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Gender Equality and Climate Change

Matt Peterson describes the way women and the environment are ignored as a bd relationship.

I think we are all stuck in a bad relationship.

And what are the hallmarks of a good relationship? Communication. Listening. Respect.

Well, we are not listening -- and certainly not demonstrating our respect -- to the planet or for women and girls, as they suffer at our hands. We seem to be deaf as both are speaking out loud and clear.

Whether it is growing impact of global warming as evidenced by sea-level rise and storm surge from Hurricane Sandy, or the epidemic of violence against women as seen in the unspeakable atrocities against women and girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We are not listening.

... a place where these two challenges -- these two bad relationships -- are more interlinked than anywhere else perhaps on planet Earth.

A place where the bastardized concept of dominion - dominion over women and the planet - has spun out of control.

... the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place that is rich in so many ways, but particularly in natural resources, including rare-earth minerals. These rare-earth minerals are essential to our cell phones and other electronic goods that we have become so dependent on, which we supposedly "need" for our daily lives. And what's happened?

Armed militias, who depend on profiting from these rare-earth minerals, use rape of women and girls to control and continue to profit from these rare-earth minerals. Over half a million women and girls have been raped in the last 10 years alone in the Congo.

Why is the Eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, as a UN official recently put it? In great part because we're so dependent on these cell phones and electronic goods, and the rare-earth -- or conflict minerals -- needed to manufacture them. [emphasis mine]

Tags: climate change, rape, rare earth minerals

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by TNT666 on February 14, 2013 at 8:21pm

Biological sex equality, not gender equality. Genders, gods, fairies, santas, no.

Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on February 14, 2013 at 10:48pm

Perhaps there's a strong cultural component to "gender", but as long as the term is used to exploit half of humanity it can't simply be dismissed as fairies can be.

Permalink Reply by TNT666 on February 14, 2013 at 11:17pm

30 years ago it became politically correct to say "gender" instead of "sex" for female or male, but today the word "gender" has been taken over and the term now has "essentialist" meaning, speaking of some vague concept of "feeling female on the inside", going beyond the meaning of its original intention. I have banned the word gender from my vocabulary, and I solicit all rational thinkers and scientists to do the same. Many feminist groups are also working along this train of thought.
I am a female. I have no gender, not in the eyes of science anyway.

The media of course can continue to misconstrue science and definitions, but it is the duty of rational thinkers to not fall for it, nor propagate it.

The half of humanity that are exploited are female sexed.

Permalink Reply by Fatma Kurt on February 15, 2013 at 1:29am

In Turkish, we use the same word for sex or gender: cinsiyet. Sexual is cinsel, sexuality is cinsellik. The root of them all is cins meaning simply sex again. So translations make the difference disappear here. Maybe the non-native part of the female sexed people just don't know what the cultural component to gender is. I've realized it just now.

Permalink Reply by TNT666 on February 15, 2013 at 2:25am

Until a decade ago, they were nearly undistinguishable in English/French too. It's only in the last decade that gender has come to mean some sort of essentialist "inside feeling" of "femaleness".

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