The Furious Spinner

Once again Barbara Ehrenreich is singing the truth. She writes, "So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy: feminism....I don't mean just a few opportunistic references to women, like those that accompanied the war on the Taliban and were quietly dropped by the Bush administration when that war was abandoned and Afghan women were locked back into their burqas. I'm talking about a sustained and serious effort."

Absolutely, Barbara! If women around the world had autonomy and complete control over their own bodies so many problems would be solved, horrors alleviated. I remember trying to have an email conversation with a Muslim woman who was furious over the content of some of my essays (at least I think the writer was a she). It didn’t seem like she had actually read the essays; instead she was angry because I was American and I had an email she could write to and scream at me. I kept saying, “If you would actually listen to me instead of screaming at me, you would find we agree on most everything." But she kept saying about how terrible the United States was, how stupid I was, and how all would be better in the world if the U.S. was gone.

Finally I told her that yes, the United States government was doing horrible things but if the United States disappeared from the planet, all would not suddenly be great because the world was still full of patriarchal regimes who worked to suppress the rights, the souls, the bodies of more than half their population: women. Inexorably entwined to this misogyny was a disregard for Nature which resulted in the degradation of the environment which caused famine, disease, pollution, etc. My argument really pissed her off. Of course the world would be great with the U.S. gone, she wrote. How could I be so stupid? And women? She shrugged that off. It was a meaningless argument to her.

She believed if the great Satan America was destroyed evil would be destroyed. But it ain't so. People in the Soviet Union hoped and prayed for communism to fall, just as decades before they had hoped and prayed and worked for the end to the reign of the czars. Millions were certain that life would be great once communism was gone. But that wasn't what happened. The soullessness of communism was replaced by the soullessness of consumerism. They are sides of the same coin. Both communism and consumerism don't honor the Earth, Nature, or women. Neither encourages autonomy or creativity. Same thing with those who focus all their hatred on the absurd and oppressive policies of the United States. Yes, things need to change here in the United States, but that’s not the end of it. Governments and people all over the world need to change.

Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the U.S. should “pour U.S. tax dollars into girls' education in places like Pakistan, where the high-end estimate for female literacy is 26 percent, and into scholarships for women seeking higher education in nations that typically discourage it....Expand the grounds for asylum to all women fleeing gender totalitarianism, wherever it springs up. Reverse the Bush policies on global family planning, which condemn seventy-eight thousand women to death each year in makeshift abortions. Lead the global battle against the trafficking of women."

We do need a worldwide revolution, just as Ehrenreich suggests. A feminist revolution. Women in the United States have many more rights than most women in the world, so we ought to be leaders in this revolution.

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