Women’s Lib

Oh Dakin.  My favorite desert rat. He’s at it again. I should pull his posts into a reader so I can preview them before reading, and just skip the ones that are going to make my blood pressure spike. Only read the ones about how to keep rats out of my grain stores.

” My theory is that granting women’s rights ( we ignore the anarchist conviction that a right cannot be granted by the government ) was a government stratagem to weaken males. Far from being enlightened and progressive, giving women equal rights was merely a way to castrate a governments main potential enemy. Destroy a males sense of providing and protecting his family and you have somewhat neutered him. … I think taking jobs away from males, and then becoming females guardians and protectors and providers by giving those jobs to women, put the government much more firmly in control of the population. And look at the growth of women’s rights in this country. At times the government was grabbing much more power. So, when the big daddy government goes, there go the champions of fem lib.” James Dakin

Big Government isn’t the champion of Women’s Rights. Women are. And women are not just going to wake up one day and suddenly realize they no longer want to own their own land, run their own companies or control their own lives. We’re not going forget how to use our guns or our brains or our ballet at the box. It disturbs me every time I see this vein in the prepping community.  The fantasies of the destruction of certain groups, leaving the writer’s fantasy Eden-land, full of people of the same color and political/religious thoughts. And women dependent on a government for their human rights. (Are human rights anarchist thought now? I hadn’t realized.)
Even in some sort of massive die off TEOTWAWKI type event, are the remaining men really going to be interested in killing/breaking over half the remaining population just to wrest our rights out of our hands? Surely there will be more pressing problems to deal with.
That’s like saying people are going to go right back to slavery as soon as this government crumbles. Or that we’ll all magically turn into god-fearin-folk instead of the melting pot of various pagany-atheist-hindu-whatever that has become fairly norm.
Wishing won’t make it so. The reality is the surviving men would be fighting that fight against their own mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. I think few would be interested.

He’s fond of saying that “women’s lib destroyed traditional roles,” but so what. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against “traditional roles.” I do have a problem with chaining people to to your favorite ones whether they want those roles or not.  Also, which tradition are we talking about here? Given his surname and country of origin, I’ll make a wild guess that he’s referring to European traditional roles.  As opposed to, for instance, the “traditional roles” of the matrilineal tribes of the Mosuo or the Minangkabau or the Akan. (I could go on, I took a lot of elective courses in college.)

It would seem more efficient to focus on the work of survival and mutual aid through a time of government turmoil and instability, and less on how to screw someone over to get a bigger piece of the shitty pie. But that’s just my humble Midwestern opinion. Thanks for letting me vent. Anyone else got a soapbox rant they need to get off their chest?

- Calamity Jane