The Thompson Reuters Foundation is reporting that the United States is the 10th-most dangerous country in the world for women. The U.S. ranks only marginally better than such places as the Democratic Republic of Congo, perhaps the poorest place left on the planet; Yemen, in the middle of a bloody and large scale war; and Nigeria, where Boko Haram has been known to kidnap entire schools of girls to rape and enslave.
That America is counted among such company is obviously an obscenity. But which?
The obscenity is actually that anyone is deluded enough to believe this nonsense. America certainly isn’t perfect (as a foreigner I’m not even convinced that it’s quite that shining city on the hill). But it’s most certainly one of the best places to have ever been alive in. And that goes double for the women in it. Consider that the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head for her suggestion that girls should go to school. Women gain more advanced degrees than men in the U.S. these days. This is evidence of a certain difference in rights and opportunities, no?
Between 1 percent and 1.5 percent of the entire U.S. population were able to turn out for the Women’s March in their “Pussyhats,” while Saudi women have only just been allowed to drive, and Iranian still cannot attend sporting events. These are vast differences in rights. That the Women’s March was originally driven by mere sexual boasting is also evidence of a chasm in the lived experience. That so many were driven to protest over said crudity of expression shows that the more important parts of life are already sorted.
The mistake here was one made by Thompson Reuters. They went and asked, of all people, the experts on women’s human rights. There’s something important or us all to consider about such people: groupthink. Within any human grouping that doesn’t care to reference the outside world as they discuss among themselves, certain false beliefs will rise to prominence. Here, asking 700 or so “experts” ends up being asking 700 people with preconceptions about the world, each driving the other on to assertions ever greater — and further from reality. It is in this manner that we get the claim that the U.S. is equal to Syria in sexual violence. Our experts are equating the propositioning of some actresses in the U.S. with mass rape and enslavement in Syria.
No, I am not just being flippant. The report itself insists that views were driven by the #MeToo movement. It claims Harvey Weinstein’s gross misconduct is sexual violence of the same order as the massacre of all the Yazidi men and the sexual slavery of the women.
All of us out here in reality have a grip on life, a sense of proportion. What this report is telling us is that groupthink has sent the experts mad and denied them of any ability to see perspective.
Again, America is not perfect and it’s undoubtedly true that some women have been harmed, harassed, and hassled by some men. It is not true that this rises to anything like the level of oppression suffered by other women elsewhere. To assert so is not just a delusion, it is ridiculous.
Consider this: Current debates over female reproductive rights in the U.S. seem to be concentrating upon whether employers must righteously pay for contraception, whether justice requires taxpayer funding of abortion infrastructure (even if not the act itself). Significant parts of the world are still pondering whether forced female genital mutilation is both just and, or only, righteous. To percieve those as equal violations of women’s rights is an obscenity.
Which leaves us with the one thing which is truly great: the time and place I’m asserting all this. We get to disagree as much as we like with each other. That is something denied to far too much of the world even now, especially women.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
