The dignity of women and the long rape

The woman is the first instalment of the glorification of man. She is his raising and elevation from a material being to a being who can love, and can serve, and wait and endure and make himself open and vulnerable, who can risk everything and grow in responsibility, gaining dignity through suffering.

But for the last couple of generations men have been taught not to challenge women. Women have a free ticket to the top and there is none of the necessary experience necessary so she arrives inexperienced and unable to take difficult decisions. Then she and everyone subordinate to her are in trouble. That trouble cannot be dealt with until someone, some man, takes the first step of saying that she is in the wrong place and must step down from this position because she does not have the authority it requires.

Until that moment comes, women are being plundered. The more women are at top of hierarchies, the more women are actually exposed and vulnerable. Women are plundered for what they can provide to the real power brokers now. Real power is usually exercised from behind the scenes, anonymously, as I am sure you know. Our power brokers are happy to have women at the top because it enables them to wield real power from behind the scenes and without challenge. Our power brokers never ask themselves how our society is going to survive this.

You would think that all women are pro-woman. Not so. Many are. Many would like to pass on their wisdom and experience over a lifetime and so want someone to pass their experience on to. They want daughters. Then they want there to be other young men for their daughters, and other young women for their sons. That is how they wish to serve womanhood and give womanhood a future. Future-oriented women are ready to do and to endure what is necessary to bring about this communication of life and experience on to a new generation. In order to give it life, they are willing to subordinate themselves to this new generation.

But many of these women are being denied their own daughters and children. And who is denying them this? Why, they themselves. They are denying themselves the opportunities to love, to engage, to lead and create the new institutions, to commit and initiate and triumph. They are allowing their responsibility to be taken away from them and their dignity to disappear.

Their dignity is also disappearing because they are giving it away, not realising that this is what they are doing. There are not enough men around to tell them not to give their responsibility away and to hang on to their dignity. Those women have not wanted to hear this warning and so have put some distance between themselves and their nearest menfolk. They give their responsibility away every time they accept the offer from some corporation to provide some service for them, a package that claims to provide just what they want, that fits their busy working lives, so that they have more time for themselves. The corporations manage to remove our dignity by taking decisions away from us by offering time-saving ‘packages’ – candy from a baby.

Dignity is being taken from women. Women are torn out of the relationships which give them their dignity. We are all witnesses to this slow relationship stripping which is the long rape of this generation’s women. This is violation of women and of men. It is a weapon used to demoralise men so that they don't identify with those women, feel any compassion for them or step in to protect them. This stripping is intended to create a disabling sense of shame that stops men from protesting and intervening.

We are accomplices to the dismemberment of our families and of the large family that is our society. The familial relationships by which we once knew who we were, and by which it was an honourable thing to be a sister or aunt or grandmother, are being dismantled. In every case the particular actual relationships with specific people are being given up in favour of the mirage of relationships that are general and universal, with the groups with which we are encouraged to identify ourselves by the media. Our children are taught to despise their own people and to prefer any of groups identified with glamour. Men have been taught to walk away from the woman they have made pregnant, talking about her right to choose – a ‘right’ that is sheerly demonic. This generation has no rights to deny life to the next generation. The present has no right to destroy the future.