Thursday, March 29, 2007

The Inequality Inherent in Punishing Women

If I'm counting correctly, this is the forty-seventh reason to home school:

The arrest of two women teachers on charges of having sex with their male students has brought cries of lingering racism in one of South Carolina's most conservative counties and evoked some of the South's oldest and deepest-seated racial taboos.

As anyone who has been following World Net Daily's reporting of the issue, this isn't a new thing. The media went after Catholic priests who had sex with minors; they also went after the cowardly bishops who moved the perverts from diocese to diocese. Some Catholics felt that the media was being over-zealous, but while their vitriol for the Church as a body was unfounded, their indignation at both pedophile priests and those who enabled them was not.

Unfortunately, this zeal has yet to be applied at public school teachers, who, according to WND, are more likely to abuse children than even priests. Nor is such behavior regulated to teachers and Catholic priests. Pedophilia is a huge problem, and incidents of it are likely to be found in among any group of people who is allowed lengthy and private access to children.

Both women are white. The boys — six in all — are black...

Some blacks shudder to think what would have happened if the teachers were black men and the students were white girls.

I concur with the shudder, but for a different reason. If the teachers were black men and the students were white girls, there would be an uproar. But the same would hold true irrespective of race so long as the man was the teacher. I read into this a bias which breaks down, not according to race, but according to sex.

I may be completely wrong in this, but my statement is at least partially correct. From a legal standpoint women are treated as children all too often in this country. Later on in the article, the prosecutor insists that the only reason the bail was set so low was due to the lack of risk that the accused would run. Fine. That still does not explain the ridiculously light sentences passed on women who commit similar crimes.

I think the idea of an egalitarian society is one of humanity's more stupid ideas. If men had complained that women hold an inordinate amount of power, I would find the complaints unmanly, but at least admit that they were true. Women will probably never run most of the corporations; they will never hold a majority within Congress or the Supreme Court. They will eventually capture the presidency, but none of this is actually a good rubric for judging power. Where every women reigns supreme is in the home, and especially the bedroom. Behind every good man is a good woman goes the saying, but really, behind any man, be he good or bad, sits the woman, and no man can really ignore the advice of the fairer sex. Macbeth certainly could not.

Anyway, my problem with the whole idea of an egalitarian society is that those who had the power, the real power, sough to give it up to take their place in the bored halls of corporate boardrooms or the hallowed political halls where rubber stamps are given to ideas concocted somewhere else. It is a foolish thing to forfeit one's soul to gain the world as profit, but it is beyond foolish to trade it for nothing at all. No one with a brain trades real gold for fool's gold, but that is precisely what the feminists have attempted to do.

Today's story demonstrates, I think, that the egalitarian system will ever prove elusive. Should it ever arrive, I rather think that we will all find it to be disturbing and ridiculous. If next someone tries to do something to narrow the equality gap in the bedroom, I shall head screaming for the hills.

2 comments:

troutsky said...

Are you arguing that having sexual power should be as satisfying to women as having intellectual, political and economic power?

what of rape, who has the power? Women rapists are rare indeed. Equality refers to equal access and opportunity, not exact "sameness".

A Wiser Man Than I said...

Women will never have the same amount of physical power for certain; it seems likely that they are similarly with less power economically, intellectually and politically.

No one disputes the physical disparity. Moving onward...

Political power is of little importance, and it seems silly to worry about whether a man or woman is in charge of the plutocracy.

Economic power is held in a few hands. Fortunately, the people who are dull enough to run the important corporations tend to be men. As for the "glass ceiling", this has much more to do with the fact that women gravitate towards fields wherein not much money is made.

Intellectually, men tend to be concentrated on both ends of the bell curve. Count that for what you will.

As for rape, what is this but the use of physical leverage for that which would be otherwise unattainable? In other words, rape is evidence of the power women have over men, though this may be small solace to those who are raped.

Do you deny that women are getting unfair treatment and attention or do you believe they should be given preferential treatment?