A rant.
Daine Rehm, who I normally love, has a show on right now where she is very uncritically discussing population control as it is connected to world sustainability. I guess it’s in honor of world day or something.
Some of the suggestions that have popped up as to how to lower world fertility rates have been contraceptives in the water, everybody who wants to be a parent has to “do something good,” and those who are “good parents” can have four or five children and those who suck can’t have any.
Oh, and women empowerment. Because, you see, when women have power over themselves they “make the right choice” and usually limit their fertility to population friendly numbers.
It’s interesting how “women empowerment” is being discussed in terms of, you guessed it, third world/developing world women. Because it’s third world/developing world women whose fertility is the *most* dangerous to the world, right? If they keep popping them out–mass starvation, global environmental destruction, civil wars, and mass hysteria will all break out.
*THAT*, my friends, is how dangerous brown women having babies truly is. The destruction of the world rests on their vaginas.
And meanwhile, this frontline program talks about how water from D.C. to Seattle in the U.S. are poisoned almost beyond recovery–why? Because of the unsustainability of a capitalistic system that prioritizes growth over interconnectedness, money over health, and toxicity over food chains.
Whole ecosystems of fish, crabs, oysters, whales, and plants are literally dying out because of unchecked “growth pollution.” Factory farm waste is being dumped untreated and unchecked into our water supplies. The dead zone area (unable to sustain any sort of life) in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Massachusetts and only growing. But this is all apparently ok–because it’s being done in the name of capitalism and growth. And isn’t capitalism as a system of governance the only system in the entire world that has ever worked?
Let’s think about things logically here for a minute. When did issues of population unsustainability begin to rear its ugly head? Let’s look at in the U.S.–post WWII. We’ve all heard scary stories about how the Baby Boom generation is going to break the U.S. economy. Well, what, exactly, coincided with post WWII baby making time? *ECONOMIC* prosperity, right?
Ok, let’s go back in time further. Back to that time when white Europeans were lecturing Native poeple about how they were not entitled to their own land because they hadn’t *developed* it properly. When those white folks refused to negotiate with Native women (thus *disempowering* those women) in treaty negotiations, when those same white folks forced Native youth to go to boarding schools and taught the girls how to be domestics and proceeded to rape both girls and boys with impunity (disempowerment?).
And yes, that was all done because capitalism *needed* Native land for “growth” and “development.”
And let’s think about Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,–and how many indigenous women were raped, murdered, forcibly impregnated, or forced into prostitution because of U.S. invasion (which, yes, was done in the name of “defending capitalism”).
And how about Iraq and Afghanistan–what does “spreading democracy” really mean when free market unchecked capitalism is implemented as the form of governance by colonizing governments? And what has it meant for women? Does the increased rates of suicide, rape, prostitution, lack of eduction have anything to do with this capitalistic intervention?
And these are all very blanket, non-nuanced understandings of how capitalism plays with the lives of women throughout the world. When you take the time to get more nuanced, you get an even more disturbing picture. Most pointedly–is it a surprise to any damn body that the work of raising children (i.e. future workers) is done for almost free of charge by most women throughout the world? We raise our children as if we had a choice in opting out of this system. As if we and our children some how exist independently of a structure that has a desperate need for cheap labor. In all reality, from the moment of conception, each child born has a realtionship with capitalism–a relationship with corporations. What will that child “be” when she grows up? Why is this question so important to us all?
Point blank, women are creating more workers. Period. And yet we exist world wide as one of the largest ununionzed workforces in the world. Is there a reason for this or is it just coincidence?
A joke:
What would happen if mothers would unionize?
Answer: fathers would suddenly get a lot more interested in raising their children.
The point is here–it’s not the scary brown vagina that holds the destruction of the globe in it’s layers. And it’s near impossible to me to fathom how capitalism as an entity can “empower” women when it has been so essential and necessary in the literal *enslavement* of women throughout the world.
Capitalism is an unsustainable model of living. The destruction it has forced on the world in just the last 200 years alone is important to notice–how can a world live without capitalism for literally millions of years just fine–capitalism comes along and suddenly global implosion becomes a reality?
It is NOT the best system we can come up with. And if we could all turn our violent “development” minded eyes away from the brown vaginas of the world and toward the destruction sitting in our own backyards, maybe there might be some space to hope after all.
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April 22nd, 2009 at 9:19 am #
Oh, well said! *applause*
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:41 am #
Speak it mujer.
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:09 am #
preach.
yknow, this reminds of me of my recent confusion about the whole thing about stopping women in the 3rd world from cooking over an open fire with dung or wood. a lot of scientists and policy makers are treating this like one of the main causes of global warming, second only to carbon emissions. they’re serious as a heart attack about getting “modern stoves” for people in places with no electricity to fight global warming…
um, what in the hell were people using for thousands of year? what were they doing, using prisoners of war as kindling or something? Only NOW this is a problem? gtfoh!
does someone know something i don’t? am i just ignorant? if i am, please educate me.
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:56 am #
Thank you for that. It was brilliantly written and wonderfully argued!
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:41 pm #
Not to mention — “contraceptives in the water” — we HAVE that. That’s what’s causing all kinds of really fun mutations in aquatic life and no doubt in ours… This is so stupid it’s mindboggling.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:02 pm #
BFP, I want to donaughty things to your scary brown vagina. You rock.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm #
Oh yeah, and contraceptives in the water is such a great idea.Beause it will be totally eay to make sure everyone gets exactly the right dose. And NOBODY has ever had a bad reaction to them and decided to use an alternative form of contraception, so forcing it down people’s throats aganst their will won’t hurt anyone. And it’s not like brown women deserve to control their own bodies. I mean, it’s bad enough that they had the audacity to be women, but being BROWN,too? That’s 100% unforgivable.
And as for the fish, well, who cares? I mean, it’s (white, rich, cissexual, non-disabled, genderconforming, English-speaking, non-boat-rocking) PEOPLE who matter, right? I mean, fish are all well and good, but we need to put our own secies first. I mean, what IS this? Some kind of earth day?
Oh. Yeah…
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:25 pm #
haha @SA that’s so funny–cuz I was just gonna post something about how I wanted to take up a close up picture of my scary graying child bearing vagina and post it as my header. I got some nasty comments about what a stupid bitch I am and stupid “brown bitches” need to stop having babies blah blah blah.
I figure a nice close up of brown vagina will scare trolls away quite effectively.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:34 pm #
@anon–I know. The guy talking was nothing more than a scare monger, IMO. He was basically to the point that he didn’t care *what* happened, as long as something happened–he even said something along the lines of “China may not have found the greatest way to deal with this, but at least they’re dealing with it” or something like that. The one woman on the panel was like–actually, several countries have thought about how to deal with population control and have gotten much better effects through less coercive means (I think she said Sweden and brazil as examples and pointed out how all they had done was make condomns and other birth control available).
Another interesting note, anon, was that the effects of contraceptives in water was actually discussed. A woman who works with dolphins and endocrines noted that the effect of contraceptives in the water system is producing devistating results on most ecosystems and pointed out that she wasn’t really sure how that would help–the main panalist guy was like–ah, yes, good point. But we have to do something. Or something.
I’m like–how about we *start* with cleaning up all the devistation we have committed world wide on our ecosystems–and maybe, just maybe, those ecosystems could actually provide enough food/resources for the population as it exists? I mean, I hate to be all, NO NO TO CONTRACEPTIVES, because when women have access, they use them, and I in NO way want to deny women the right to contraceptives–but why are these discussions on the environment ALWAYS centered on the bodies of third world/developing world? It’s the mexicans fault that the desert is being destroyed (nothing to do with the massive fence being built across that same desert, see community news) or the brown women who won’t stop having babies, or the brown women who want to use tampons instead of moon cups or what the fuck ever.
Never *ever* do does the U.S. ever have to interrogate *its* culpability in this freaking mess?
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:01 pm #
Right on (as usual).
You and Winona LaDuke on the radio were the very best of Earth Day, I say.
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:25 pm #
Of course the flip side to the fear of the brown vagina is promoting the birth rate of white women. It is not fear of pot population increase that really scared people but the thought that they could be over run by the uncivilized brown hordes. I think that you can really see this with the treatment of the pregnancy of Bristol Palin vs the teenage pregnancy of a young black woman.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:49 am #
*applause* great post
Scary how in discussions of reproductive rights, when the discussion centres on women in “developing” (don’t like the word for obvious reasons) nations, it’s all about, how can we educate them to use contraception and have fewer kids.
Yet you see all types of “fantastic empowered women” articles about women entrepreneurs working into their 70s, with glorious stories of their wonderful and numerous grandchildren, and how they’ve got so much more to offer them cause they’ve, I don’t know, had zillions of expensive holidays in other people’s misery and lots of money to buy treats.
I get creeped out in the UK (perhaps Ruth can corroborate this) by the coverage of stories about children – not only do only the cute, blonde crime victims get picked for coverage, but the tabloids are all “look at the beautiful child”, which instantly says to me, “look at the quality genetic material we lost!”. Not only is it scandalous that no one is interested in the thousands of kids who disappear every year that, maybe, have less blonde or cute genetic material, but the kid himself doesn’t deserve that. I’d hate to be a kid watching the news now: you’re either a ten-year-old murderer, an eight-year-old murder victim, you’ve vanished, or you’re invisible, or if you’re not white you’re probably a knife-crime victim in a seedy part of a big city – all the emotions and reactionary attitudes of adults being projected onto you, must be really scary.
You talked about the issue of “developing” the land as well, it’s horrifying that things as precious as land, people, culture, geography, are valued as commodities rather than for what they really are.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:59 am #
Here is the definiton of genocide under international law:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
This is definitely number 4, and could also be 2 and 3.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:00 am #
I think you would like this link:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6421/
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:36 am #
Interesting how the “US Americans have hugely disproportionate eco-footprints” news of a few years ago didn’t seem to result in the same same “bomb the water system with contraceptive drugs” message.
I double dog dare you to change your profile pic to your one of your vagina…though I’m not sure it would actually result in an overall decrease in creep traffic.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:49 am #
I think we do produce enough food to feed everyone in the world – the problem is that areas with low yield or income, or high population density, or all of them together, don’t produce enough food to feed their people.
Not only that, but there are plenty of highly productive areas in places like Guatemala, for example, where US and other international interests, own a large percentage of the arable land and use it to ship food back to the G20 countries so that we can have cheap oranges and bananas year round.
The company I work for is an importer of food ingredients, and it is not cheap. The only reason we buy foodstuffs overseas rather than from the US & canadian crops is because even with duties and freight charges, the profit margins are greater than buying say, beet sugar from michigan, or soy meal from canada. That chicken that was raised in california was raised on soy meal from china, and the quinoa from an american or canadian milling company (we deal with most of the organic mills I’ve seen on store shelves) is from bolivia. The sugar in some locally produced foodstuffs isn’t sourced from say, a local michigan beet sugar company, but it’s from Brazil.
We move this food all over the world because privilege + money enables it. It has got to stop.
April 24th, 2009 at 11:26 pm #
iirc, most of our ecological problems can be traced back 1000 years or more, some of them tens of thousands…
April 27th, 2009 at 2:47 am #
What a relief it is to find this opinion expressed. All my (white, western) friends are getting very, very into reproducing themselves, and I dare not mention that a western couple stopping at two children is the same, in environmental terms, as a Bangladeshi couple stopping at 1000.
Nobody that I know sees how our consumption habits are bleeding the rest of the world dry. Thanks for pointing out that part of the problem, Whit.