The Chris Hedges Report: Disaster patriarchy and the global war on women

now you talk about terror [Music] what about for me [Music] i've been terrorized [Music] all my days [Music] the leaked majority draft opinion in dobbs versus jackson women's health which suggests the supreme court is poised to overturn roe v wade returning the question of abortion to the states is part of a broader assault against women the covet 19 pandemic has seen an estimated 30 percent increase in violent attacks against women along with the curtailment of their rights this assault rights v formerly known as eve ensler is quote the most severe setback to women's liberation in my lifetime end quote much of this abuse including an increase in sex and labor trafficking is driven by the loss of work further disempowering women in the u.s she writes more than 5 million women's jobs were lost between the start of the pandemic and november 2020 because much of the women's work requires physical contact with the public restaurants stores child care health care settings theirs were some of the first to go those were able to keep their jobs were often front line workers whose positions have put them in great danger some 77 of hospital workers and 74 percent of school staff are women even then the lack of child care options left many women unable to return to their jobs joining me to discuss the assault on women's rights as well as their new book the apology is the tony award-winning playwright and author and activist v formerly known as eve ensler so v let's begin with the expected supreme court decision with this leak uh number one were you surprised and number two uh where do we go from here i was surprised it was leaked that's for sure um i just want to say how happy i am to be with you chris to be talking to you um and i was not surprised um that i think we've all been waiting to hear that this was coming um i think there's so many feelings that i'm having about this and so many i just got off a call with many women who all of whom on that call were clear that this ruling will never be accepted by many many women across this country and it is coming out of a theocratic court it is coming from judges who perjured themselves on the stand when they talked about robes versus wade it is coming from sexual predators on the court clarence thomas and brett kavanaugh and by people who were appointed to that court by a sexual predator president so we can't at all trust them to you know women don't not only want to go near these um men in terms of their bodies but we certainly wouldn't accept laws from them and i think one of the things we all need to be thinking about and i've been thinking about this so much this last week is when our institutions fail us as the supreme court is doing um 70 of the people in this country support abortion support reproductive justice support reproductive rights when the our institutions fail us it's not just our right it is our duty to not obey those institutions and i think what we have to communicate now to the senate to the to the courts is that women across this country are not going back in the bottle we've been freed for 50 years we've had choice we will never give those rights up that's not going to happen and we're not going to accept this period i want to talk about the democratic party because the democratic party had 50 years when it could have codified this in to law you had jimmy carter uh you had uh clinton and you had uh barack obama all of whom had majorities at least at the inception of their presidencies barack obama said i think it's called the freedom of choice i can't remember the title of it act that would have codified roe v wade into law was the first thing he was going to sign when he took office he said this is a candidate and then in his eight years as president never signed it uh talk a little bit about the failure of the democratic party to stand up and and do what it should do well i think it's it's it's exactly what the democratic party is doing right now right what was biden's message that he put out when this happens this is what we will do it wasn't you know you don't lead people into battle already claiming defeat right as you you're moving into it you say we will stand up and we will fight to make sure this never happens and i think that attitude that commitment to women to people with with pregnancies who want wanted or on one has never been there in the democratic party it has never been um the with the rigor with the devotion with the commitment that is necessary to codify a law and i think we are seeing the the results of that now right and and i think one of the things we all have to look at is the people have to be clear that this is not what the people want and we have to go to any lengths to show we will not accept this as law we will not because i believe as many people believe once the chips start to go every right is going to start to go with him this is essentially a theocratic uh christian right-wing um takeover of the courts and it will we've already seen what it's done with voting rights it's going to keep going one right after another right after another right so i think i don't even know it's about pushing the democratic party anymore because i think we have pushed and pushed and pushed i think it's more people saying at this moment the state is no longer serving us in ways that are necessary to protect our basic rights i mentioned before we went on the air that i covered romania where abortion was illegal it didn't stop abortions it meant that those who had resources the wealthy the mistresses of the party bosses all had access to safe abortions and poor women died in back rooms that's what happens when you outlaw abortion that's exactly right and we know that the people who are going to suffer most in this country from this loss are black women and brown women and poor women and indigenous women and immigrants and people who don't have access to resources and money and this will be devastating and the idea that we think we're going to go back to those times where women's bodies are destroyed or when women are forced to have children against their will this is just unconscionable it's not it's not possible it's not something we can accept and we should be clear biden supported the hyde amendment which stopped the federal government from paying for abortions and he supported uh allowing states uh individually to overturn roe v wade so i mean that's biden's track record on this issue right and i think you know what we need right now one of the things we were talking about is like we need leadership in this country that has the commitment to women's rights that and and and commitment to lgbt rights and commitment to voting rights inc that that are matching the times that we are living in with with the energy with the thinking with the imagination with the creativity and with the commitment and we we see that completely lacking in the democratic party i'm sorry it's just not there uh before we talk about the response um why what is it about patriarchy that is so obsessive about abortion well i think one of the things we have to look at is like a history of going back and back and back to when when did the idea of controlling women's bodies start you know and my piece in the guardian i wrote like what is it about women's bodies right that make the patriarchy so afraid right and insecure and so cruel and so punishing and i think it has to do with our autonomy and i think it has to do with our mere existence i think it has to do with our capacity for pleasure and unending pleasure i think it has to do with our strength which is able to bend and carry and birth and lift and and isn't isn't reliant on weapons and and violence but is it it has an inherent strength it has an inherent energy of strength and i think that patriarchy is insistent that there are certain men that rise that control the dominate that have the goods that have it all that that hierarchy is maintained and i think when women have a right to their bodies and have access to their bodies and and know that they can have children if they want them and don't have children if they want to if they can have sex when they want to or not have sex when they want to we're living in a completely different world and i think there is a huge pushback against those world that world because essentially the few very very white men who have the power will be disabled of that power and they are not giving it up so where do we go what's the response you're right there's a kind of fatalism on the part of the democratic party leadership that it's already going to happen what should we do i think what we have to do first of all is believe that we can we can do something i mean my feeling the last few days is talking to people and hearing just this feeling like there's nothing we can do this is you know i've been reading so much about you know the early days of germany when they were banning books and and and and nazis were beginning to evolve and and there was time in those moments for people to really make change and for people to fight back and for people to say this is not my country anymore this i don't recognize this country anymore and i think part of what we have to do is be willing to be more bold more daring go further out to actually shut this country down if it means that all of our rights that are entangled in one right like the fact that we keep separating our voting rights from abortion rights from um from gay and and lgbtq rights but all of this is the same story there is an attempt to keep the world that is trying to emerge from emerging the world where we for example reckon with our history and look at the history of white supremacy in this country and teach real critical race theory and look at what what what what this history of this country has done to indigenous people to black and brown people uh i i i it's pushing back against gender liberation it's pushing back against working workers rights liberation it's looking back against a deep and powerful concern for the earth and for protecting the world all of these things are one for all in all for one and what patriarchy and what capitalism has brilliantly done has divided us into these silos so we all think we're fighting for this issue over here in this issue over here when in fact this is one story and when we go out to fight for one issue we need to fight for all issues and i think first it's believing that you can change things and standing up and joining forces and becoming unified with others and fighting that and that is saying it's being willing to say i'm just not going to accept this as law period that's not going to happen so when i don't accept that what's going to happen as a result of me not accepting that and i think that's what has to emerge over these next days uh i want to talk about the you which you write about in the guardian the the covet crisis being manipulated and used by patriarchy and you had some staggering figures and these are global figures of uh violence disappearance with that lockdown with covid with the law with the economic consequences of the pandemic you've also seen a reassertion of a very uh dark patriarchal figures speak about about what's happened yes it's been really really terrifying um i wrote this piece called disaster um patriarchy which was based on naomi klein's idea of disaster capitalism when capitalism when capitalists used a disaster to impose measures they couldn't possibly get away with in normal times generating more private from themselves and disaster patriarchy would be a parallel and complementary process where men exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominate and rapidly erase the hard earned rights of women and all over the world patriarchy has taken full advantage of this virus to reclaim power on one hand escalating danger and violence to women everywhere and then the other then kind of stepping in as this supposed controller and protector of women um i have to tell you that working on the front lines of violence against women we have seen an explosion of violence uh towards women across the planet and um cisgendered gender diverse violence intimate terrorism i mean first of all the fact that people were locked in their homes with partners with their children no one even considered what kind of violence that would generate when men weren't working when no one was working when people were panicked about how they were going to live when people were getting sick we've seen unbelievable violence and we don't even know what that is yet and then of course at the same time they were shutting down you know shelters and places that people could escape to and and and and not like lifting up women and protecting women and i think we've seen the spread of revenge porn um as the world was pushed online and digital sexual abuse has escalated um i i hate to be the bearer of really bad news but confinement um it was a perfect uh kind of storm with economic insecurity fear of illness and excess of alcohol all of these combined to make violence disturbing everywhere and you know i i i'm in contact with sisters around the world from italy to to the philippines to all across this planet it is the same thing across the world the statistics of violence against women during the pandemic are absurdly high and and i think you know as we come out of the pandemic um what's being done to support those women because so much of those shelters and so much of those systems that would be there for women have gone away because there's no funding for them um and i think we've also seen the rise of rape we've seen the rise of sex trafficking because of poor families around the world one of the things that deeply concerns me is how many girls have been out of school and the ending of education for young girls because we were seeing a a progression of that and a movement forward on that in the world and to see millions of girls out of school there's pushbacks on so many things one that for example if you look at the issue of female genital mutilation right when girls were going to school um and they weren't being cut they were they were you know becoming doctors they were becoming teachers they were becoming people who could provide for their families and so their families weren't cutting them anymore because they were bringing income and they were bringing food back to their family after they've been educated now with girls not being able to go to school we're seeing a rise again of fgm we're seeing a rise again of of families selling off their daughters rise again of being pushed into child marriage and i think this isn't even been taken up on a scale or being addressed on the scale that it needs to be addressed on because it's really happening in real time um and then as you said at the beginning of the show like in the us more than five million women have lost their jobs right and because because of that women are now home they're back inside the house taking care of children all day long taking care of their families all day long we can't even estimate how exhausted women are as a result of the pandemic and how panicked they are about what's become of their lives that they had before before the virus let's talk about women on the front lines you write about the nurses for example but it is a disproportionate percentage of women who uh in the midst of this pandemic are on the front lines talk a little bit about what's happened to them well i think i really want to talk specifically about both nurses and restaurant workers you know as we all remember at the beginning of the pandemic um no one even thought about what was going to happen to our nurses and to our care workers in hospitals remember women were being forced to wear garbage bags as protective uniforms and um they were reusing masks which were obviously going to get them sick um the the way nurses have been treated throughout this pandemic who are the fundamental people on the front lines has been simply outrageous and and and in my opinion profoundly inhumane and i i did a piece called um that kindness where i interviewed lots of women who were on the front lines to ask them what it was like during the pandemic and you know nurses become nurses because they want to heal and they want to make people better and to put nurses into conditions where they are on these front lines but really cannot help people get at the beginning of the pandemic nurses were just flooded with patients they weren't able to help anyone they were they were doing their best to heal and do this but with no support with no um with no backup from from the from the government from the hospitals and that is across the board like in terms of women's work if you look at women in restaurants um who are still fighting you know they have most of them are making two point thirteen cents and two dollars and thirteen cents an hour are fighting for the basic you know fair wage those women have been forced to work in restaurants where there's even a new development called mascular harassment if one can believe this where when you're serving a man they were asked to take down their mask so the man could see if they were pretty enough to get a tip and obviously this risk this puts women at high risk of getting sick it puts them at risk of obviously it's it's humiliating it's it's it's degrading but there was nothing women could do to fight that because there was no one backing them up during the pandemic and i think the more the more um the more we erode women's rights in the workplace um the harder it gets for women to stay well to do their jobs well to um to even keep those jobs because they're they're so working against their their basic human rights you you you write about women farm workers as well pesticides poisoning sexual abuse heat stress issues i want to read a little passage you wrote and then have you comment on it you said covet has revealed the fact that we live with two incompatible ideas when it comes to women the first is that women are essential to every aspect of life and our survival as a species the second is that women can easily be violated sacrificed and erased this is the duality that patriarchy has slashed into the fabric of existence and that covet has laid bare if we are to continue as a species this contradiction needs to be healed and made whole i thought that was a really prescient point thank you chris um i feel it so deeply and i feel it particularly around everything that's going on with the with with abortion too you know women are expected to do basically all the the labor and all the work that keeps this culture together and keeps the world together whether it's parenting or teaching or caring for people in restaurants or or taking care of the elderly or working as nurses or working in the field or we just go down the list we the world would stop it absolutely stop in its tracks if women withdrew their labor from it who would wear the children who would teach the children who would who would who would nurse people who would care for people we who would clean who would who would who would do everything that is essential to our lives and yet we are the most undervalued unpaid unrecognized uncherished and most easily disposed of and i think one of the things i think we have to understand as women and and people who who are doing this work is that we actually have power we hold the power and if we make a decision to withhold that power and stop doing all these things the world would actually stop that we have essential value that we are critical to the evolution of the human race and the continuation of the human race and if we make a decision to say we are no longer participating in this until the world changes it will change but part of it is getting us together and unifying us with our male and and lgbtq allies so that we are all joined in this understanding that there are only some people who are valued in this culture there are the rich the billionaires the white men the people with power are valued and everybody else is not and so part of it is how do we all come together to understand that we are in a struggle to fight for the majority to fight for majority rights to fight for what is basic and human and and to stand for the people who keep this world together i want to close by talking about your book which i read the apology beautifully written hard to read um it's essentially written in the voice you wrote it but written in the voice of your father who uh sexually abused you as a child talk about why you wrote it and uh and why an apology is so important [Music] thank you for asking me about the book um you know i i i think as a child i always thought there would come a day where my father would wake up and come to consciousness and realize what he had done that he had sexually abused me that he had beaten me that he had almost murdered me and that he would come to his senses and say you know i was wrong and i want to make amends to you and i want to look deeply in my soul for what i've done and that didn't happen i waited 30 you know i waited all my life and then my father died and and somehow even in his death i had this fantasy for 31 years that i would go to the mailbox and there would be this apology letter and he would finally have sent it to me from some other realm and i i don't think i'm alone i think there are millions if not billions of women waiting for those apologies and then me too happened and i saw so many men being called out for their behavior whether it was sexual harassment whether it was rape whether it was abuse whether whatever it was and i kept waiting for men to be accountable to make apologies to do self-reflection to look at themselves to say this is what i've done and i'm doing self-investigation and i'm trying to understand how did i become a man who was capable of doing those things what in my family what in the culture what in the society made me like this and to do the work enough so that apologies could be met and to be honest with you i didn't hear one single apology not only that we see men who have done terrible things you know going to prison briefly and then getting out or never going to prison or never having any ramifications and so i realized you know i've been waiting this apology my whole life i'm just gonna write it i'm gonna write the apology to myself and say the words to myself that i needed to hear so that i could be transformed and i could go on with my life and to be honest writing this book was probably the hardest thing i've ever done in my life i had to kind of climb into my father who's been dead for 31 years but to be honest as soon as i made the determination to write the book he felt very much present through the writing of the book and i had to kind of go into him to try to understand not justify let me be clear there's a difference between understanding and justification to understand what went into my father who was he that he was capable of attempting to completely destroy his child his daughter to sexually abuse her to put her down to beat her to eviscerate her on every level to make her feel stupid to make her feel unworthy and doing that was a very very profound thing because i began to understand patriarchy on a level i had never understood and i began to understand that one of the columns of patriarchy one of the things keeping it supporting and holding it up is the non-apology is men having joined in some kind of unspoken unconscious decision that they will never say they're sorry because once man one man says he's sorry the whole system begins to crumble the whole the whole idea and i think what i discovered is that apologies are a pathway for all of us in a lot of different areas look we have we have a country with completely unexamined history denied denied denied whether it's how this country began with the destruction and the genocide towards the indigenous and the eviscerating stealing of their lands and the eviscerating of their culture going towards 400 years of slavery and the destruction of african americans and and jim crow and all that's come after and all of that has been buried there's been no apology there's been no reckoning there's been no accountability and i think part of this country one of the reasons we're here is we have diabolical amnesia it's diabolical and that is countered with an apology because an apology forces you to remember forces you to go back forces you to look at the details of what actually happened and what you are responsible for and then it gets you to actually say to the person you're apologizing to i understand what my actions did to you i see the impact of it on you i see the long-term effects it's had on you i actually get that i am responsible for that and i take responsibility so that you're not guest lit for the entire for your entire future so you understand your didn't make this up that you're not insane this really happened and you can be free of those crimes as well as the perpetrator beginning to be free of those crimes well if there's no honest reckoning with the past there's no capacity to have a dialogue none because you have to begin grounded in a truth however unpleasant in the book you talk about its ramifications very self-destructive ramifications that it had on you perhaps the the kind of reverberations of that abuse are awful can you address that thank you for asking that because i think one of the things we do is we talk about quote gender violence and we we keep it very abstract and we don't look at what does what does the impact what is the impact of sexual abuse on children and girls and boys and what what is the impact of violence i i grew up i was an outcome of violence i was a consequence of violence my daily existence was threatened by being beaten by and and that came after the years where my father was coming into my room at night and invading my body and taking me and doing with me what he wanted to do with me so i grew up in a state of terror anxiety i couldn't think i lost my ability to think i couldn't focus i couldn't concentrate i had to start basically erasing everything that had been done to me because it was so intolerable so i began to erase my memory and my capacity for memory my body got sick it got all kinds of strange um infections it became vulnerable in ways it would never have become vulnerable if somebody hadn't invaded me i lost my capacity for intimacy like i you know whatever relationships i was in the closer i got to the whoever i was involved with i had to withdraw myself because it was too frightening because intimacy meant a form of takeover and violence and invasion um there are so many and you know it's it's interesting i you know 12 years ago i had um you know stage 3 slash 4 uterine cancer and i started to really do research about how many women have gotten reproductive cancers and i have to say i know i haven't been able to prove this scientifically yet but it will be proved eventually there is a direct link between trauma towards the body and cancers that develop in the body it is absolutely i think one day we will come to call cancer trauma there is a direct link with that so the kind of impact um that sexual violence has on children on women on our our our mental health our ability to believe that we are worthy i mean i have fought my entire life um not to believe i am nothing not to believe i'm stupid not to believe i you know to fight to believe i have a right to be here because that right was eviscerated from the time i can remember and um you know and i'm a fortunate person i'm a white person i grew up in an upper middle class environment where at least i was exposed to resources that could help me but i've spent time in prisons i've spent time in homeless shelters i spend time where there are poor people who haven't those access to those resources and they simply disappear they simply are broken they simply are drug addicts they they end up doing crimes because they they at some point all of the trauma that's been done to them is explosive and eventually there's a reaction to it and we don't treat any of this um although there are millions of us who are in this position because one out of three women um will be beaten or raped in her lifetime i did a book on the christian right uh american fascists that kristen write the war in america i didn't put it in the book but i interviewed uh you know dozens and dozens of women in the movement and every single one had spoken about domestic or sexual abuse every single one yeah and i think it's one of those things where when you look i've been doing this work you know to end violence against all women and girls for it's going to be 25 years and i sat with women everywhere in the world and all over this country and um there are so many women who have been beaten who have been raped who have been cut who have been incested and yet it's the underlying thing that's determining so much of our existence and still has not been confronted in a way that is is measurable you know that it is comparable to the the severity of of of the crimes and i think that's all part of this way of minimizing women and erasing women and making women feel they don't have a right to their voice and a right to their body and a right to their their just their basic worth great we're going to stop there v i want to thank the real news network and its production team cameron grenadino adam coley dwayne gladden and kayla rivera you can find me at chrishedges.substance.com [Music] you

Channel: The Real News Network

Views: 16,879

Keywords: the Chris Hedges Report, the real news, v formerly eve ensler, roe v. wade, abortion, Supreme Court, SCOTUS, the apology, vagina monologues, violence against women, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, LGBTQ+ rights

Id: 6ORw_p1ZbZ0

Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022