Friday, December 27, 2013

Feminism for the 21st century

BBC World News aired a Hardtalk with Gloria Steinem earlier today. I watched diligently the first couple of minutes, and I was again struck buy the elaborate, nerdy way in which she puts together her sentences. Substantively, I still ponder the following question. Ms. Steinem remade a point she has raised countless times in the past: in the U.S., “if you count up all the people who were killed in 9/11, plus Americans who were , and you count up all the women who were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in the same amount of time, more women were murdered by their husbands and boyfriends than were killed in those three events.


I suppose this is intended as a condemnation of patriarchy – and I am fine with that, since I have no part in it. However, I am quite sure – thought I don’t have the patience to look up the data – that during the same time period even more women (and perhaps children) were killed in the U.S. by firearms which were not fired by a significant other; and more women and children per capita were killed by cars in any “developed” country. So I am left scratching my head – what are these statistics supposed to tell us?