Sex Discrimination
A bit of painful imagery is utilized for the purpose of describing how sexual discrimination is indoctrinated into legal codification. As one might well expect, this codification arrives courtesy of patriarchal indoctrination. There are few surprises in the legal world, after all:
“This so-called `benign discrimination’ is considered the only way to analyze women substantively as women for legal purposes. In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females.”
What is Gender?
Some remember the so-called good old days when the question of “what is gender” seemed like a strange question. Of course, today we know a lot more about how we know a lot less about gender than once thought. The author, however, frames the question—for her own specific purpose—with imagery that adds yet another dimension:
“Gender is an inequality of power, a social status based on who is permitted to do what to whom. Only derivatively is it a difference. Differences between the sexes do descriptively exist; being a doormat is definitely different from being a man. That these are a woman's realistic options, and that they are so limiting, calls into question the explanatory value and political agenda implicit in terming gender a difference. One is not socially permitted to be a woman and neither doormat nor man.”
What is a Prisoner?
The same sort of use of imagery is engaged to answer the question of what defines a prisoner. This is a question that has always been and remains far easier to answer than what is gender. But even so, the author’s imagery creates a very precise and specific portrait for its answer:
“The liberty of prisoners is restricted, their freedom restrained, their humanity systematically diminished, their bodies and emotions confined, defined and regulated. If paid at all, they are paid starvation wages. They can be tortured at will and it is passed as discipline or as means to a just end. They become compliant. They can be raped at will, at any moment, and nothing will be done about it. When they scream, nobody hears. To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status”
Mrs. America
Before becoming famous as a character nailed by Cate Blanchett in the miniseries Mrs. America, Phyllis Schlafly was on her way to becoming just another footnote in the political history of America; a woman whose life had become a “might have been” rather than an “actually was.” Between her heyday and Blanchett’s resurrection, Schlafly occupied that middle ground of fame where she was mostly still remembered only by the opponents she defeated and certainly not fondly even then:
“Before she decided that feminists create the problems we fight, back in 1967, she knew sexism when she encountered it. When she was attacked for having six children as a disqualification for a party post, she placed a cartoon in her book Safe—Not Sorry showing a door labeled `Republican Party Headquarters,’ with a sign reading `Conservatives and Women Please Use Servants' Entrance.’ Now the conservatives are in. Are women still to use the back door?”
