If “One Billion Rising” is a legitimate enterprise that seeks to tamp down violence against women – it is far from clear whether it is valid or just a gaggle of girls out for a publicity joyride in a jalopy – its shaky delegate at Wednesday night’s Culver City Democratic Club meeting did it a disservice.
Chattering about “violence against women,” on television talk shows and down the internet, rose to No. 1 on the kids’ pop-culture hit parade during the winter, a season when marginal celebrities tend to grow bored by their regular playthings.
Combine the sexiness of “one billion” with an outrageous, headline-grabbing claim “one in every three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime,” and presto. You have a hit record, chum.
A woman named Dr. Barbara Block, strikingly resembling that outrageous, sunglasses-wearing, blonde-wigged faux celebrity who stared down from Sunset Boulevard billboards in the ‘70s and ‘80s, ankled into the meeting, vastly overdressed, resembling Monroe after a long night out. Somewhere.
At best, her rambling, disjointed talk about a serious subject blurred her supposed mission.
It was as if she had been awakened from a deep sleep. Disorganized, embarrassingly unprepared, she repeatedly burbled platitudes that sounded like a driver darting from lane to lane on the freeway. At 4 or 5 miles an hour. She spoke, shall we say, deliberately.
Bereft of solutions, she repeated shopworn lines. Mainly, she claimed victim status for all women, and she prattled interminably and almost irrationally about dancing in the streets. When that laid a dud, she launched into flights of rhetorical fancy.
Have a listen.
Speaking of worldwide violence against women, she said:
“We all care to help our sisters. It’s knowledge, knowledge. That apple that Eve wasn’t supposed to eat.
An Eaten Apple
“When we eat it, when we know what is going on, we do something about it. Because we care.
“And that is not a question of morality. It’s not a question of…
“Morality is, I think, very subjective. And it comes up for hypocrisy a lot. And one religion has one view of morality and another religion has another view of morality. And the patriarchy has their view of morality.
“Some people will say, you know, that contraception is immoral. And they have their opinion.
“So I don’t go for morality. I go for ethics. Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. Do not hurt me. Do not stalk me. Do not rape me, and I will leave you alone, too.
“Ethics, and I think that is what the worldwide web is helping us to devise, is a system of ethics that goes beyond religions, that goes beyond villages and says ‘no’ to certain things.
“You know, we don’t always know: Do we wear a veil? Do we not wear a veil? Should we wear a short skirt? Should we not wear a short skirt? Everybody has different opinions. Everybody has different opinions about when life begins. Some think it begins in past lives. I mean, some think it begins after you have been born for a year. Some think it begins with a sperm. Every sperm is sacred. Some people think it begins…
“You know, there always is going to be an argument about that in the morality department. But we have laws. We have ethics. And we have respect for each other’s space. And this is about respecting our space, and, uh, and, uh, defining that. And that is what we are doing on the worldwide web. That is what we are doing, that is what we are doing to forward the cause of women, of people all over the world.”
