Is there a "War on Women"?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes, and it's time to fight back.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I wouldn't call it a "war". Republicans aren't going after women just because, but rather because a number of their views just happen to screw us over. They know this, and they continue anyway.

It's pretty clear a solid chunk of the modern GOP is made of closeted (and in some cases not-so-closeted) mysogynists. It's not just about the policies they support, but also the rhetoric that surrounds it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

But pro-life positions and religious opposition to parts of Obamacare don't come from a place of hating women, they come from religious arguments...

Most religious arguments usually get around to hating women.

No. I'm a religious pro-lifer and have no problem with Women. I care about the life of the fetus. Most pro-lifers are the same way, though there are select cases of sexism that unfortunately get taken as examples of the movement as a whole by trigger-happy politicians.

I think he means that some of the "rules" or behaviors encouraged by various religions have a sort of archaic bias against women, at least in comparison to views and behaviors accepted in the modern word. Something that may have been seen as OK back then is not today, which can be said about a lot of things.

But I have to say, I'm not sure religion is really the cause or origin of this. The major religions are old, very old, and they were influenced by the views of their time. Women in a lot of societies have almost always been on some sort of unequal footing since the dawn of technology and increased productivity. Go back to a lot of primitive agrarian societies and you see much more equality, which was steadily eroded as those societies evolved and advanced forward.

Maybe there was some idyllic time where things were a little more equal, but it's pretty clear that patriarchy predates industrialization. Even Ancient Greeks didn't see women as people.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Maybe there was some idyllic time where things were a little more equal, but it's pretty clear that patriarchy predates industrialization. Even Ancient Greeks didn't see women as people.

That's true, but I was thinking more Paleolithic and early Neolithic, before the rise of higher-productivity agriculture. I was just suggesting that at it's core, the evolution of gender roles/equality probably has much more to do with economical factors / resource gathering than religion. The development of religion and gender issues is possibly influenced by these factors, and not the other way around.

You might well be right, I don't know enough about prehistoric societies to really have an opinion. From what I read, it's widely agreed that agriculture and sedentarization are what gave rise to social hierarchies based on the division of labor, and gender inequality might easily have been a product of that.