Documentary Synopsis
America’s Abortion Fetish: It’s not what you think!
It's been an ongoing tug-of-war in the struggle for women’s rights that is most recently evident in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The documentary, “America’s Abortion Fetish: It’s not what you think!” shares the perspectives of experts who study women’s rights over the course of human evolution. Their thought provoking insights of long-ago established behavioral assumptions and biases point to four basic building blocks that shed light on why political and religious conservatives fight so hard to punish women and limit women’s rights, including reproductive rights.
1: Male mating strategies.
The stage is set by men’s and women’s reproductive biology and by evolution. The experts we talked with tell us that the highest priority of any organism is reproduction, which propels an organism’s genes into future generations. For human males, this often translates to having as many female sexual partners and encounters as possible. Perhaps not too surprisingly, this evolutionary imperative is at odds with female mating strategies. Females are much more selective in their mates. Female mating strategies often seek to monopolize a male's attention to ensure protection and resources. Attention keeps males from straying. Protection keeps women safe from other males. Resources provide for the female while she is pregnant and raising infants and young children. How do males and females resolve their divergent mating strategies? The resolution is resolved by men having a monopoly on violence. Traditionally, as we’ll see, men forced their mating strategy on women through violence, resulting in women becoming the property of men.
2. Patriarchy.
Patriarchy is a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. Instead of shared power, patriarchy is power over others. Humans have been roaming planet Earth for around 200,000 years. It’s only been in the last 10,000 years that most humans abandoned their hunter-gathering days and built city-states of all sizes. As these city-states developed, patriarchy became a more civilized form of violence against women. Patriarchy gave male mating strategies structure in society which have been codified into laws and traditions. As a result, women in these formal societies, with no rights of their own, continued to be property of men and punished simply by being female.
3. Religion.
Religions around the world were written and developed in a world of patriarchy. Specifically, the three major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, reflect the desires and needs of men. Religion gives patriarchy divine structure. Religion codifies male mating strategies with the divine. Religion also codifies the punishment used against women. The Abrahamic God commanded their followers to adhere to the patriarchal structure that existed before the religion was developed. It’s no surprise that this God was male. It’s no surprise that this God was very interested in the chastity and sexual activity of women. It’s no surprise that this God supported male mating strategies. It’s no surprise, under this God, that women were again property and had few or no rights.
4. Politics.
Politics can be traced from the Stone Age into our present reality. Through the ages politics codified male mating strategies into common law. Throughout the history of politics, women rarely had any rights. Women could not vote in the established political process. They could not divorce. Men made the laws. Men wrote the books. Men developed the science. Men developed medicine. Men developed the art. Recorded history has mostly been made at the expense of women’s rights. Slowly, but unevenly, around the world. Politics has been changing, moving toward more equality and rights for women. These slow evolutionary changes in women’s rights highlight how the societies, cultures, and religions that demand a conservative orthodoxy in their particular religion have the least amount of equality for women. This is universal around the globe. Women in conservative Afghanistan have very limited rights. In conservative Iran, a woman may be killed for having a piece of hair exposed from her headscarf. In the United States, conservative political policymakers legislated the punishment of forced birth upon women in America. These conservatives would rather see a woman die than have a fetus aborted.
Examining these biological and man-made human evolutionary building blocks, “America’s Abortion Fetish: It’s not what you think!” throws light on age-old engrained traditions designed to control women, including their reproductive rights.
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It is a fascinating, challenging ride.