MORAL ISSUES CONCERNING GENDER I. Gender A. Gender vs. Sex B. Gender/Social Norm/Identity C. Kottak: Gender and Social Organization II. Some relevant international data: A. Amartya Sen's measure of "missing women", i.e., the number of women not alive today but who would have been had they received nutrition and health care equal to that given to males: 100 million B. Over 100 million girls and women have suffered genital mutilation. C. Approximately one million children, mostly girls, per year are forced into prostitution. “Female child prostitution is an epidemic that touches every corner of the world. The female child usually finds her way into prostitution by being bought, kidnapped, tricked, sold by her parents, or traded. Figures estimate that the child prostitution business employs approximately 1 million children in Asia, 1.5 to 2 million children in India, 100,000 children in the United States, and 500,000 children in Latin America. Statistics also estimate that in one year's time a child prostitute will service over 2,000 men.” (Laurie Robinson, “The Globalization of Female Child Prostitution,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies D. In the developing world, literacy rates for women run substantially behind those for men. E. Female infanticide has been a perennial phenomenon in world history. A recent version is the abandonment of up to a million female babies a year in China as a result China’s “one child policy” and a traditional preference for son. F. Although men suffer more violent crimes than do women (6.6 million to 4.7 million in the U.S. in 1992-1993), women are fare likelier to suffer violent crimes from intimates (i.e. spouse/ex-spouse/boyfriend/ex-boyfriend, etc.). a. 4% of violent crimes perpetrated on males were by intimates. b. 30% of violent crimes perpetrated on females were by intimates. G. Women are about ten times likelier to suffer sexual assault than men. H. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between ages 15 and 44 in the United States - more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. I. Approximately 40% of women on welfare were victims of child sexual abuse. V. To what extent are these statistics a function of gender? A. To what extent are gender norms taken to justify these phenomena? B. To what extent are these phenomena themselves part of the enforcement of gender norms? VI. What are the gender norms? A. Vary somewhat by time and place. Kottak on what we learn from anthropology. B. What are the gender norms in our society? Again, these no doubt vary. But some have characterized American society as a whole, if only because some were written into law: 1. Women could not vote in national elections until 1920. 2. Until sometime in the 19th C, husbands had rights to control wives property during marriage. 3. The traditional legal definition of rape is the performance of sexual intercourse by a man other than her husband with a woman against her will, by force or fraud. 4. Here is Machiavelli in The Prince giving advice to rulers in the 16th C on what they must do to avoid being “despised and hated”: “He will chiefly become hated, as I said, by being rapacious, and usurping the property and women of his subjects, which he must abstain from doing, and whenever one does not attack the property of honour of the generality of men, they will live contented” What can we infer from this about what Machiavelli is assuming his readers will believe about the relation between “subjects”, “property”, and “women”? 5. Kant distinguishes between “active” and “passive” citizens. In order to be an active citizen, with the right to vote, someone must be “fit to vote.” And to be fit to vote, one cannot be in a social condition of dependency on the will of others, since then one will not be likely to make an independent judgment. Among passive citizens, Kant includes: “An apprentice in the service of a merchant or artisan; a domestic servant . . . ; a minor; all women and, in general, anyone whose preservation in existence (his being fed and protected) depends not on his management of his own business, but on arrangements made by another. 6. What elements of the gender conception of women can we draw from these historical sources and practices? And to what extent and how are these implicated in the statistics we saw above? VII. Consider rape. Is this a crime of sexual excess or is it a crime of power? Why does the rapist rape, and what does the rape express? Rape victims feel degraded and humiliated. Why is that? VIII. What about "domestic violence"? A. Many experts say that the key to understanding battering is that it is an expression of the desire to have power over and control the other--that frequently, what provides the occasion for the most violent forms is a woman's trying to assert her own power, often by trying to cut off the relationship. Women who leave their batterers are at a 75% greater risk of being killed by the batterer than those who stay. (Barbara Hart, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1988) B. Many professionals who work in program also assert that battering is connected to what they call "male privilege". IX. This suggests that rape and domestic violence have to do with asserting male authority over women. Domestic violence seems itself an attempt to assert male “privilege”, that is, the right to rule wives and partners. And rape seems an assertion of the rapist’s “right” to possess a woman’s body. A. This suggests that the persistence of these, or related, gender norms is relevant to achieving equal justice even in the Lockean sense of rights not to be a victim of violence. B. Moreover, the more violent expressions of “male privilege” don’t occur in a vacuum. Without countless other, “nonviolent” confirmations of the gender norms, rapists and batterers wouldn’t take themselves to be in a position to be judge and jury in the court of “male privilege.” C. So to what extent are men and women who are not themselves batterers or rapists complicit in a system of practices and norms that rapists and batterers take to support their activity?