A Saudi woman is beheaded for “witchcraft.” Girls are disappearing in India.

Women are “disappeared” in so many ways.

Non-witches in Saudi Arabia may still be “honor killed” for being with boys, for being raped, or for adultery.

So women are more expendable than men.

As they were during the witch hunts of Europe which lasted from 1450 to 1750, resulting in tens of thousands of killings. Three-quarters of the executed were women.

Steven Katz, author of The Holocaust in Historical Context, says,

The overall evidence makes plain that the growth — the panic — in the witch craze was inseparable from the stigmatization of women.

Continuing, Katz quotes The Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published by Catholic Inquisition authorities in 1485-86.

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. … What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours…

For the sin of being “woman” so many were killed in two German villages that only one woman per town was left alive at one point of the witch hunt.

Echoing ancient Germany, in some Indian communities few women can be found today. ABC news recently reported:

Fifty thousand girl fetuses are aborted every month in India. It is a staggering number. And it has created whole villages where there are hardly any women. We went to one such village in the province of Haryana. Everywhere we looked, we saw boys, young men, old men, but very, very few women. It was unsettling, especially because we knew this was not some freak of nature, but a result of the deliberate extermination of girls.

As we all know, China faces a deficit of the female sex, too.

In both China and India girls are a drain on family finances. Indian brides require huge dowries which can run their families huge debts. And the eldest son is “Social Security” in China. No son? No one to care for you in old age.

Currently, right-wingers are staging a war on women in the U.S., pushing to block the cancer screenings and tests for HIV that Planned Parenthood provides. They seek to prevent access to birth control and abortion that could save women’s lives. And they want to cut nutrition programs for women and children. Women just aren’t that important.

Patriarchy too often rids the world of women and finds each man smothering the feminine within, whether a stance, a way of walking, a way of talking, an emotion… If he does not he will be accused of being a woman, a girl, girly, girly man, sissy… or he may be called woman-like: fag or gay. Pretty awful, huh?

And so the feminine is “disappeared” in male-dominated societies and within men, themselves, while sexist women and men bolster the cause even as egalitarian men and women fight the good fight.

Where misogyny wins no one is better off.

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