Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation

0 thoughts on “Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation”

1. Not very tangentially: HIV infection in women in India is called “mother-in-law” disease by doctors. Most women are infected by their husbands, and even if they *know* their husbands’ HIV status, the pressure to have children is so high that it often overrides the fear of infection. Doctors now are managing medication intervention programs (bringing viral loads down) and artificial insemination treatments to spare these women from HIV while still allowing them to become pregnant.

2. I’m not as versed in this as you are but from the outset, I’m finding ths hard to swallow. Intercourse, other than rape, is performed by two consensual people so why is it the man killing the woman? When women die in childbirth how likely is it that they view the situation as the man killing them?

3. I wonder. It seems that all of the things you mention are part of a pattern: the patriarchal power structure has treated women as disposable for centuries. When you said “But females of all ages are still objectified, harassed, molested and assaulted at a staggering rate” I think it points to the concept in our society of women as interchangeable, disposable, temporary.

   In the (not so distant) past, if wife #1 dies in childbirth, the man would find himself the second one. Hansel and Gretel’s father had the more common story than the wife of Bath did.

   This is not very coherent and I am certainly not saying that such a view of women is a good thing. I’m just wondering if there is a connection in concept.

4. I have begun to wonder if one of the reasons why men and women seem so distant from each other in human culture is the fact of maternal death. Why get so attached to wife #1 if there is a high likelihood that she will die in childbirth? Could we have developed a whole PTSD-like male response to the women in their lives dying (and therefore deserting them) as children, brothers, husbands, and fathers?

5. Funt, killing doesn’t have to be pre-meditated. Historically, when a man and a woman had intercourse the danger assumed by the latter was tremendous and that assumed by the former was minimal.

   We often say “flu kills people”, even though the flu virus itself has no particular consciousness. When we say heterosexual intercourse is the greatest killer of women, that doesn’t mean men intended to kill — but men’s bodies and their secretions play the central role in maternal mortality.

   And Gail, VM, and kate, yes yes yes.

6. Hugo:

   Thanks for posting this. I thought I’d expand for some of your readers.

   I am the author of *Women in The Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military* (Seal Press, 2006). A title for which I disclaim all responsibility. One of the issues I had to deal with was the whole line of, well, if women serve in combat, they’ll die and thus society will be unable to reproduce itself. On the one hand, that’s ludicrous on its face: noncombatant status did not save a single woman’s life during, say, the Strategic Bombing Campaigns, much less German occupation of the continent, particularly in the East, during World War Two, a war in which noncombatants were systematically targetted by both sides.

   But on the other hand, I found myself seeing if I could extrapolate, from CDC figures of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, number of children born to the average woman, and number of children born, the number of maternal deaths. From 1900 to 1960, I estimate that appx. 840,000 American women died in childbirth. By comparison, battle deaths of major American wars from the Revolution through Korea (I did not include Vietnam because as of 1960, only a handful of Americans had been killed there) total 602,451; add deaths of all causes from those and the major war death total reaches 1,079,245. (You can find these figures and all sources in Chapter 4, Afghanistan and the tragedy of biology.)

   As for Afghanistan’s 16% risk of maternal mortality, that’s the national average. Parwan province includes Bagram Air Force Base, but 60 miles up the Ghorban Valley Road is Shekh Ali, where I calculated, based on the numbers of maternal deaths told to me by a village elder, that women ran between a 45 and 91% chance risk of dying in childbirth. (The road then was very rugged, even though it handrailed the Ghorban River. Getting to the road, especially in winter, could be nearly impossible.)

   Intercourse is simply a physical act: rape and lovemaking are legal and moral terms. Consent does and can not exist without the meaningful ability to say “no”. Very simply, men – not women – get women pregnant. Men are entirely responsible for their fertility, and in the absence of contraception women can use and the ability of women to refuse sex with men, also that of their female partners as well. And when women die or are simply badly hurt in pregnancy or childbirth, morally, the responsibility is that of the man. He got them pregnant: they did not conceive by wind alone.

   That’s tough meat to chew on. To my knowledge, no society has been able to handle that on a sustained basis. Therefore, we, being a species that foreknow our deaths, have deformed relationships between men and women in all kinds of ways to deal with that reality. For example, most societies practice some form of coverture, in which the man is head of the household and has a financial claim to the woman’s domestic labor. Most societies also see women as physically less strong then men, despite the fact that we had to contend with all the evolutionary risks men did (don’t think man the hunter, think man the hunted, as in Giant Hyena Chow) – as well as pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation. And most soceities have taken this attitude towards rape, especially marital, and domestic violence: so what if he had sex with her if sh e wasn’t a provable virgin? So what if her husband beat her to death?

   The reason being, even if she wanted intercourse, it would kill her anyway. Her husband was going to kill her anyway. They are only executing the verdict levied against her on the day of her birth.

   And this is why we regard women as fundamentally interchangable. Your cow dies, that’s a tragedy. Your wife dies? Get another. And you go on, you live and care for your surviving children, rather than kill yourself to expiate your guilt, by hardening your heart. Societies coped with this immense bloodletting of women in what should ahve been their most productive years by hardening themselves against the civic and human worth and sexual dignity of women.

   Sorry for going on at such length, Hugo. Also apologies for spelling and grammar errors. I can’t edit myself ad hoc worth anything.

7. Hugo,

   interesting to find you making a social investment theory argument (that the relative costs of pregnancy caused different mating strategies in women and men), as that seems to be the mother of all biological arguments…

8. Funt, killing doesn’t have to be pre-meditated. Historically, when a man and a woman had intercourse the danger assumed by the latter was tremendous and that assumed by the former was minimal.

   You could just as easily say that any act of consensual intercourse was an act of suicide by a woman. It would be about equally absurd.

   Yes, yes, I know: plenty of not-so-truly consensual sex, etc. The point is that, even if we were to talk strictly about truly consensual sex (assuming here you’re not of the school that such a thing doesn’t exist), you would never dare characterize it in that manner, even though it would be about equally applicable.

9. I wonder if that’s the reason for concealed ovulation in humans…

10. My husband tells me that the Aztecs believed in an afterlife that offered similar honors for women who died in childbirth and men who died in battle.

    I think certain traditional beliefs may well have made a lot more sense in a world where women were nearly constantly nursing or pregnant (as well as at high risk of mortality from childbirth) than they do now.

11. Yes but you cite the potential of being killed as a cause for fear of men. Why is the fear justified if both parties enter into it willingly. How about just being afraid that you might die rather than being afraid of the man?

12. Erin,

    “And this is why we regard women as fundamentally interchangeable. Your cow dies, that’s a tragedy. Your wife dies? Get another. And you go on, you live and care for your surviving children, rather than kill yourself to expiate your guilt, by hardening your heart.”

    You characterize men alone (the context says that the “we” is men) as heartless, caring, and unmoved by common death, and I don’t think that is a fair assessment. In times and places where infant mortality was far higher, would you characterize mothers as similarly unmoved when their young infant, not unexpectedly, dies? “My cow dies? – tragedy. My baby dies? – I’ll just have another!” Or, in a warlike country like Afghanistan, when their young son dies, not unexpectedly, in some tribal battle? Are inner city mothers unmoved when their young sons, not unsurprisingly, die from addiction or violence?

    The argument from disposable might have some merit, if you could indeed show that women are more disposable, and less worthy of emotional investment, than men. But is there any evidence for that? You cite the fact that death by childbirth is widespread, but that in itself that doesn’t mean that women are more disposable than men, because it is only one of the possible causes of death. It would be interesting to investigate life expectancy from infancy for both sexes to get a true picture of which sex is really disposable, and – according to your reasoning, not mine – which sex is more heartless.

13. Interesting point: given that infant and child mortality was once much higher, on average, a woman would have had to have at least three (rounding up), and probably a good deal more, children (rounding up) for the human species to continue, much less to expand its numbers. Add to the fact that children traditionally provided labor to the family as an economic unit, plus social insurance when the concept of social insurance provided by a government or finance didn’t exist, and if the 40% (or probably even the 20-25% numbers) are to be believed, that meant that, statistically, most women were dead by the time they were done reproducing.

    And at the same time, that’s how the human race survived. Interesting conundrum.

14. In no particular order…

    Lynn, this was also true for Spartan women.

    Sam, I cannot speak for Hugo, but people who justify different male supremacist “mating strategies” (rape, prostitution, polygamy, child marriage, forced marriage, male promiscuity, etc.) are actually incredibly ignorant (to be kind) of biology. For example, the most beneficial mating strategy for men as a biological class is monogamy, preferably with a mature woman, not a girl, then to invest like hell in the welfare of the mother and their children, carefully spaced. That produces the lowest number of maternal deaths and highest number of living children, and optimizes the chance of each man to marry, especially when maternal mortality rates are high and possible medical intervention is limited.

    Funt:

    Women often have an intense sexual fear of men because we know that many of us are sexually with impunity, regardless of either the psychological or physical consequences. In the premodern era, and in much of the world today, those included death in childbirth (or from abortion and HIV). Which is not an easy and humane end, even if you loved the man, wanted the sex and the pregnancy. If you didn’t, death in childbirth (or abortion or HIV) was often death by torture. That’s very deep in our psyches and not unjustified.

    To pretend that this is conflated with some abstract fear of death – or an easy, dignified suicide – is sophistry.

    “Sweating Through Fog” , when I wrote, “we,” I was not referring to men alone. I assure you that had I been, I would have written, “men.”

    The saying I quoted about the death of one’s cow being a tragedy is actually an Afghan saying. At least, that’s where I heard it. I’m sure it’s not unique to Afghanistan. Then there’s the Russian peasant proverb: a chicken is not a bird and a woman is not a human being.

    And yes, actually, it is a fair assessment. Widespread death callouses people, as we see in war, and death in war, as you can see from the statistics I cited above, was episodic, death in childbirth a constant bloodletting. Women are physically vulnerable to men in a way men are not vulnerable to women, and without modern medical intervention, there was little anyone could do about it. In order to maintain our sanity, we had to make peace with that, and the easiest way to do that is to believe that this means that men are superior to women, that their human worth is greater.

    In societies where maternal mortality is widespread, people, men and women alike, commonly engage in practices that at best devalue girls, by denying them educational and employment opportunities that their brothers have (and to do otherwise makes no economic sense today any more than it did in America until we could get maternal mortality rates down) and at worst increase the risk of maternal mortality: female genital mutilation, child marriage, feeding girl children less and giving them less medical attention. Wife beating is common and not considered a crime, and women have little, if any right, to control their bodies meaning that women are often often, literally – and deliberately – bred to death.

    This is not equal opportunity and the incidence of male-on-male violence in the inner cities vs. male-on-female maternal mortality, using modern Afghanistan or Sierra Leone as the baseline simply doesn’t compare.

    I am always amused by people who will grasp at the most specious reasoning, unsupported by biology, to say, That’s why men and women are different. And then very energetically avoid engaging the reality of real differences between male and female biology.

    Cheers,
    Erin Solaro

15. My comment to Funt should read, “Many of us are USED sexually…”

16. “To put it even more bluntly, men have killed far more women by ejaculating inside of them than they have by any other method.”

    So Hugo, the young men you talked about in the previous post, is the above statement designed to make them hate their sexuality?

17. Erin,

    I wasn’t referring to any particular difference in mating strategies. It’s just mildly amusing to read an – essentially – evolutionary psychological argument (as you put it – “That’s very deep in our psyches and not unjustified.”) in a post by someone who usually goes overboard to explain the world in constructionist terms (and usually vocally opposes any behavioral hypothesis based on the economics of reprouduction, which your argument essentially comes down to).

    Btw, I agree that monogamy (with modest social control thereof?) is optimizing the reproductive success rate for most men, I think that can easily be seen by the fact that more men than ever are genetically reproducing these days than have ever done so in genetic history – it’s practically even. But maybe that statement also contains a question – if that’s an evolutionary unusually high rate of reproduction for men – was there a fitness element causing lower reproduction rates that doesn’t exist anymore? I guess none of us will know, but it’s an interesting question. Maybe it’s like a high gun ownership and low gun ownership safety equilibrium – have most men in stable relationships and a relatively peaceful society or have excess testosterone, a high rate of polygyny and a relatively aggressive society – of course, these are always feedback slopes that are hard to get on and off. Once you’re on a dysfunctional track it’s hard to get off again. Because social instability breeds violence breeds polygyny breeds social instability etc…

18. Speaking of midwives, let’s not forget how many women died of “childbed fever” in the 19th century because male doctors, who pushed midwives out of the way (because they didn’t value women’s experiential knowledge over their “superior” masculine theory) *didn’t wash their hands* coming from autopsy. This is pre-germ theory and Koch’s postulates, etc. Survival was much higher with a midwife attending.
    I’m not reading this as an evolutionary argument, and I hope it wasn’t intended as such. No evolutionary strategy that favors survival of the individual over the propagation of her genes can be anything but a failure. The trait for avoiding childbirth would disappear in one generation. I’m pretty sure Hugo knows this. And the pressure to have lots (by primate, not general animal kingdom standards) of kids hasn’t been off of anyone for a significant span of evolutionary time, and is still on in most of the world.
    Sam, I question 1. that “more men than ever” before are reproducing nowadays (evidence?) and 2. that an allele governing that trait would have gone to loss/fixation already. But this isn’t terribly relevant. It is, however, relevant to point out that most “evolutionary psychology” is sort of like the Holy Roman Empire — not legit evolution OR psychology. So many of humans’ social constructs are evolutionarily dysfunctional. Yes, we evolved, and yes, we’re still evolving (albeit in a really weird and changing environment), but attempts to apply basic evolutionary principles to human social constructs fail because it’s just not that simple. It’s been a long time since most people’s reproductive success was based on anything but a circular measure of “fitness”.

    As I understood it, this point was just a segue into a conversation about why ob-gyn care for the developing world is a feminist issue.
    Poverty places women dramatically more at risk for childbirth complications, HIV, domestic violence, etc. The best way to help them is to give them economic power, as through microlending programs. When women are making money for themselves and their families, their newly-high status is protective. Dependency is dangerous. In the case of childbirth, as well as sexual assault, women need to control their own bodies to be safe.

19. Interestingly, in Judaism the command ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is binding only on men, not women, because of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth.

20. Gail,

    I can only give tentative numbers -

    http://fatherhood.hhs.gov/charting02/introduction.htm

    these are self-reported and thus certainly not reliable in detail as men will both not know about children they fatheres and assume they fathered children whose biological father they actually aren’t, but at 84% that’s twice what’s suggested as genetic historic average here –

    http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/

    so “more than ever” certainly seems a priori plausible to me, even if it’s not exactly 84% vs female 86%.

    I don’t doubt that much of evolutionary psychology is rather problematic, but asymettrical costs of reproduction aren’t just an assumption of evolutionary psychology. The costs are real, it’s just what kind of conclusion you draw from it when it gets difficult and often purely speculative.

21. Erin,

    “I assure you that had I been, I would have written, “men.”

    You are being disingenuous, because in your original comment you only characterize men as being callous and unfeeling, not women, and even in your response you only complain about callousness towards women. You expand it just a tiny bit to complain that women might be callous towards women, but you just can’t bring yourself to make the leap to say that women might ever be callous towards men – even sometimes their own dying babies.

    So in your view of morality men, and men alone, are morally accountable for deaths in childbirth. Yes, of course there would be no death in childbirth if there were no intercourse with a man. But that man had a mother that suckled him and kept him alive. You could be as cynical about her as you are about men, and say that without her self-interested nurturing of her male gene-carrier he could have killed no one, but that might muddy the moral waters a bit.

    “This is not equal opportunity and the incidence of male-on-male violence in the inner cities vs. male-on-female maternal mortality, using modern Afghanistan or Sierra Leone as the baseline simply doesn’t compare.”

    Go back and reread what I was asking. I wasn’t arguing that the likelihood a death of a male in an inner city was comparable to the likelihood of death from childbirth for Afghani women. I was arguing that likely death in both cases may lead to seemingly heartless views, by mothers on the one hand and husbands on the other. You claim the problem is lack of caring, of valuing people, but you seem to think that only men are heartless, and that only women are not seen as valued.

    “I am always amused by people who will grasp at the most specious reasoning, unsupported by biology, to say, That’s why men and women are different. And then very energetically avoid engaging the reality of real differences between male and female biology.”

    Not sure who this is directed to, but I will say this. First, in order for your argument to have any coherence, you need to support your theory that women are not valued because of the unique risks of childbirth. You need to compare the life expectancy of both sexes at birth, to see if any sex seems clearly and unequivocally less worthy of investment.

    Second, you are not really making a biological argument, but rather a mixed biological and moral argument, where you shift from using biology to excuse women to using morality to condemn men.

    Third you cast this seemingly-biological argument in terms of the moral worth of those you consider victims and those you consider oppressors. You mix the natural pain and risk of childbirth with the human-caused tragedy of rape and male-on-female violence, in order to mix the intended and clearly culpable actions, of men, with the unintended consequences of their other actions. It isn’t enough that people with XY chromosomes have to be tarred with the brush of the violence other people with XY chromosomes do. You have to make them responsible for natural deaths from childbirth as well. So I think you are using biology to promote an extremist, and, to me abhorrent, view of human nature.

    And finally, I have no more moral culpability for the after-effects of sexual intercourse in Afghanistan than you do. All you are doing is making a quasi-biological argument, and a poor one, for the blood-guilt of me and my male spawn.

22. Sam, that’s interesting stuff, which of course I should have thought of — I clearly wasn’t thinking back far enough. In hard times, a red deer is more likely to carry a female fetus to term. Why? Because, for the reasons you cited, Sam, a female is likely to have babies even if she’s of poor quality. Male deer can have lots of mates at low cost, so they aren’t picky. When grass is lush, birth rates skew male — this is a good chance to have high-quality offspring that can compete among the other males for lots of mates. Humans, however, are usually monogamous — and, of course, as everyone has pointed out, women risk more in having children, making boys almost always a better choice if you want to ensure you have children. Unless, of course, you want to be absolutely certain the grandchildren you’re investing in are your descendants — so lock the wife up at home, or put her in corsets, or bind her feet.
    But this is all as much a fact of immediate biology and economics as of evolutionary history.
    So here’s (part of) where I think things get screwy in evo psych:
    We can figure this stuff out ourselves. You can make a genetics-based argument if you want, but genes almost never explain all of everything. There is no gene — or even array of genes — for something as complex as the human behaviors described above.

    I really don’t think this post was supposed to be about evolutionary genetics, like I said above. The point is that socioeconomic power structures subjugating women’s bodies to male desires kill women in this century as they have for centuries past. Death in childbirth is not murder — unless the woman a) did not freely choose to become pregnant and/or b) was denied prenatal care and/or appropriate medical interventions because of her low status as a woman.

    I’d like to direct everyone’s attention to this article about birth injuries in teenagers in Tanzania. Heartbreaking.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/health/24hospital.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=fistula&st=cse

23. ‘noncombatant status did not save a single woman’s life during, say, the Strategic Bombing Campaigns, much less German occupation of the continent, particularly in the East, during World War Two’ (Erin Solaro)
    This is not a military history blog, but I suggest you do some remedial reading on it. Not being a soldier on the Eastern Front saved lots of women in both Germany and the USSR. Closer to home, American women did not have to take Tarawa, or die defending it. The risks were not equal and people who stayed in places like the continental US were at no risk at all. Others did not have this option.
    ‘Most societies also see women as physically less strong then men’ (Erin Solaro)
    Most societies are not stupid. Ours is occasionally a bit silly, but we still have separate sports for male and female athletes.

24. If God punishes by death those who engage in forbidden sexual activity, how then to explain that the leading cause of death for women for centuries was having intercourse with their own husbands?

    The Bible is actually pretty clear on that one — the risks of childbirth and patriarchy are a curse straight from God to punish Eve for disobedience (disobedience with a sexual flavor, since the main thing they appear to have learned from eating the fruit was that they were naked). Which, now that I think about it, is pretty consistent with both 1) the value placed on Mary being a virgin even though her whole role in the story is to be a mother, and 2) Paul’s view that even married sex is not so much licit as a concession to people’s incorrigible desires.

25. “When women die in childbirth how likely is it that they view the situation as the man killing them?”

    You’ve obviously never witnessed many women in childbirth. All of those comedies you see on television that involve a woman in labor screaming at the father of her baby (STAY AWAY FROM ME!! YOU DID THIS TO ME!!!) did not just pop up out of thin air. That type of attitude is quite common during childbirth.

26. Stentor, I’m not sure I’d jump with Genesis straight from the curse of pain and the desire to be dominated all the way to explaining the high incidence of death. Men are going to sweat more, apparently, as part of our legacy as sons of Adam — but not lethally!

    The point is less about the Torah itself, of course, and more about the way in which modern believers tend to interpret nature. Modern Christians tend to see nature as that which is in harmony with God’s plan; they talk a great deal (read the theology of the body stuff) about the sublime complementarity of men and women on both a soul and a physiological level, and how the two “fit” together so well in intercourse. Fit, that is, in a way that two men or two women don’t. The problem is that pregnancy is historically more lethal than any other sexually transmitted disease or infection, and only a man having unprotected intercourse with a woman can generally get a woman pregnant. If we see death as the consequence as a rebellion against nature, then virtually all forms of sexual activity that do not involve penis-in-vagina intercourse are apparently more congruent with God’s plan.

    Which is why the campaigns against reproductive health and contraception in all its forms are shot through with the worst kind of misogyny; it’s not about being “open to God” as much as it is about asking women to being open to death itself, a risk that, historically, was greater than that of going to battle.

27. disobedience with a sexual flavor, since the main thing they appear to have learned from eating the fruit was that they were naked

    No. They had the knowledge of good and evil, and if they’d then eaten from the Tree of Life, they’d have been gods. There was nothing sexual going on until after they left Eden; they didn’t realize they were naked before any more than animals notice they’re naked.

    And I often wonder how much of God’s pronouncement was predictive rather than imprecative.

28. Hugo: I agree that modern American Christians see heterosexual intercourse leading to pregnancy as the only God-approved sex. But modern American Christians are also living in a time and place where heterosexual intercourse leading to pregnancy is far less risky than it has been for most women through history. When the risks were more obvious even to the men who write the official theologies, they could be explained away as a divine curse just like the Falwell/Robertson explanation of AIDS as a curse.

    mythago: They didn’t have intercourse before they left the garden, but they certainly recognized their nakedness — which implies an adult knowledge of sex rather than a childlike innocence about the parts that need covering — during the post-fruit pre-eviction period.

29. Why assume there was no sex in Eden? There could have been sex without sin, yes? It was knowledge, not action, that led to the expulsion.

30. WarNerdFanboy:

    I have reported from Iraq and Afghanistan, where i was embedded with combat troops, for the Seattle PI. I am a former Army Reserve officer married to a former Marine officer. (My ex-husband was also a former Marine officer.) I have a strong interest in serious military history (not the zap-blam-gott-im-himmel-bayonet-in-the-guts school that Max Hastings decried) and have written operational military history myself (a study of casualties and cohesion upon combat effectiveness in an infantry regiment during the Buna campaign). Tarawa (or Pelelieu or Iwo Jima or for that matter the Hurtgen) does not change the fact that during World War Two, all major combatants targetted entire civilian populations (albeit in differing ways and to differing extents) and being female – having noncombatant status – did not save your life. The US was unique amongst major combatants in that our general population was not at any real risk.

    And yes, societies generally are stupid about female strength, as Title IX has shown us. We – mena nd women alike – are often profoundly ambivalent about female strength, aggression and violence.

    Sam and Gail:

    I can’t speak for Hugo, but I can tell you that neither evolutionary psychology nor economics play any role in my thinking about the tragedy of human reproductive biology and its emotional, intellectual, cultural and political ramifications. I find evolutionary psychology impossible to take seriously, either intellectually or morally (and the two are usually related), while economics in our day has become a theology of greed. I honestly did not consider, for a second, the very idea of assymetric costs of reproduction because I simply do not think in such terms.

    I thought, instead, about grief and guilt, shame, pain both mental and physical, and death so inescapable and constant that it must have seemed like the very judgement of the gods against the equal human and civic worth of women, and their sexual dignity. I thought about what widespread maternal mortality did to those who survived, fathers as well as mothers, and how it must have shaped their relationships with each other, as well as those of their children who survived their own childhoods. And I thought about what it did to their relationships with other men and women: within their own sex, in other words, as well as the other sex, as well as how they thought about their own bodies and those of the other sex.

    “Fog,” I have quite clearly written about human beings drawing moral significance from ineleuctable biological reality. Any other honest interpretation of my writings is not possible, and for what it is wortn (nothing) the men I have discussed this theory with, for whom maternal mortality was a lived and terrible memory, or who have contemplated the current hideous reality in Afghanistan, have never insisted upon such a distorted intrepretation. But then, they also did not pretend to know what was going on in my head.

    Cheers,

    Erin Solaro

31. ‘being female – having noncombatant status – did not save your life’ (Erin Solaro)
    It kept you from having to take the risks that combatants did have to take, thus often enough saving your life.
    IIRC the Japanese did, in the end, draft their entire female population aged 17 to 40 into their Home Guard, making them combatants liable to get sent in human wave/banzai attacks against Allied invasion forces. I do think this would have made something of a difference to their chances of survival, had the war not ended before an invasion could happen. Not that civilians would have been safe during an invasion…

32. Erin,

    “I honestly did not consider, for a second, the very idea of assymetric costs of reproduction because I simply do not think in such terms.”

    Well, whether you considered it or not, you’re suggesting precisely that, and people who think in those terms certainly will read you that way. Economics, btw, is not a theology of greed, economics is the science of allocating scarce resources and understanding the choices individuals make in this dillema. Economical thinking means trying to understand the world in terms of the effects of scarcity and competition for scarce resources. “Greed” in any common understanding would be the desire to accumulate resources beyond what’s opitmal for the individual’s satisfaction of needs and, as such, is certanly *not* something recommended by economics, quite to the contrary. I do agree, though, that much of the economic writing in the 20th century has focused on quantitative research in the Walrasian paradigm and simplistic behavioral assumptions of a “homo oeconomicus” that did not adequately represent reality and may have left people who do not try to actually understand economics with a feeling of moral despair (like you, I suppose). This tendency, however, is being actively corrected in the last decades. Just have a look at the list of Nobel Laureates in economics in the last 20 years, and you’ll see how the focus of economic research has shifted. The economic imperialism used by much of evolutionary psychology is a recognition of this change, yet, as already mentioned, while the different costs are real, the assigned categories and rationalities are largely speculative.

33. Sam:

    Actually, I do try to understand economics. Most of my reading now centers around economics and labor issues. Obviously, both Krugman and Yunos (actually a banker) are quite approachable, also Sen, but I am currently struggling with The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. The author (Benjamin Friedman) does not seem to realize that in real material terms, there is a sharp limit to what we need to be happy. Beauty, dignity, the knowledge that our work contributes to the maintenance of our civilization, these “higher” level needs are central to human happiness in a way that, for example, food is not: beyond a certain level, more food of better quality and variety does not make you better fed, in terms of either nutrition or flavor. I could draw a similar analogy to housing, or clothing. But more beauty makes us happier than less, and beauty need be no more resource-intensive (time is something else) than ugliness.

    In that sense, we’re really not dealing with the allocation of scarce resources, unless some of us feel we are entitled to the time of others. And while I am not sure yet how to write about that, I do know that no nation in history has done what we have since 1975: exported millions of jobs, indeed entire industries, while importing millions of immigrants, legal and “illegal” to do much of the work that remains, a labor policy meant to lower the flow beneath American citizens. Then our policitical elites pretended this was a good thing, and economists provided a tremendous amount of ideological cover for it. Alan Greenspan had lots of helpers.

    To read my writing dealing with the tragedy of human reproductive biology through the bloodless language of asymmetric costs is possible only if you willfuly distort first the writing itself, then the fact that when it comes to reproduction, the men and women and boys and girls who survive(d) widespread maternal mortality were (are) most intimately related to the women and girls who did not. The reason relationships between men and women – which means, fundamentally, sexual relationships – are so profoundly warped, particularly in terms of widespread, if not universal, great physical violence by men towards women, is because those costs weren’t really that asymmetric, but nearly as horribly painful for the living as for the dead. And the living somehow had to go on.

    WarNerdFanboy:

    I confess you have me at a loss.

    Your writing evidences you as entirely ignorant of German occupation, anti-partisan and anti-Jewish policies, particularly in Eastern Europe, but also in the West; the US and British strategic bombing campaigns in both Germany and Japan; and the conduct of many (most?) Soviet troops through Eastern Europe but above all in Germany, conduct that Catherine Merridale, in her superb _Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945_ aptly described as “Despoil the Corpse.” You appear to deliberately refuse to understand that the point of targetting noncombatant populations, which was a hallmark of WWII (and for that matter of the current war in Congo) is to kill, wound and terrorize people who do not bear arms, principally women, but also men and boys not of military age.
    Finally, you appear to be ignorant – probably deliberately so – of the fact that under the Geneva Conventions, members of a Home Guard are combatants.

    Therefore, I simply have no idea how to respond to you.

    Best,
    Erin Solaro

34. Erin,

    in a hurry, more probably tonight, but just briefly,

    “Then our policitical elites pretended this was a good thing, and economists provided a tremendous amount of ideological cover for it. Alan Greenspan had lots of helpers.”

    Agreed. Since you do read Krugman, one of his earlier columns on slate.com (that weren later turned into a book, can’t remember the title, ca. 1999 or so) dealt with that exact issue, how economic research is a relatively cheap thing and one day there will be a tale to tell about how private interestes were able to hijack mainstream economic thinking by funding research. Yes, that story will need to be told, but it should be noted that even though economics may be the dismal science, it’s, in many ways, a far better structured approach to understanding reality than much of sociology. I’m not saying history should be told in cliometrics, but everyone who’s writing a historical narrative should be aware of the numbers.

35. Erin,

    I’m not pretending to read your mind. Carefully worded statements like “And when women die or are simply badly hurt in pregnancy or childbirth, morally, the responsibility is that of the man”, when coupled with pithy punch-lines like “Her husband would have killed her anyway” makes your views quite plain. I point out what you emphasize and what you omit, what you say easily, and what your refuse to say. Your response is nothing more than a feeble “some of my best friends are…” and I treat it the same way you’d treat an Afghani man’s pride that his wives and daughters love him.

    I’m not at all surprised that Hugo highlighted your views. You are far from the first person who felt that compassion and empathy for the sufferings of women were an insufficient spur for action, unless they were mixed with the far more energizing jolt of hatred of men. Hugo read what you wrote and found a new, quasi-scientific basis for the intrinsic moral stain of male sexuality, so I am not unusual in my reading.

    Sorry, but your “ineluctable biology” reasoning is little more than Glenn Beck blackboard logic. In the same way that you blend biological reasoning and moral reasoning in a way that demonstrates you’re adept at neither, you do the same with your moral conclusions based on military history. You haven’t accounted for the only demographic evidence that would justify your biological claim of female disposability. I’m guessing you won’t check the demographic evidence from the Soviet Union after the Great Patriotic war, because a simple count of the number of surviving women and men might weaken your claim that being a women afforded no net advantage during those times. You moral conclusions about military history are equally suspect, because while you rightly note that women were victims of strategic bombing massacres, and that women in the US had it relatively easy, you stop there because on balance you have the always-gratifying evidence of women as victims. You could have thought a little more deeply about those American women and what they were doing during the war, and considered the fact that huge numbers of them were working in munitions factories. You seem fond of pointing out the strength of women, so you need to picture those strong, brawny female arms assembling the napalm munitions that set Tokyo alight, running the uranium separators at Oak Ridge, and happily pocketing the man-sized cash payment for their labors.

    Just to be clear – I’m not giving these examples because I’m trying to say that men are better than women, or that women have it easy and men have it hard. I expressed sympathy for the terror of childbirth before I ever read you. I’m just trying to point out how shallow your reasoning is. I’m no expert in history, but I do know that biological arguments about the moral culpability of groups of people have often triggered particularly virulent hatreds.

36. German occupation in Belarus was, arguably, worse than anywhere else in the East (Poles would probably disagree). The biggest single group of Nazi victims in Belarus were POWs, combatants who were starved to death in prison camps. (Source: Christian Gerlach’s ‘Kalkulierte Morde’.)
    Noncombatants may be targeted by the enemy. Combatants always are. They also have superiors who have priorities other than keeping them alive, and who are sending them to places where the enemy can target them.
    The Home Guard were/would have been combatants (as I wrote). That was the point: in an invasion they would not only have been bombed and starved, they’d have been used to fight the Allies. That would have put them, as combatants, at greater risk than noncombatants.
    But this is not Axis History Forum, so I’ll shut up before I get banned.

37. Uh yes, folks, can we please please stay on topic. Military history was my least favorite variety when I was on my way to the doctorate, and I sure don’t want it on my blog.

38. If there were an Eloquent Blog Comment Hall of Fame, Sweating Through Fog, I think yours would have to get serious consideration.

39. Sweating Through Fog:

    I own, shoot and have a concealed carry permit for a .45. I wish more women did so. So much for celebrating women’s victimhood, or as I wrote in my essay, “Women, Handguns, and Civilization,” “No more victims.” As a gun owner, I am responsible for every round I fire. And although I really find absurd and baffling the whole phallic thing about guns, I don’t find that a bad analogy for male ejaculation: if you want to enter someone’s else’s body, you need to be very responsible about the whole process. The more so when the simple act of ejaculation can lead, very directly, to death in childbed—*especially* when genuine love and desire for her partner and hope for a child were no safeguards for the woman at all.

    When those deaths take place in that context and also a context of widespread, substansive equality between men and women, such responsibility is not guilt—which is no comfort at all to the widowers of women who die like that.

    However, that was not the context of widespread maternal mortality in this country or the rest of the developed world until very recently, and in much of the world, it still is not. The legal, economic physical and social power of men over women, particularly in a sexual context is still very real, as we have recently seen on display here in the days following Mr. Polanski’s arrest. And the more power you have over someone, the greater your responsibility is.

    Maternal mortality is not a monocausal explanation for human brutality or even the catastrophic failure of European civilization (particularly German and Russian) in the last century. It is a nearly monocausal explanation of the devaluation of women and girls vs. men and boys, because the reasons men and women alike give for devaluing the female sex are nearly monocausal. When, cross-culturally and transhistorically, the reasons offered for everything from rape to refusing to condemn rape as women live it to denying women the vote to not teaching girls to read, to economically disadvantaging women, whether it is confining women to low-paid work, paying women less for doing similar, comparable, or the same work, and allowing men to claim women’s unpaid domestic labor, come down to arguments of female biological inferiority, best for anyone seriously writing about the changes in female status to understand what they’re really talking about. It isn’t height or weight, or muscle mass and body fat ratios, or the way the female body developed to accomodate pregnacy, or that estrogen is some niceness and passivity hormone, as opposed to the extraordinarily powerful anabolic steroid it actually is. Men and women are different in that reproduction hurts and kills women, not men. As the Bible says, “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” In other words, I have offered not a shallow explanation, but a simple one, because the problem is really very simple. Almost impossibly painful, and as old as the difference between men and women, but not complicated. And I am not obliged to research any other aspect of human cruelty, of which there is a tremendous amount to go around, in order to proof this theory. My own research is adequate enough to demonstrate that the old, fundamentally moral, bargain that men died in war because women died in childbirth had real biological validity, and emotional validity for several generations of men whose mothers and grandmothers had given birth under the doom of maternal mortality.

    This is not changed by the fact that World War Two marks, in European and American history, the beginning of the end of that ancient balance, for it coincides with the beginning of a freefall in maternal mortality rates thanks to improved public health measures and medical intervention. It is also a statistical outlier in that the consequences of rape were far less lethal than could have been expected only a generation before: rape was more widely practiced by the Germans than is commonly realized, but that tended to be a prelude to murder. That was significantly less true of the Soviet Army, especially after hostilities ended, although many raped women committed suicide. Indeed, the figures Hugo offered on maternal mortality confirmed my long-held suspicion that the widespread (far from universal) use of rape in war was once a deliberate means of killing women who, as they were generally noncombatants were theoretically immune from arms, and alienating the women who survived abortions and forced pregnancies from the rest of their communities. In the American context, the dreadful losses of the Civil War, which deranged our own demographic balance for a generation, are a very transient hump compared to the maternal mortality statistics I offered, in that they were attributable to political policies and decisions, rather than the biologically defining characteristic of the male body. Wars are episodic in nature while pregnancy, especially without contraception, was a constant fact in women’s lives, making maternal mortality one long decimation of women in what should have been the prime of their lives at, as it were, the hands of men, a vulnerability men do not have to women.

    To be very honest, if men wish to develope a sexuality that they can feel good about, it’s easy. All men have to do is develop a morally good sexuality. That’s not hard. As individuals, eschew prostitution, including porn, and rape; collectively and politically work to shun the product, the producers and the purchasers of prostitutes and porn, and commit rape, as well as the defenders of such people and their actions, and you’ve gone a very long way to blaze a trail for another generation to build on.

    If you wish to describe this, too, as manhating, you are at liberty to do so. But that takes you into the realm of words meaning whatever you say they do, rather like WarNerdFanBoy citing the deaths of millions of POWs in German captivity, apparently ignorant that as they were noncombatants, they were murdered—and their noncombatant status did not save a single one of their lives, any more than it saved the life of a single woman in that war. I admit that it took me so long to reply because, while I was writing some final scenes to my novel, I pondered your post from time to time, at a loss as to how to deal with someone who is quite willing to play that game.

    Cheers,
    Erin Solaro

40. Wow! This has been a fascinating discussion. Erin’s theory does go a long way to explain the elevation of P to V intercourse where the man ejaculates inside the woman as the gold standard of sex – with everything else being considered taboo (sodomy) or incidental and easily dispensed with (“foreplay”). Once people figured out there were numerous ways to pleasure each other without semen entering the vagina of the woman the patriarchs got nervous and handed down the edicts proscribing non-procreative sex.

41. I didn’t use the term “manhater” – all I did was highlight statements like “And when women die or are simply badly hurt in pregnancy or childbirth, morally, the responsibility is that of the man”, and asides like “Her husband would have killed her anyway” Your response offers a fresh trove of examples, starting with the analogy between ejaculate and bullets. I don’t want to list them all, but I want to draw attention to my personal favorite: In an example of moral insight that would do Stalin proud, you evaluate the sum pain of two examples of mass human death, and conclude that one stands out from the other one – the one that is just a “very transient hump” – because the former can be attributed to the “biologically defining characteristics of the male body.”

    I said your views are shallow. You say they are simple, and indeed they are that as well. They are simple-minded. Just to give some facts you may not have pondered when musing about “ineleuctable biological reality.” Spermatozoa is a necessary, but insufficient cause of maternal death in childbirth. Another necessary, but insufficient cause is ovulation. Similar are successful implantation and the continued growth of the baby. Maternal death can be triggered by all sorts of reasons, such as pathogens, toxins, starvation, dehydration, congenital illness, accidents, and murder.

    As far as your advice for what men must do to gain a healthy view of their own sexuality – I think an excellent starting point would be to ignore you, and your need to cleave humanity into two distinct instances of biology, and where the defining characteristic of one is to sow death from their loins. Your offer of redemption is disingenuous, because as cursory as your knowledge of biology is, I’m sure you know that whether a particular man supports good progressive politics or not will have no effect on whether his wife and child will survive her labor. And if she dies, you will still, of course, consider him morally responsible.

    You have a biologically-determined, repugnant, and extremist view of humanity.

    Quite oddly, you focus on death in childbirth as the monocausal explanation for the devaluation of women. First of all, given the complexity of history and the diversity of culture, a monocausal explanation for anything often gives reasonable minds cause for skepticism. But allowing that you may have attained an intellectual summit that few have reached, I struggle through your justification. And it is, at heart, stories and proverbs: “The reasons offered…” Together with your interpretation of what “they are really taking about” as the basis of “female biological inferiority.” And you characterize those “real” reasons this way, the very keystone of your Grand Monocausal Theory: “Men and women are different in that reproduction hurts and kills women, not men.”

    Now that last quote is just a ridiculous summary of how people have viewed sex differences. Your view of what “they’re really talking about” misses the blindingly more obvious, and more fundamental: Women can give birth and men cannot. It isn’t that women can die in childbirth, it is that women can give birth to children in the first place! Now I’ve heard lots of hateful, dismissive and devaluing comments about women, and I honestly can’t recall one that focused on the risk of death in childbirth as the telling barb. Until I read you I never heard the Afghani and Russian proverbs, and I suspect you’ve viewed them narrowly, and that you’ve given them a disproportionate weight in your Grand Theory of “what they’re really talking about.” To believe your characterization of how humans view their differences, were we to discover a small population of men who could give birth, we’d react by ignoring the fact that these men could give birth – instead we’d struggle with the far more compelling “Gee, I’ll bet sometimes they might die doing that!” until we realize that this new source of death makes them inferior.

    Now my flippancy here is not to minimize or discount the awful risks of childbirth, and what it must be like to face that from a women’s perspective, and it is certainly not to say that women’s experience of maternal death had no impact on human culture. But that is far from treating it as sole cause of human injustice, and treating the low risk of death in childbirth as one of the two defining characteristic of men, the other being natural born killers.

    You are certainly not obliged to research other forms of human cruelty, since clearly you have your plate full cataloguing ever more examples of the cruelty that men do, and of their heartlessness. I suggested you ought to check life expectancy at birth demographics, as a way of testing your Grand Monocausal Theory. Similarly a check of post-war survivor demographics might focus your mind away from your current, quite vacuous line of reasoning about whether being a woman lent some advantage towards survival in those times. Right now you are considering only the dead, looking only at dead persons of class X, and concluding thusly “See! – being an X didn’t save their life!” without realizing that when you use only the dead as the basis of your conclusion, your reasoning is just the vacuous: “See – being killed didn’t save their life.” You need to account both for the dead and the still-living to justify such sweeping claims about whether any characteristic had some survival value. But then again, this focus on death alone seems a pattern with you.

    Even were your Grand Monocausal Theory of “what they are really talking about” were to be true, there is no reasonable basis for your profoundly repugnant view of men. You seem driven to blame men for death heedless of traditional mitigating factors like intent, or lack of control over natural factors. You seem driven to locate this moral responsibility in their very biology, with the aim of fixing it as permanent and irrevocable mark against their male descendents. Their essence is that of a pathogen.

    Now back to the beginning – to you and your gun. I didn’t say you celebrated victim hood. I said you found examples of it gratifying. As your research uncovers yet another instance of women’s death and suffering, you are gratified that in each and every case you always discover some killer male ejaculate in close proximity, thus proving … with … with … geometric logic! – that you’ve found the agent of all female sorrow. Given such a sound and level-headed perspective of human affairs, I’m not at all surprised that you feel motivated to provision arms.

42. This is one of the most insightful pieces I’ve read in a while. We, in the developed world, have become cavalier about the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth. But, even with our reduced rate of death in childbirth, this issue is fundamental in understanding why reproductive choice is the difference between women as human beings and women as chattel. It is an argument I’ve had many times with those who feel men should have equal say when it comes to deciding whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy. (Most recently, here.) There is simply no “equal” when it comes to the risks associated with every stage of pregnancy.

43. Donna:

    Yeah, I’ve pondered the whole issue of PIV sex, and why, for example, that is considered “real” sex and sodomy (comprehensively) and “foreplay” are not—regardless of the pleasure and intimacy involved. And I came to think the underlying issue was the absolute moral seriousness of PIV sex and the profound consequences for both men and women. To which far from all men have been oblivious.

    LaVaughn:

    Yes. This.

    Sweating Through Fog:

    You are at liberty also to call me callous.

    But I will tell you this.

    Callous women do not walk Cemetary Ridge and look down into Devil’s Den, or Bloody Lane at Antietam, and wonder that mortal flesh and bone can do so much. Nor do they risk their lives, as civilian journalists, to cover two wars in the belief that, however appallingly unwise those wars and upgefuckt their conduct, the American Republic is worth the lives of American women, and it should shock our consciences that 2% +/- of casulaties from Irag and Afghanistan are female, due to military personnel policies that should be (and can only be) changed by men. And i have written a whole book on that. Nor do they write _The Doves: A Novel of Russia and America_ that is steeped in Russian history and culture, to include post-war Soviet demographics. Samples of which are to be found on my blog. (I would have read them, if I were you.)

    However, compassion—and respect and admiration for what we call the poor bloody infantry—does not change the American figures I offered, nor their interpretation. Nor do I find runaway emotions to be helpful in dealing with the subject.

    As for me and my guns, I am a woman who in a very urban area has used a 12 ga shotgun, (the lethality of which makes my .45 look like a squirt pistol) to successfully defend another human being. My husband and I live in the back of beyond where cougar and bear sightings are frequent, and the friend of a friend of ours was killed and eaten by a bear that broke into her home.

    If you have been a soldier, particularly in the combat arms, your writings are unworthy of you. But if not, well then, I understand you.

44. Oh, I don’t know that “we” who have actually been pregnant and given birth are all that oblivious to the risks. Some Western women, probably, do think that dying in childbirth is something that only happens in scary Third World countries; but I doubt even those of us who had trouble-free childbearing don’t know a friend or acquaintance who was confined to bedrest for two months, or had toxoplasmosis, or who was rushed to the ER for an emergency C-section because if she stayed in labor it was going to kill her, not just the baby.

    The ‘natural birth’ movement has done a lot to free women to make choices, but it has also peddled a pack of lies about how birth is just as easy and safe as brushing your teeth (as long as you stay away from doctors, that is).

45. And then there are the young girls who don’t die but are so severely damaged from childbirth they become social outcasts or are recorded in the statistics months later as dying from starvation / infection rather than the birthing process.

    The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 2 million women have untreated fistula and that approximately 100,000 women develop fistula each year. There is a very high incidence of fistula in Africa and parts of Asia.

    The root causes of fistula are grinding poverty and the low status of women and girls. In developing countries, the poverty and malnutrition in children contributes to the condition of stunting, where the girl skeleton, and therefore pelvis as well, do not fully mature. This stunted condition can contribute to obstructed labour, and therefore fistula. Fistula used to be present in the U.S. and Europe, but was largely eliminated in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century with improved obstetric care in general and the use of c-sections in particular to relieve obstructed labour.

    A fistula is a hole. An obstetric fistula of the kind that occurs in many developing countries is a hole between a woman’s birth passage and one or more of her internal organs. This hole develops over many days of obstructed labour, when the pressure of the baby’s head against the mother’s pelvis cuts off blood supply to delicate tissues in the region. The dead tissue falls away and the woman is left with a hole between her vagina and her bladder (called a vesicovaginal fistula or VVF) and sometimes between her vagina and rectum (rectovaginal fistula, RVF). This hole results in permanent incontinence of urine and/or faeces. A majority of women who develop fistulas are abandoned by their husbands and ostracized by their communities because of their inability to have children and their foul smell. Traumatic fistula is the result of sexual violence. The injury can occur through rape or women being butchered from the inside with bayonets, wood or even rifles. The aim is to destroy the women and the community within which the sufferer lives.

    Facing this possible future no doubt has an effect on a woman’s psyche.

46. From Broken Bodies – Broken Dreams (Information is from a book released by the U.N. Complete blog can be found by clicking on my name):

    “The leading cause of death for 15- to 19-year-old girls worldwide is complications from pregnancy and child-bearing. According to public-health experts, for every girl that dies during pregnancy or childbirth, 30 more will suffer injuries, infections and disabilities. And the risks are not limited to the mother: If a girl is under the age of 18 when she gives birth, her baby’s chance of dying in its first year of life is 60 percent higher than that of a baby born to an older mother. Moreover, the extended reproductive span of a girl who is married early puts her and her children at risk due to a greater number of pregnancies and deliveries. According to one study, women who marry before age 19 will have two to four times more children than those who marry after age 25.

    The additional burden of obstetric fistula

    One of the most physically and psychologically debilitating effects of early child-bearing is fistula, a rupture of tissue that results in an opening between the vagina and the bladder or the rectum, or both, which is reparable only with surgery. Primarily caused by obstructed labour, fistula is closely linked to marriage and child-bearing among girls between 10 and 15 years of age. In one 1995 study in Niger, for example, 88 percent of women with fistula were in this age group when they were married. As will all pregnancy-related injuries, young married girls in resource-poor settings are least likely to get treatment for fistula. With leaking urine and feces, a malodorous girl suffering an untreated fistula is likely to be ostracized by her community and divorced by her husband.”

    brokendreams.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/child-marriage-part-2/

47. Erin,

    I’ll decline the invitation call you callous, and instead continue to consider your words and reasoning I call your writing plainly wrong on points you’ve stated here. Wrong in terms of the facts you’ve stated, wrong in terms of the reasoning you follow here, and wrong in terms the view of humanity you present here: Making males, purely by nature of their biology, morally responsible for death in childbirth, now and in the past.

    First, a fact

    “…[women will] die and thus society will be unable to reproduce itself. On the one hand, that’s ludicrous on its face: noncombatant status did not save a single woman’s life during, say, the Strategic Bombing Campaigns, much less German occupation of the continent, particularly in the East, during World War Two, a war in which noncombatants were systematically targetted by both sides.”

    I say the evidence shows otherwise:

    The East:

    I can’t copy and paste the text on page 7, but the summary of “excess deaths” from comparing postwar census figures with prewar figures, 27 million people are missing (dead), and 20 million of the dead are male.

    Strategic Bombing in Germany

    It was no different in Germany, even though it suffered strategic bombing. In 1946, in Bavaria there were only 76 men aged 20-50 per 100 women aged 14-40. They give numerous charts of different population breakdowns, and in no age bracket except for children, are the ratios of men and women close.

    This isn’t about your position about women in combat. It isn’t about whether you are moved or not at the pity of war. It isn’t about me making some grand claim about who had it better or worse, about who the real victims were, coldly weighing the deaths of millions in some hellish accounting that fails to realize that many survivors would rather have been killed than witness what happened to those they love.

    It is an analysis of whether you can look at patterns of evidence and draw sound inferences and conclusions – especially if you want to be treated as a credible historian. To me, the plain facts are that looking at the East and a country that suffered strategic bombing, there is ample evidence that being a noncombatant woman made it more likely that you would survive. To conclude otherwise from evidence like this, you would also have to believe that not being Jewish didn’t save a single life in countries occupied by Germany.

    Now to the way you’ve reasoned here. I’ve followed your line of reasoning and discovered to my horror that walking among us are a profession of killers. Each and every year thousands of us die at their hands – and that’s in the developed world. In poor countries like Afghanistan, the rate of death from these killers is appalling. It isn’t at all like normal death, this is an bloody death, made worse because it results from an invasion of our bodies. Sometimes without our consent. We often fear them, but we are trapped because their power over us forces us to submit. Worldwide, each and every year hundreds of thousands of people die at their hands, a constant and remorseless blood letting. Some of them feel guilty for what they do, but they just close their hearts and move on. They aren’t at all like us, because the defining quality of their profession is that they are trained specifically to invade others bodies, heedless of the death that may result – it is in their very nature.

    Now I don’t for a minute think that is a fair characterization of surgeons. Not a perfect analogy, but a useful one. To witness a victim is to realize that it wasn’t the wind that cut open their bodies.

    Because I have an agenda, I hold surgeons morally responsible for all deaths that result from their labors, without regard for other factors like infection that commonly cause surgical death. I use the guilt they feel as a telling indictment. I take no account of their aims and objectives, and I ignore the larger purpose of what they do. My aside: “But then again, this focus on death alone seems a pattern with you.” was very serious, because in the same way I ignore the lives that are saved by surgery, you ignore the living people who were conceived from the actions of men.

    So do you still maintain, after all this, that the words you brought into this thread, the most central of which are: “And when women die or are simply badly hurt in pregnancy or childbirth, morally, the responsibility is that of the man.” – are a fair characterization of half of humanity? Do you still maintain, that they are morally responsible for a continuous, immense bloodletting by virtue of the “biologically defining characteristics of the male body?”

    Hugo didn’t draw you here because you were moved at Cemetery Ridge, or because you served as a war correspondent. You had something very basic to say about men, and I think what you said is repugnant.

    Words matter. You seem to want me to ignore the words you’ve written here, and look elsewhere at some other body of work. You don’t want to be judged by the words you choose here, but by whether or not you are a callous person or can use a firearm responsibly. As a writer I think you should welcome scrutiny of your words, because you craft them to illustrate the truth, and to express who you are.

48. Wow, as a man who served in Iraq for 2 years I just have to say this whole discussion is pretty ridiculous. Wow.

49. sunnofabcrich, so who do you think is right?

50. El:

    What anyone thinks of who is right does not depend upon experience in Iraq or anywhere else.

    What I’m going to say is fundamental when dealing with questions of scholarship, to name only one example. I’ll sum up with this post and be done.

    The (minor) question is, are American maternal mortality figures (which are what I used) high enough in the context of major American wars, to support the American contention that women should not serve in the combat arms lest it jeapordize the future of society?

    With my (conservative) estimate of 840K+ American maternal deaths between 1900 and 1960, vs. 1.79 million combat and noncombat (which are usually but not always combat-related; combat deaths total 602+K) deaths in 34 years of major American wars, from the Revolution through the end of Korea, the answer is, very clearly, yes.

    Or, as the classical Greek proverb had it, for men war, for women the marriage bed.

    Obviously, due to a stark decline in maternal mortality rates after about 1940 (in 1920, the US maternal mortality rate appx 1 in 40 women, for a total of 20K+ maternal deaths; in 1940, it was appx 1 in 100 women, for appx 9600 deaths; by 1960, it is 1.4 out of 1000 women for 1580 deaths) combined with the catastrophic failure of European civilization *after* the First World War (I am one of those who see the two world wars as the Thirty-One Years War, which I’ll get to in a moment), this doesn’t hold now in the developed world. But I never claimed it did.

    Whether a person thinks I’m right or “STF” is right has nothing to do with Iraq service or not. Nor does it have anything to do with feelings. The only question is, are my figures accurate? And unless the Pentagon’s figures or my sources are way off—and my research is reviewable; I list sources and methodology in Women in the Line of Fire—the answer is yes.

    Unless you wanna do a recount of CDC and Pentagon figures, you can’t argue with them.

    The larger question is, have maternal mortality rates been high enough to form how we view women and girls as compared to boys and men? Hugo cites figures ranging from a low of 20% (1 in 5 women) to 40% (2 in five). I’ve got maternal mortality estimates from one district, Shekh Ali, in Bagram province in Afghanistan, that range from 45% to 91%.

    STF would have you believe that these rates have absolutely no effect on how men and women view men and women. Women’s legal disenfranchisement as both citizens and human beings, as compared to men, which has been the norm in all human societies until about 1917, when it began to change only slowly as some women won the right to vote the laws that governed them, is, as near as I can tell from his perspective a badge of honor because we can give life. Never mind that men have found legal enfranchisement worth killing and dying for: to have for themselves, to keep other men from having.

    I suppose that’s always possible, but it’s really not bloody likely. No one, after all, would dispute that the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which was the most catastrophic European War prior to the Second World War, had a profoundly far-reaching impact on Europe and European state formation. German population overall is thought to have declined between 15 and 30%, with some areas suffering more than others. In this sense, the maternal mortality statistics both Hugo and I have cited are like one continuous Thirty Years’ War for pretty much all of human history until about a century and a half ago: and the men who are losing the women and girls they love are not only helpless before their deaths, but often responsible for their deaths and certainly fear they will be responsible for others. Wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends.

    I mentioned a 45-91% maternal mortality rate in Shekh Ali (I was relying upon a range of reported maternal deaths). In comparision, the US Army fought at a place called the Hurtgen Forest in World War Two, suffering 23,000 battle casualties plus 9,000 nonbattle casualties out of 120,000 troops. While I don’t have to hand the breakout for wounded vs. killed, most of those casualties (at least half and probably closer to 75%) would have been non-fatal. To this day, the institutional memory of that battle—which has helped shape certain Army policies—is so awful the US Army does not like to talk about it. And those casualties (KIA + WIA) are nowhere close to 45% maternal fatalities amongst the female population, for lifetimes on end.

    What you think of these numbers or whether you agree with them or not doesn’t matter. They exist, which means they’ve shaped us and our relationships as men and women with each other profoundly for the worse. We’re only beginning in the modern world to begin to be able to unpack them.

    I have deliberately avoided replying to STF now. It’s simply rude to address someone by their legal first name while hiding behind a pseudonym. Especially when describing them as having hateful, biologically reductionist views on men; male sexuality; women and reproduction; being indifferent to male suffering; ignorant of the Soviet Union’s appalling demographics; gratified by female suffering yet not being surprised that I feel motivated to provision arms, never mind that I do really live in the back of beyond, which I noted—we post bear and cougar sightings in the community—and being killed and eaten is very low on my list of priorities; and having the moral insight that would make Stalin proud (most people would define that as callousness, at least). You also like to really rip things out of rich context. Whatever your motivations or emotions, you have made any kind of civilized, rational dialogue or conversation impossible.

    I will say that I’ve been reading Hugo for a while now because I think he has one of the more positive visions of male sexuality I’ve ever read: respectful of the body, male and female, while not being biologically reductionist.

    Cheers,
    Erin Solaro

51. Erin,

    First of all I want to make it clear that I take no position on the minor question of women in combat. Not that it is a minor issue to lots of people, but it is not the main focus of this discussion.

    On the major question of maternal death and men’s responsibility for it:

    “STF would have you believe that these rates have absolutely no effect on how men and women view men and women.”

    If you want to be treated like a scholar, you need to realize that reading comprehension is an essential qualification for effective scholarship. You apparently didn’t read, or understand this:

    “Now my flippancy here is not to minimize or discount the awful risks of childbirth, and what it must be like to face that from a women’s perspective, and it is certainly not to say that women’s experience of maternal death had no impact on human culture.”

    It was you, not me, that introduced your gun and your concealed carry permit into this blog conversation, apparently in the odd belief that this would foster a civilized and rational dialog.

    I asked you several times to account for postwar Soviet demographics to justify your claim that being a noncombatant woman would not aid survival. I then produced some evidence to demonstrate that your claim was wrong. I did not call you ignorant, I asked you – someone who claims to be a historian – several times to account for something I knew of. And now, having added some evidence to what you forlornly wished was a civilized, rational dialog, you say I described you as being ignorant of Soviet demographics. I made no such description. I produced evidence to justify my view that you were wrong in your claims.

    I said that considering the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people as a “very transient hump” because some other mass bloodletting is attributed to the “biologically defining characteristics of the male body” is an example of moral reasoning that would do Stalin proud, and I stand by that characterization.

    I said that you had an extremist, biologically-determined,and repugnant view of men, when you say things like “And when women die or are simply badly hurt in pregnancy or childbirth, morally, the responsibility is that of the man. He got them pregnant: they did not conceive by wind alone.” and “Her husband would have killed her anyway.” I did not, repeat, not, characterize your views as “hateful.” I stand by my statement of your views. I gave reasons that justified my view of those statements in particular, and my view of your moral reasoning in general.

    You present yourself as an author, a scholar and a historian. I’m just a guy with a keyboard, but I stand by what I write, because I am prepared to either justify it, or to acknowledge that I was wrong.

    I don’t know you as a person, and obviously you don’t know me as a person. I do not mean to cause you personal grief, and I am not insensitive to your position here. This was certainly not the reception you expected on a feminist blog. It isn’t your fault that Hugo highlighted your views about men, and that that his focus prompted me to focus on them. I participate in many blog threads, and you have reacted to my sometimes pointed and sharp criticism without becoming highly antagonistic and personal towards me. This patience and forbearance is highly unusual in blog discourse, and I am quite sincere when I say that this speaks very well of you.

    I think we’ve both made our respective points, and it is best to acknowledge that our views are irreconcilable. I wish you well.

52. I mentioned that because of Erin tossing around war credentials, I seem to remember us having to go out of our way to keep “embedded” reporters and various other noncombatants safe. Getting killed doesn’t make you a martyr or a hero it just makes you dead.

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