Where Dunning-Kruger reigns supreme
We in the US so easily lose sight of how awful we look to the rest of the world.
The UN gave three human rights experts from that rest of the world plane tickets to the US so that they could check out how women fare here. They were appalled.
A delegation of human rights experts from Poland, the United Kingdom and Costa Rica spent 10 days this month touring the United States so they can prepare a report on the nation’s overall treatment of women. The three women, who lead a United Nations working group on discrimination against women, visited Alabama, Texas and Oregon to evaluate a wide range of U.S. policies and attitudes, as well as school, health and prison systems.
The delegates were appalled by the lack of gender equality in America. They found the U.S. to be lagging far behind international human rights standards in a number of areas, including its 23 percent gender pay gap, maternity leave, affordable child care and the treatment of female migrants in detention centers.
Also domestic violence? Sexual harassment on the job? Sexual harassment everywhere else? Voice in government? Visibility in the culture?
The most telling moment of the trip, the women told reporters on Friday, was when they visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced the hostile political climate around women’s reproductive rights.
“We were harassed. There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,” said Frances Raday, the delegate from the U.K. The men repeatedly shouted, “You’re murdering children!” at them as soon as they neared the clinic, even though Raday said they are clearly past childbearing age.
“It’s a kind of terrorism,” added Eleonora Zielinska, the delegate from Poland. “To us, it was shocking.”
It is shocking.
Another main area of concern for the delegation is violence against women — particularly gun violence. Women are 11 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than in other high-income countries, and most of those murdersare perpetrated by an intimate partner.
Well, it’s like this – we love guns, and we hate women.
While the delegates were shocked by many things they saw in the U.S., perhaps the biggest surprise of their trip, they said, was learning that women in the country don’t seem to know what they’re missing.
“So many people really believe that U.S. women are way better off with respect to rights than any woman in the world,” Raday said. “They would say, ‘Prove it! What do you mean other people have paid maternity leave?'”
Look at it this way: that illusion probably cheers them up.
I hear it even from liberal friends. Look how good we have it, better than anywhere else! Even females, sometimes. My male friends, liberal and feminist, still can’t quite understand why certain things bother us. They don’t have to deal with it every day, so it doesn’t sound so bad.
That’s an easy mistake to make. It occurs to me (not for the first time) that that’s one of the benefits of being a blogger – you seek out stuff you don’t already know, so that you and your readers can find out about it. (If you’re that kind of blogger, that is.)
A number of my friends do escort work at that clinic and were involved in the visit. It was indeed appalling, they related afterward. And our esteemed state auditor, who seems to think his job consists solely of political grandstanding on topics not relevant to auditing, was complaining afterward that these visitors should mind their own business and not tell people in Alabama what to do. (I’m sure you recognize that “don’t tell us what to do” sentiment as a common one in the South.)
“Dear Muslima” anyone?
And as a general comment, the specific observations of these women seem to pair well with the general observation that notions like “the American dream” can actually inhibit progress, partly from obscuring the reality of how dire a situation might actually be, and partly from perpetuating and reinforcing a kind of nationalistic “just world theory”.
“Don’t tell others what to do” when all they did was observe the harassers — whose sole purpose is telling other people what to do. Head asplode.
Better than Saudi Arabia… what a bloody low bar.
Well, the idea of the US as a world leader is certainly not confined to the position of women. Some years ago I had a rather bizarre experience when a citizen of the US explained the principle of trial by jury and presumption of innocence to people who were citizens of other common law nations. Apparently they were American inventions. It was difficult to understand how the people of the US, such an vast and open society can be so blinkered about the rest of the world, then I remembered Hollywood, that great propaganda machine.
The arrangement of a Fox News studio shows what is wanted of women in the US. One man in the centre, and two women on either side, four in all, all displaying long, shapely, stockinged, carefully crossed legs for the delectation of the viewers. I am invariably appalled when I accidentally (usually) come across this arrangement… You certainly see nothing of the kind on Japanese television, and I doubt you would see it on any television station in Europe.
The South has no monopoly on that; in fact, I think it might be even worse in the midwest! Oklahoma, where I grew up, combines the attitudes of a southern state (in parts of the state) with the attitudes of a midwestern state (in other parts of the state) and a western state (in still other parts of the state – yes, it’s a schizophrenic state). I’m not sure which of those areas has the worst “don’t tell us what to do” attitude – but it seemed to become even worse when I moved to Nebraska, which is solidly midwest.
The standard response: If the USA is so bad, how come “everyone” wants to live there? (Hey, maybe this is the question to which Dunning-Kruger is the answer.)
Theo Bromine – except for all the people who desperately want to get to other places – plenty of immigration to European countries, Canada, Australia…
Keep in mind also the sheer size of the place and the wide oceans on either side. In a way we’re isolated by our bulk and distance from the rest of the world.
When I saw this first, I noted two of the observers were from Costa Rica and Poland. Not exactly states where women’s reproductive rights are respected any better than Texas.
At least they didn’t ask for an observer from Iran or Saudi. But then, they’d never send one…she might escape.
Ophelia,
I’m not convinced by the ‘isolation’ argument. The US is far less isolated from other liberal democracies than Australia and NZ. Earlier generations of Australians responded by becoming travellers and living abroad for some years and many still do. The essential factor is probably not isolation but the immense demographic and economic resources of the US, it’s not surprising that many Americans don’t express curiosity about the outside world. I know very little about Belgium or Canada, however if I was informed that the position of women or their medical systems were superior I wouldn’t be incredulous, that’s the difference.
Well it wasn’t really an argument, it was just one suggested factor in our undeniable tendency to ignore the rest of the world. I envy Europeans their proximity to a wide array of different countries/languages/cultures (even though that hasn’t always worked out well in practice).
Theo Bromine, @ 10
The standard response to the ‘everyone wants to live here’ is that the US doesn’t need to build a wall on its northern border to keep Canadians from illegally entering the US, does it? The US isn’t ‘so bad’, it’s just not the world leader in social and political trends that some Americans seem to believe.
According to Scott Walker, we do
I do know Canadians who have moved to the US (and even become citizens) who still get derisively called “frostback”.
RJW @14 – it could also be the enormous amount of resources that are poured into convincing Americans of that fact. From my earliest years, I was assailed by messages about how wonderful we were, how unique and special we were, how we were the winners and the top at everything. This is not just in our TV, movies, magazines, etc – it was in the school curriculum (not all schools, but I went to school in Oklahoma). Part of the whole flap over the revision of the Texas schoolbooks and standards is that members of the right wing want that restored into the schools (I’m not sure how much it’s left, but they perceive that everyone is always saying America is horrible in the schools. I’ve been in Texas; I doubt it). There is an enormous noise machine designed to spread the message about our wonderfulness and everyone else’s worthlessness, from the earliest stories about the Minutemen, who apparently took the musket from over their fireplace and beat the British without any help from anyone (anyone here from France? You’re free to protest that picture) to the Iraq war, where we freed the Iraqis from the horrible dictator and brought them democracy. It’s brainwashing, and they get kids young enough that very few ever think to question the dominant paradigm.
@19: it’s called “american exceptionalism”. No other nation has “exceptionalism” the way america does. In my young days in Canada it was known as “yankee bullshit”…..to Canadians all americans were ‘yankees’ then.
lknklast,@19
Yes, that’s why I mentioned Hollywood. Like many people outside the US, I’m a fan, however some of Hollywood’s version of the rest of the world is just plain offensive to non-Americans and, of course, the pure genius of the US propaganda machine is that all we foreigners actually pay for it. I sometimes have to point out that the US really didn’t invent democracy and the country was in fact rather behind the trend in some democratic innovations.
I’d also agree that the American idea of bombing Third World countries into democracy has its limitations.The belief by American planners that, after the carnage, Iraqis would embrace US style neoliberal democracy was amazingly naive.
The USA is one of the great achievements of Western civilsation, however it’s about time that Americans realised that they could learn from the outside world, not just preach to it.