Brutally Honest

Women paying a steep price for feminism

A very steep price:

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl's counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.

...

But oddly enough, Ms. Hvistendahl notes, it is usually a country's rich, not its poor, who lead the way in choosing against girls. "Sex selection typically starts with the urban, well-educated stratum of society," she writes. "Elites are the first to gain access to a new technology, whether MRI scanners, smart phones—or ultrasound machines." The behavior of elites then filters down until it becomes part of the broader culture. Even more unexpectedly, the decision to abort baby girls is usually made by women—either by the mother or, sometimes, the mother-in-law.

It would seem that women need to advance the cause of women by protecting themselves from... themselves.

More proof of feminism's moral corruptness.

Any bets as to how quickly this will be swept under the rug?  It simply doesn't fit the meme. 

Virginity checks for women demonstrators in Egypt

The Arab Spring is not all sunshine and roses... but some of us knew this:

A senior Egyptian general admits that "virginity checks" were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.

The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.

At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or "virginity tests."

But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.

"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)."

The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn't later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)."

Because the best defense against the charge of rape or sexual assault is proof of the victim's virginity. 

Once again the West is confronted with the misogyny of Islamic culture and once again, this story and stories like it will fade into the background. 

Though it's great to see Amnesty International raising an outcry we'll know that the West is waking up to the barbarism that is Islam when we see Western women's groups join in loudly and vociferously condemning these actions and raising their voices in support of those victimized by such travesties.

But don't hold your breath.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Chris Matthews: Sarah Palin has "proven herself to be profoundly stupid"

Coming our way via IOTW, yet more evidence for Chris Matthews' irrelevance and his hatred for Ms. Palin:

Matthews' arrogance is exceeded here only by Ron Reagan's smugness... and to think that he's nodding his head about someone else's alleged stupidity is simply primo.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Bill Maher's obsession with Sarah Palin reaches new low

And that's quite a feat given this dude's despicableness.

Last week, he called Sarah Palin "a dumb twat".  Over the weekend, he decided to use the "C" word... you know the one... it rhymes with punt.

Class act eh?

There was a time, long since past, where peckerheads like this were dealt with by men with spines, men with class, men who treated ladies like ladies and a**hole misogynists like the scum that they are.

Bill Maher needs to have his butt kicked.  I've got to believe that many women out there could do it.  But there ought to be a man out there, a real man, who'll stand up for ladies and punch this guy straight in his kisser.  And yea, as someone who's recently returned to the Catholic church and who's trying his damndest  to walk the straight line and be a role model worth modeling... I realize that what I'm calling for here goes against the grain.

But hey... I'm a sinner.  The apostle Paul called himself Chief Sinner.  And I'm telling you that if Bill Maher and I were to run across each other, I might just wrestle that title away from St. Paul.  I think it'd be worth it.

For Sarah Palin and all decent women maligned by this butt-munch pantywaist poor excuse for a human being... one punch is all I'd need.

And then it'd be off to the confessional...  post-haste.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Wouldn't you like to see Bill Maher meet Todd Palin?

Especially in light of this classy comedic act by Maher?

I'm not sure what was worse here... Maher or the idiots in the audience applauding him.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Why is Arab misogyny ignored by Western elitists...

... while the alleged misogyny of American military culture is played up?

Caroline Glick has an interesting and provocative thesis centered on what she calls "the international media's quest to advance the ideology of identity politics":

To date the most egregious attack on a foreign journalist in Cairo's Tahrir Square took place last Friday, when CBS's senior foreign correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten by a mob of Egyptian men. Her own network, CBS, took several days to even report the story, and when it did, it left out important information. The fact that Logan was brutalized for 20 to 30 minutes and that her attackers screamed out "Jew, Jew, Jew" as they ravaged her was absent from the CBS report and from most other follow-on reports in the US media.

The media's treatment of Logan's victimization specifically and its treatment of the widescale mob violence against foreign reporters in Cairo generally tells us a great deal about the nature of today's media discourse.

...

This week, a group of female US soldiers filed a class action lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld. The plaintiffs allege that both men and the US defense establishment are responsible for the sexual assaults they suffered during their military service. They claim that the men who abused them were a product of US military culture.

The US media has provided blanket coverage of the story, which effectively places the entire US military on trial for rape.

What is interesting about the lawsuit story is that it highlights the alleged perpetrator. Coverage of the lawsuit has been heavy on details about the alleged misogyny of US military culture.

In stark contrast, coverage of Logan's sexual assault makes almost no mention of the perpetrators. Certainly the issue of Egypt's societal misogyny has been ignored.

What makes the distinction between coverage of the two stores so remarkable is that there is there is no comparison between the alleged anti-female bias in the US military and the actual misogyny of Egyptian society.

There is much more at the link and it ties things together quite nicely. 

Read it, digest it, use it as a filtration system for reading liberal thought.  It will help make some sense out of that which more normally would seem to be nonsensical.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

"the feminist movement itself is a deception"

Caroline Glick:

Since the height of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, non-leftist women in the West and Israel have been hard-pressed to answer the question of whether or not we are feminists. Non-leftist women are opposed to the oppression of women. Certainly, we are no less opposed to the oppression of women than leftist women are.

But at its most basic level, the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as “structurally” discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women.

So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a deception.

The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren’t a hollow term, then prominent feminists should be the leaders of the anti-jihad movement.

That there's a truth slap.  Go and read the whole thing, then pass it on... preferably to a self-avowed feminist you know.  Maybe it'll wake them up.

Or not.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

TSA insists on x-ray screening of mother's breast milk...

... despite guidelines allowing an exemption and causing the young mother to miss her flight.  The following video should have you seething:

H/T to Jay Tea at Wizbang who comments:

Your tax dollars at work, folks. Guaranteeing our nation's security by depriving a seven-month-old of his mother's milk and making a conscientious mother miss her flight.

A peek inside Planned Parenthood

Posted by guest blogger, Leslie.

If you haven't been following Live Action's undercover work in Planned Parenthood clinics across the United States, you have been missing out on some thought provoking sights.

Compare this latest clip comes from Wisconsin:

Related: Live-tweeting abortion.

The problem with Islam...

... at its core would seem to be Islam's problem with women:

Do some of the answers to the puzzle of that woman-hatred lie in Koranic passages and sayings like these?

The Prophet said, "I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women."

O ye who believe! When ye prepare for prayer, wash your faces, and your hands (and arms) to the elbows; Rub your heads (with water); and (wash) your feet to the ankles. If ye are in a state of ceremonial impurity, bathe your whole body. But if ye are ill, or on a journey, or one of you cometh from offices of nature, or ye have been in contact with women, and ye find no water, then take for yourselves clean sand or earth, and rub therewith your faces and hands, Allah doth not wish to place you in a difficulty, but to make you clean, and to complete his favour to you, that ye may be grateful.

Once Allah's Apostle went out to the Musalla (to offer the prayer) o 'Id-al-Adha or Al-Fitr prayer. Then he passed by the women and said, "O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women)." They asked, "Why is it so, O Allah's Apostle?" He replied, "You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you." The women asked, "O Allah's Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?" He said, "Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?" They replied in the affirmative. He said, "This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn't it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?" The women replied in the affirmative. He said, "This is the deficiency in her religion."

The answer is yes.

And the answer is obvious for those willing to see.

Rachel Adams goes on to suggest that which might work toward a solution for men and women in the military serving in places like Afghanistan:

If through the good offices of our military—especially our women soldiers—we could help Afghani women unravel themselves from centuries of complicity in their own oppression and see themselves not as defiled, unclean, perpetually wanton creatures to be hidden away as if they were carriers of plague, but rather as noble members of the human race endowed with greatness and blessings: the giving of life, the tending to it mercifully and lovingly, and, most important, the imparting of lessons in real virtue—self-acceptance to their daughters and just plain acceptance to their sons—that would be gaining hearts and minds indeed.

You'd think that women's groups who claim to be for the advancement of women's rights would be all over this... but you'd be wrong.  

We've been reminded this week what it is that these groups seek to advance.

I'm of the opinion that the best way women might "unravel themselves from centuries of complicity in their own oppression and see themselves not as defiled, unclean, perpetually wanton creatures to be hidden away as if they were carriers of plague" is to expose them to the teachings and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.

How intolerant of me.

H/T W&W.

Crossposted(*).