Educate a girl, they say, and she can avoid being married off during childhood, lessen her risk of contracting HIV, and contribute to the economy to help end the cycle of poverty in the developing world.
Offer microloans to girls. Just $60 can buy her a cow. Selling the milk will change her life and the lives of her family. It will help her entire village. She will save money to invest in her own future.
Make sure every girl has a birth certificate. She will know her own age so she can protect herself from child marriage. She can open a bank account and vote.
Empower and support girls' choices about their own bodies. She has a right to protect herself from HIV.
Lovely sentiments. All true and worth considering.
But they've forgotten one thing - the reason women and girls suffer is because they are weaker than the men that dominate them. And while it is true that education is the one thing that can never be taken away...
- A girl's $60 cow can be stolen by those stronger than her,
- A girl can be forced into marriage by those stronger than her,
- A girl can contract HIV from a rapist who is stronger than her.
13 comments:
Don't forget that the girls can be sold into bondage by their families, killed by their relatives for breaking tradition, kept from being educated by those stronger than her, etc.
Good post!
One contradiction I've never understood with the anti-gun left concerns abortion. (whatever one's personal views on that may be)
On that issue liberals uphold the sanctity of the woman's body. Her body, her choice. My libertarian mind cannot fault that argument.
When it comes to guns & women's self-defense those same liberals who hold women's empowerment and right to choose in high esteem recoil in disgust at the very thought of a woman having the freedom to say "my body, my choice" and choosing to arm herself with the greatest equalizer mankind has yet devised.
Antipathy towards weapons of self-defense is something I've never understood about the feminist movement in general. What good is empowerment if you're not empowered to defend your own life?
Wasn't Betty Freidan anti-gun / anti-self defense?
As the father of a boy and a girl, I can offer that the natural defense mechanisms at work in each is very different. I wish we could just say "teach her to defend herself", but my experience tells me that it's not that simple. There are differences in empathy and identity between the sexes that don't change quickly, barring trauma. Even teaching adult women self-defense usually requires clearing the empathy hurdle. "Should I fire a warning shot? What if I just wound him?"
On the other hand, boys seem to be born without empathy, and are required to learn it by regular application of corporal punishment.
Great post & true, true, true. I'm a woman - I live my life differently than a man. I doublecheck where I park, I pay attention to when I'm out & where I'm out. Pretending a man isn't usually stronger than me is silly - he usually is. Therefore, it's up to me to make sure I can fight back in any way necessary. And I will.
But, but but Breda...
Throwing money at a problem is soooo much more important than offering an actual, y'know, solution.
Get with the HopeyChangey program, willya?
Damn, skippy, Breda!
In celebration of that fact, I'm about to head over to the range and run some rounds through my snubbie which I'm about to get back from the gunsmith. Here's to the real power to assert oneself in a dangerous world.
The whole microloan thing is a bit of Socialist fantasy and further proof that they are economic illiterates. Building wealth, not manufacturing money, is the key to prosperity. Collectivists see a printing press as a means to make money since they are not otherwise able to create value or wealth.
Loans only work in effective states with Laws that respect property, places that are literally broken, like Sub-Saharan Africa, Sudan with the Janjaweed, parts of Afganistan, Central America, and Columbia where FARC brutalizes it's own offer little in the way to prevent the Loan from becoming some kind of device of chattel, or more simply taken away.
In the other instances where it's been championed as a leg-up out of poverty (Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank of Bangladesh) the women involved have been forced to make some very dire promises of future behavior and activity to acquire the loan, their children had to attend a special school where they were indoctrinated in the Bank's ways.
The Grameen Bank "foundation" was always subsidised heavily and nevcer a for-profit center.
It received $1.5 million from Bill and Melinda Gates, and George Soros has given some $12 million-plus to all sorts of Grameen spinoffs, including gifts to expand banking in other countries.
Yunus assembles peer groups to lean on delinquent borrowers, and makes political-mental reconstruction a condition of the loans, which nowadays are taken out in order to repay previous loans and so on. His "Sixteen Decisions" that must be adopted by all borrowers read like a party platform for
collectivist regimentation including:
"We shall take part in all social activities collectively." "We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus." "We shall build and use pitlatrines." "If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any centre, we shall all go there and help restore discipline." http://mises.org/journals/fm/Dec06.pdf
Anyhow give a girl a gun and she can take care of herself, or even put a gunless man to work for her. :-)
You sure are cute with your dimples... and gun! More pics?
Like mike w I have never understood the passivity taught to young women, by supposed feminists. What kind of mindset other than perpetual victimhood is inculcated by "don't resist, give your attacker what he wants?"
Refuse to be a victim - that's the starting point. Resist by any means available. All my adult life I have been astonished by those who claim to empower women by enslaving their minds.
The anti-gunners always claim widespread firearms ownership will inevitably lead to barbarism, shootout,s rampant violence, and those predictions have always been wrong. Always. Gun owners appear to be courteous, thoughtful, self reliant and self controlled people. Are those not qualities worth encouraging? Even among women, at risk of them getting uppity?
Hey
I may know that 12 year old. As a father I have new that I cann't always be there to protect my daughter. So she is a black belt in martial arts (teaches classes to other kids, has been doing this for 6+yrs.), shoots rifles and handguns with me at the range (she wants an AR15 in 6.8 for her birthday to go deer hunting with me.), and has an IQ over 180 in 6th grade she's doing math and science at high school levels. This girl turns 12 next week, watch out world.
Breda, as a side not- In Japan teen females are driving the cell phone market! NTT, Japan's largest cell phone maker specifically uses teen girls as a focus group when designing cell phones. They have, I believe, over a hundred designs that have been "approved" by the teens and are on the market today. Also, I taught my girls how to shoot when they were age 10, both now own and shoot pistols regularly.
The bad thing about women with guns is that when they start thinking they have the right to vote it gets dangerous to argue with them ;>
The first thing I taught my wife, daughters and now grandaughter is self defense both hand to hand and with a firearm.
My wife and daughters all have CCW permits and carry everywhere it is legal to do so. The grandaughter is not old enough for a permit or to own her own firearm yet but I am still teaching her now.
I have always wanted my girls to be just as self reliant as any boy or man. Nobody learns from handouts. Everybody that is willing learns from doing.
Teach then and give them a start and watch the flower grow. Give them handouts and teach them nothing and watch the flower wither and die.
Joe
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