According to the United Nations, women and their children are the most oppressed, abused citizenry on planet earth. Not black men, not homosexuals nor the religious nor the Jews nor the Irish nor the Palestinians nor the transgendered nor the poor or whatever ethnic, religious segment you've managed to identify with in your lifetime. [Although women do fall into most of these catagories]

Women. And their children. Oppressed and abused by most religions. Oppressed and abused by men. Oppressed and abused by systems such as: economics, politics, pornography. If you are a woman in the First World, you are lucky but can easily sing the blues. If you're a woman in the Third  World: fuhgeddaboudit.

In my half a century on this little blue marble I've helped the poor, I've helped gays and children and African-Americans, AIDS patients and helpless animals and men.  But what I haven't done and what I'm going to start doing is take my finite energy and help women. I'll start volunteering time and resources to the Womens Shelter here in Honolulu. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that all the while we women are running around helping everybody else, there ain't nobody helping us.

We made the terrible error of thinking that if we had enough bake sales and raised enough money and tended enough wounded and cooled enough fevered brows and bit our tongues and didn't make waves and made less money than men and put up with sexual harrassment and forgave enough abusers, somebody would finally help us.

Not so much.

And while everybody is kvetching about how wronged they are, women continue to live in prostitution, rape, domestic abuse, genital mutiliation, murder, honor killings, sexual slavery, abductions, making 80 cents on the dollar for each dollar a man earns [including but not limited to a recent popular senators office. His women staffers earned much less than his male staffers] and poverty. When you don't earn as much as men you can't save as much as men, you can't invest as much as men so you don't have as nice a retirement as men. Elementary, my dear Watson. 

The report commissioned by the International Trade Union Confederation in 2008 shows clearly that, based on their survey of 63 countries there is a significant gender pay gap; on average 15.6%, which means that women earn on average 84.8% of men's earnings.   Overall, throughout the world, the figures for the gender pay gap range from 13% to 23%

On average, women working in a recent popular U.S. Senators office were paid at least $6,000 below the average man working for the senator. That’s according to data calculated from the Report of the Secretary of the Senate, which covered the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2007. Of the five people in this Senators office who were paid $100,000 or more on an annual basis, only one — his administrative manager — was a woman.

The average pay for the 33 men on his staff was $59,207. The average pay for the 31 women on his staff was $48,729.91.  And don't tell me he is the exception to the rule.

Sigh.

You want to talk healthcare? Until very recently all clinical trials were based on men. Men's bodies. Then the researchers would attempt to extrapolate what that might mean for women: there are still doctors who  won't prescribe aspirin therapy for their female patients because all of those clinical trials were based on men. Who knows if aspirin therapy even works in women to prevent heart attacks?

 "Early studies on daily aspirin therapy were done mostly in men. More recent studies have focused on the effects of aspirin in women, finding that its effects differ between the sexes, and for women, between age groups." Mayo Clinic

Historically, biomedical scientists and researchers have preferred studying male subjects for a variety of reasons including:

• First and foremost, the longstanding belief that women were just little men
  and that the only difference was in reproductive organs. 
• Perceived costs and complexity of recruitment and inclusion of women in
  clinical trials.
• The desire both to protect a woman’s potential fetus (regardless of whether she is
  pregnant, uses contraceptives, or intends to conceive) and to avoid legal liability
  from prenatal exposure.
• The potentially confounding effects of women’s hormonal changes.

Sigh.

Islamic terrorists brought misogyny to a whole new level by promising their recruits that their reward in Paradise was a brothel filled with 72 virgins waiting to be raped by them. No word yet on what female suicide bombers have to look forward to.

But then of course, women do succeed.

Oprah Winfrey. Joyce Meyer. Ellen DeGeneres. They all have something else in common besides being extremely talented, business savvy and wealthy. They were all sexually molested as young girls. Oprah was raped at age 9 and went on to have a teenage pregnancy and a baby who died in infancy.  Meyer was raped by her father for 15 years and her mother, who caught him in the act, still refused to help her. DeGeneres was sexually molested by her step-father in her late teens. Women can still succeed in spite of the gender-specific obstacles thrown in their way. I admire them. And I weep for the thousands of little girls and teenage girls who never even made it to adulthood, buried in landfills and shallow graves, victims of rape and murder.

The question that sparked this post was this. When is your earliest memory of misogyny in your life?

Sadly, I have none. It was always there. Ubiquitous and accepted and overlooked.

Walk a mile in my highheels before telling me how good I have it and who I must help next.