Naomi Wolf has done an excellent job of scaring the beejesus out of me. I link to an article of hers in The Guardian so you can read all about what scared me. I am just going to post the two paragraphs that did it. I want this idea discussed by the Progressive Hive Mind. Maybe I am overreacting? Talk me down because the hair is standing up on the nape of my neck.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
I pay attention to what groups do. One of the things I noticed about a group called Taliban is that the first thing they did when they took over a town was segregate the women by confining them to their homes. I thought at the time that there is no better way to subjugate and control a population. Everybody has a Mother. Now I find that Naomi Wolf thinks the same and then she takes it a step or two further. Whoa. Naomi Wolf is a lot smarter than I am.
Some have argued that this present "war on women" is a war against progressivism – or a war against feminism, in particular. I would say, looking at the big picture, that it is more serious than that – not that those options are not plenty serious enough. I would say that the call for transvaginal probes, for gagging medical providers, for sending the state to shake a finger for an extra 72 hours at a distressed woman and stand between her and the discussion she is having with her inner-most and private conscience, is all part of the larger crackdown we see on privacy, private space, freedom and personal choice.
It is on the same spectrum of control: the will to gag Bradley Manning or Julian Assange also seek to gag a medical provider in South Dakota. The same impulse to peer into personal emails and listen to private phone calls that has led the NSA to pour billions into surveillance stations in Utah, is the same impulse of panopticon state control that wants to get between the sheets of men and women in consensual sexual decision-making, and monitor or restrict their access to condoms and contraception. And it is the same Big Brother impulse for control that maintains that what a woman does with her own care-provider is a function of state management.