At least, that’s what Phyllis Schlafly told an audience at Bates College. Get married, and you turn over ownership of your pussy to your husband, who can do whatever he wants with it. After all, you said “I do!”
At one point, Schlafly also contended that married women cannot be sexually assaulted by their husbands.
“By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape,” she said.
Phyllis must be feeling her oats now that the revival of the ERA has made her suddenly relevant again. Too bad most of her opinions are stuck in the 70s:
For nearly two hours, she belittled the feminist movement as “teaching women to be victims,” decried intellectual men as “liberal slobs” and argued that feminism “is incompatible with marriage and motherhood.”
Disappointing none – especially the gaggle of women students who showed up sporting T-shirts reading “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” – the presentation brought several moments of high agitation.
One came when Schlafly asserted women should not be permitted to do jobs traditionally held by men, such as firefighter, soldier or construction worker, because of their “inherent physical inferiority.”
“Women in combat are a hazard to other people around them,” she said. “They aren’t tall enough to see out of the trucks, they’re not strong enough to carry their buddy off the battlefield if he’s wounded, and they can’t bark out orders loudly enough for everyone to hear.”
Why does Phyllis Schlafly hate our troops?
Hate to break this to you, Phyl — but women have been serving as firefighters, construction workers and soldiers for quite a long time now. They’re even serving in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — though of course it’s all unofficial, and they don’t get combat pay. But in a war where there is no front line, distinctions such as that are meaningless.
It’ll be interesting to see if she’s just a relic from another era (NPI) or if she’s actually got some new arguments these days. Interestingly, it seems like she was ahead of the curve on hating the homos:
“The ERA was a fraud,” she said, comparing it to the absurdities of the political correctness trend of the 1990s, which also preached gender neutrality. “(The ERA) pretended to benefit women, but it didn’t. It was just the nuttiness of feminists who were promoting an androgynous society. They didn’t put ‘women’ in the Constitution, they put ‘sex’ in the Constitution.”
She’s referring to the text of the ERA, which forbade discrimination on the basis of sex and did not specifically apply to women. Ol’ Phyllis, while an odious troll, is no dummy. She knew way back when that eliminating discrimination based on sex meant that the ERA could be used to eliminate discrimination against homosexuals — because of course telling someone that they can marry a man but not a woman is a distinction based on sex, and the ERA would provide a constitutional basis for challenging DOMA and state laws that forbade same-sex marriage. She even predicted back in the day that it would be used for that — but of course, nobody could imagine in those days that Teh Gays would want to get married!
One thing, though: can we PLEASE stop pretending that she’s just a li’l ol’ housewife? She’s a full-time wingnut activist, and she has been one for decades. She’s no more a housewife than I am.