Protection Failures as a Cause of Oppression

PROTECTION FAILURES AS A CAUSE OF OPPRESSION

Wed. June 13th, 2018

If you are supposed to protect somebody, and you try to protect them and fail, it makes you ornery.  That is why women's rights tend to decay after a war, especially after a losing war.  A war heightens men's perception that they are supposed to protect women.  But a war also heightens men's awareness of how difficult it is to protect people.  One response of people who are tasked with protecting others, and feeling that they are having a hard time protecting them, is to reduce the liberty of the people being protected, in order to make it easier to protect them.  So, when it is difficult to protect women, and men believe that it is important to women that men protect them, the men tend to take away some of the rights of women, or at least try to take away some of their rights.  To take a non-feminist example, if a successful surprise attack is conducted against a nation, and the people complain that their government failed to protect them from the attackers, the natural reaction of the government will be to take away some of the rights of the people, in order to make them easier to protect.

An extreme case of this problem with our world -- this evil state of affairs, if you will -- is described and analyzed in Lu Xùn's essay "My Views on Chastity" which Gladys Yang translated into English, along with selected other writings by Lu Xùn, in Silent China.  In "My Views on Chastity" Lu describes and critiques a civilization in which women who were raped were expected and encouraged to commit suicide (it was the civilization he grew up in).

This line of thought suggests that you should be cautious about complaining that some group of people are supposed to protect you and they did a lousy job, because that group of people might respond by reducing your rights.

Frank Newton