A World That Seems To Hate Women

Supplementary Texts

Phrases

to be down in the dumps	matrimonial mates
to make sth from scratch	marriage for convenience
non-crease (wash-and-go) fabrics	trial separation
to work at many jobs	flexible work hours
child rearing	to turn over paychecks
day care (child-minding) centre	a home-maker
to be run down	marriage has many pitfalls
to be housebound	a raiser of children
behind the kitchen sink	to contribute to the family budget
to pull in one’s belt	the finances are touch-and-go
inferiority complex	means of self-fulfilment

domestic violence	to feel unfulfilled
sex role stereotypes	to be entitled to a (un)paid maternity leave
high death rate	from cradle to grave
to step out of the male shadow into the spot-light
HIV positive
to champion freedom/women’s rights
to contract a disease
to boss sb around
equal footing

Half the world's human beings are women, and yet statistics show there is no class of people more abused, aborted, exploited, humiliated, denigrated, harassed, molested, battered, persecuted-and even murdered and enslaved.

In America alone today – and the U.S. is one of the world's oases of freedom and opportunity for women – there are 250 000 females employed in illegal sweatshops and another 50 000 to 70 000 held in bondage as sex slaves in the country's prostitution enclaves.

Moreover, 3 million to 4 million women a year are battered. Fully 22 per cent of American adult females have been physically assaulted by a husband or boyfriend, according to an extensive 1998 U.S. Justice Department study. That's more than one in every five women, making it a certainty that virtually everyone in America (whether they have discovered it or not) knows several women who have been battered by their male partner and several men who strike their women, often habitually.

Other figures are equally unsettling.

• Some 100 million women are "missing" from the current population of the world. Many of them were murdered by their parents solely because they were girls. Many others died of malnutrition, disease, or lack of medical care, because a family's or community's scanty resources were withheld from them, again because they were female. Some perished at the hand of their male partners or of soldiers in war zones. This appalling global holocaust has been termed "gendercide".

• Around the world, roughly 25 per cent to 50 per cent of women have been victims of domestic violence at some point in their lives. Violent assaults by male companions or other family members is a leading cause of death among women aged 15 to 45.

• Globally, there are more women enslaved today than in the 1700s. Approximately 2,5 million women a year are seized and forced, or are tricked, into joining various countries' slavery industries.

• Not only are 50 000 to 100 000 women a year (a State Department estimate) trafficked into the United States for prostitution, bonded sweatshop labor, and domestic servitude, but a rapidly expanding pornography industry, especially on the Internet and through adult videos and cable TV, dehumanizes women by portraying them as one-dimensional objects-merchandise or dainties whose sole purpose is to be sexually consumed by men. Many sociologists agree that the tens of thousands of males a year who become cybersex compulsives saps the vitality from countless marriages,
contributing to America's epidemic of divorce, child abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases.

• Women are being threatened not only by their families, criminals, and the porn industry but through abortion as well. Here, culture and technology intersect to forge a two-edged sword that can literally cut females mortally. On the one hand, cultural tradition in most nations favors boy babies over girls. On the other, the new ultrasound technology makes it possible to determine the gender of a baby months before it is born. Thus, parents in many countries – especially China and India – are choosing to abort far more girl babies than boys.

Дата добавления: 2017-01-14