Sex & World Peace Outline

More lives were lost due to sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, suicide, egregious maternal mortality, and other sex-linked causes than in all the wars and civil strife of the twentieth century.
Sex & World Peace, p. 4

Foundational Definitions

SEX = biological differences between men and women
GENDER = socially defined differences between men and women

Foundational Concepts

WOMEN AS BOUNDARIES OF THE GROUP

The “protection” of women often serves as a smoke-screen for the protection of their reproductive potential – “protection” is less about the concerns of the woman than about the ability of the group to control the way in which she reproduces.
Women are often “protected” by the group in the same way one might “protect” an economic asset – even if this is at odds with their interests.
Women in many societies today still possess conditional citizenship, which she receives either by her relationship to her father or her husband, putting both her and her children’s citizenship in jeopardy if she reproduces with a man from a different country.
To “protect” against a woman’s capture by an invading group, her male family members will sometimes simply kill her.

HONOR/SHAME SOCIETIES

Because of the unique role that in-group women play as boundaries of the group, with the resulting need of the group to protect them, the value of a woman in many cultures soon becomes associated with the state of her sexual relations…

Thus, the need to protect a woman becomes more and more associated with the need to protect her chastity – not her life, not her freedom.

Indeed, her life and freedom are both subordinate to the goal of ensuring her chastity – and may even be at odds with that goal.
Sex and World Peace, p. 8

“The honor of a man lies between the legs of a woman.”

PATRILOCALITY

In many traditional cultures (and also, notably, in many primate social structures, as well) – daughters, when they begin to mate, relocate to their mate’s in-group, rather than the male relocating to hers. This means that a daughter and her offspring are bound to become a part of a different immediate family than the one she’s born into.
Daughters in many such cultures, therefore, become alienated from their biological families and are the last to receive scarce resources, as their membership status within their biological family is considered temporary.