Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Enough

What do Daniel Tosh, Anita Sarkeesian, and Jesse Lee Peterson have in common? Practically nothing, except that they have all appeared in news stories this year about women’s issues that have been quite frankly horrifying.

I wrote an article about Reverend Peterson earlier this year when he gave a sermon on why he believes women are destroying America. His sermon was filled with hateful vitriol about women, running the gambit from they can’t handle pressure to they’re all sluts to they aren’t even capable of love. In the article, I explained why we should pay attention to this blatantly bigoted small-time preacher:
We should bother ourselves with people like him because this ugly sentiment is buried deeply in American culture. We see it come out in media figures like Rush Limbaugh, in legislative efforts like the more than nine hundred bills introduced this year alone in state and federal legislature to limit women’s rights, in the thirty-one Republicans who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, and we see it glamorized in media portrayals of women as objects. When almost a third of female homicide victims are killed by their partner and one in five American women have been the victim of rape or attempted rape, we can’t afford to remain silent about this issue.
The events in recent weeks involving Daniel Tosh and Anita Sarkeesian are exactly the sort of thing I was talking about.

Read more at The Inclusive.

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