how wars and violence could be decreased is every man on earth had to take an estrogen pill every day. Testosterone makes men aggressive. And violent. I know. I took HRT and played around with the testosterone component, not because I wanted to feel aggression, but because I missed my libido and energy. It made me feel GREAT! But also aggressive in ways I didn’t like. Would the 27 year-old woman who orphaned her six-month-old baby for the “glory” of dying in a hail of bullets in San Bernadino gone through with this horrific act if she had not been radicalized by her husband and other men? I wonder.
I’ve actually thought about creating a cookbook of high estrogen recipes that could be fed aggressive men. Fundamentalist patriarchal belief systems have brought and are continuing to bring so much pain, violence, and grief to the world. In anthropology grad school banter feminist cohort members and I would discuss how men were designed to guard the periphery and their infiltration of the core of society. I like to think that if there had been strong women in the young woman shooter’s life she could not have been brainwashed by the perverse violent cult.
I agree that a woman’s perspective is needed. However, as women we do need to take responsibility for the fact that we bought into the ‘male superiority’ myth for many, many years, allowing the situation we’re in now to flourish. I know few men in midlife who possess the wisdom that most women do, yet they are, for the most part, running the show. The sad fact is we’re all to blame for the mess we’re in.
Excellent point, Kimberly! Every process is two way at the minimum. I am completely convinced that women acquiescing to subsidiary roles in family and community decision-making has damaged our society. Our full and complete civic participation is long overdue.
Until men take responsibility for their out of balance, long time conditioning as women have begun to do will our society continue to show these signs of illness
We are both responsible. Women to bring their strength of the feminine and men to use their strength of the masculine in a balanced manner. Like a bird both wings have to be strong in order to fly. I know we have much work as women to keep our own strengths in balance and to support and encourage our men to make those same adjustments.
Sandy, I love the analogy of avian wings! You nailed it with, “I know we have much work as women to keep our own strengths in balance and to support and encourage our men to make those same adjustments.”
I so agree with you and it’s a big reason I’m voting for Hillary. I think it’s time to put a woman in charge and change the global energy. Plus, she’s the only candidate who’s dared to talk about taking on the NRA. I’m so sick of all this testosterone.
I agree with most of what you say. Hillary is from the “act more like a man than a man” old school of feminism though.