On the Moral Education of Males: Men Should Attend to Women’s Rights as Human Rights
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/24
Women’s rights are partially overlapping but sufficiently distinct from human rights. The rights stated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and in other documents.
Women’s rights encapsulate reproductive health rights as well. Some forms of reproductive health rights not for biological males. On occasion, the world undergoes reversals in the considerations of women as equal.
Men should care about women’s rights. Why? Men, as with women, are our fellow human beings, haven’t you noticed. The denial of rights for one sex implies the denial for the other, eventually. As with the use of war machines against enemy states, those methodologies of war come to the home turf in surveillance apparatuses and force against the home civilian population. Protection of rights implies self and collective interest.
According to UN News, there exist “alarming pushbacks” based on the description of the Working Group on Discrimination against Women in Law and in Practice. The working group stated the forces working against women’s rights include an “alliance of conservative political ideologies and religious fundamentalisms.”
This was noted in a report sent to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland.
The working group stated, “Practices such as polygamy, child marriage, female genital mutilation, so-called honor killings, and criminalizing women for sexual and reproductive behavior, have no place in any society…there is no acceptable justification for waiting for the elimination of discrimination against women.”
The reasons come from the rise in authoritarianism, economic crises, and the increase in inequality in societies becoming unhealthily stratified. There are positive changes including the Irish referendum for the repealing of the almost total ban on safe and equitable access to abortion.
In those prior circumstances, women go underground to acquire abortions. Thousands die and thousands more are injured for life as a result of the illegality and unsafe provisions of abortions. If abortion is safe and equitable in terms of access, which is a fundamental human right as noted by Human Rights Watch, then abortion rates go down, fewer women and infants die, and women and families, and babies are happier and healthier.
Therefore, as per the empirical support for the pro-choice argument, the true pro-life – and pro-family for that matter – individuals who want to lower the numbers of abortions – on only that singular focus and narrow ethical conceptualization of an important issue to innumerable people around the world – would support the legalization of safe abortions with equitable access to them too.
The working group continued, “Through popular vote as well as legislative and judicial actions, efforts are being made, in particular, to secure reproductive rights, which is encouraging in a global context of retrogressions in this area.”
Other countries work to close the gender gap and to strengthen the criminalization of sexual violence, misconduct, and rape. These are wins, not to be ignored or diminished in the long fight for equality.
However, the march of social and political conservativism connected to religious fundamentalisms amount to the main methodologies or grounds for techniques of social control against host populations. These then clamp down on women’s progress through denial of women’s rights.
The UN report talks about the culture, family, reproductive health, and sexual health as the biggest battlegrounds, where the lines are continually being redrawn internationally in the struggle for equality.
“For 70 years, women’s equality has been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; nearly 40 years ago the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women was adopted,” UN News explained, “… 25 years ago, on Monday, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action established that women’s rights are an indivisible part of human rights.”
The discrimination against women has not been eliminated in any country in the world, according to the experts’ report. This leaves room for vast improvement in the quality of life conditions for women in the world.
The further stated, “This should not be tolerated or normalized. There is an urgent need to protect past gains, and move forward to secure equality for women everywhere.”
As stated by John Stuart Mill, not exactly a fool, – and Harriet Taylor Mill, who he claimed was smarter than himself – in The Subjection of Women, on “The moral education of men,” stated:
My first answer is: the advantage of having the most universal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice instead of injustice. That bare statement will tell anyone who attaches a moral meaning to words what a vast gain this would be for the human condition; it’s hardly possible to make it any stronger by any explanation or illustration. All of mankind’s selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, are rooted in and nourished by the present constitution of the relation between men and women.
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