A Woman’s Fate is about Location, Location, Location

Once upon a time I owned my own home, and was actually surviving financially. Not rich. Never that. But I was doing okay. So I started thinking about women who were less fortunate than myself.

I’m very aware that the bulk of my good luck in life is based simply on the arbitrary fact that I happened to be born in the United States. This isn’t the only country where fortune shines on women, relatively speaking, but the odds are not in a woman’s favor in the vast majority of the world.

Here’s the gauntlet you have to run on this planet simply due to estrogen:

• In many countries, just by being female, your odds of even being born (or if you are born, not being abandoned), are much smaller than your male counterparts. The insidious dowry system makes women a burden, not a gift. Gendercide is a very real phenomena in several countries.
• But if you happen to make it past that horrifying hurdle and are actually alive to tell the tale, you then have to hope you’re in a country where they value education for women. According to UNESCO, 31 million girls of primary school age and 34 million girls of lower secondary age were not in school in 2011.
• Then there’s the risk of being forced into a marriage that you may or may not want. According to UNICEF, 55% of the marriages in the world are arranged. In some countries it’s 90%. This is fine if you get a decent, responsible, loving person who has your best interests at heart, but as is often the case in these situations, the choice will not be up to you. At least, not entirely. According to PBS, in the next decade, 100 million girls will be married before the age of 18.
• And then you have to run the gauntlet of violence. According to the World Health Organization:
  • 36 % of girls in the world have experienced child sexual abuse.
  • Somewhere between 100 million and 140 million females in the world have undergone some form of female genital mutilation/cutting.
  • Anywhere between 133 million and 275 million women are victims of domestic violence every year.
• Sex trafficking statistics are, predictably, unreliable, but it’s estimated that 700,000 to two million women and girls are trafficked across international borders every year. That doesn’t include those who are forced into prostitution in their own countries.
• Rape statistics are even less reliable, but contrary to popular belief, most rapes are perpetrated by someone who is known to the assailant. And then there’s the alarming trend of gang rape throughout the world.
• And here’s a depressing fact. According to Water.org, in just ONE DAY, women spend 200 million hours simply collecting water for the survival of their families. Imagine what they could do for the world, what progress they could make, if they could spend those hours on other things!

So, yeah, I have quite a few blessings to count. Tomorrow I’ll write about my ham-handed attempt to increase the blessings of just one other woman.

[image credit: worldbank.org]

The Destruction of Women

Today I came across this picture on Facebook.

 

A friend of mine rightly commented, “And this was before Photoshop.” Women used to aspire to have wasp waists. To heck with breathing, we wanted to be desirable! These contraptions caused deformities in ribs and internal organs, weak muscles, and respiratory problems. It also increased the rate of miscarriages and death in childbirth. How many women had to faint before this became less fashionable?

This got me thinking of other ways we women have allowed ourselves to be altered, to our detriment, all in the name of “beauty” or cultural norms. Foot binding springs to mind.

We’d like to think this particular form of mutilation was isolated, but it’s estimated that one billion Chinese women were put through this over a period of 1000 years. Yes, you read that correctly. People thought this was a good idea for 1000 years. One’s toes were bent into the soles of the feet until they broke, and then the arch was broken. Needless to say, this caused infections, especially if the nails weren’t clipped short enough and they grew into the soles. The solution for that would be to remove the toenails altogether. Sometimes the toes would drop off completely, but that, apparently, was seen as a good thing because then you could bind the feet even more tightly. And then you had the continual breaking of other bones because it’s impossible to balance on bound feet, and falls were quite common. Does reading this make you uncomfortable? Well, it sure beats the lifetime of agonizing pain that these women suffered.

The two horrendous body mutilations mentioned above are, fortunately, a thing of the past. I wish I could say that this was the end of this blog entry, and there is nothing new to report. But no.

In some Asian and African cultures, women wear neck rings to make their necks seem longer. Actually, their necks aren’t elongated. What a relief, right? No, what happens is their shoulder blades become deformed, giving the illusion of a long neck. Their collar bones and rib cages also get pushed down. This is done so they will appear more attractive.

Even more horrific, in my opinion, is female genital mutilation, which, according to the world health organization, is still practiced in 28 countries throughout the world.

About 120 million women have been subjected to this abuse. I won’t fully describe the procedure in all its grizzly variations. You can look it up yourself if you want to lose your appetite, but I will say that it is known to cause fatal hemorrhaging, cysts, recurring infections, a lifetime of pain, incontinence, fistulae, and problems during intercourse and childbirth.

Ah, but we western cultures don’t have to worry about these things, right? We honor our women! We would never cause them harm in the name of beauty, right? We’d never mutilate them, right? Well? Right?

Augmented breasts are supposed to make you more attractive and more successful. What they don’t tell you is these implants can make the breasts sore to the touch or numb and can decrease your sexual response. They also make it harder to detect breast cancer. Ruptures of the implants can cause pain and deformity. And your immune system can reject the implant and build a wall around it, causing pain, distortion and rupture.

And then there’s high heels.

According to an article in the Washington Post, wearing heels places pressure on the inside of the knee, a common location for arthritis in women. It also causes your hips and spine to go out of alignment. It increases pressure on the forefoot, and shortens the length of the calf muscles. It can cause numbness in the toes, bunions, hammer toes, and ankle injuries. But hey! It’s attractive! That’s all that matters!

Since I’ve started viewing heels in this context, I’ve stopped wearing them entirely, and when I see others wearing them, I shudder.

What frustrates me most about all these horrors I’ve mentioned above is that we women are almost always complicit in these acts. If we don’t choose it ourselves, our mothers allow it or encourage it. So why are we so surprised when this happens?

 

Eating disorders are more prevalent in women than men for a reason, and before we get all culturally superior, they are much more prevalent in Western cultures. We are raised to think that it’s important to be beautiful, but sadly we are often not warned that many standards of beauty are sick and twisted.

Eating disorders cause a whole host of side effects, including acne, constipation, osteoporosis, scurvy, diarrhea, electrolyte imbalance, cardiac arrest, kidney failure, tooth loss, brain atrophy, suicide and death.

Ladies, ladies, what are we doing to ourselves? I weep for my gender. And I’m also very, very pissed off.