Blog Posts

When You Don’t Want to Dismantle Misogyny, Blame It on Women

What explains the 160 million plus total girls and women gone missing from the world, largely because of sex-selective abortion? Why, explains New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it isn't misogyny, not even misogyny internalized and perpetuated by women. It's the spread of "female empowerment." This dynamic is also operative in the Dominque Strauss-Kahn case, where an immigrant hotel room cleaner to the US from Guinea has accused the now former International Monetary Fund head of rape. The defense has rushed to the oldest trick in the book for discrediting rape victims: painting them as women of bad character. As if rape weren't a crime no matter who the victim is. Don't institutionalized structures of male privilege have anything and everything to do with sex-selective abortion, which has imbalanced gender ratios in the world's two most populous countries, and rape, suffered by one in three women globally?