The turmoil over sex and gender in the developing world, and much of the West too, has a lot to do with the economic and social upheavals of the past century. Pastoralism and subsistence agriculture, and the gender roles that went with them, are unsustainable today, and so are the blue collar jobs that supported a certain family ideal in the West, in which women's lives, and often their fertility, were under men's control. While contemporary education, urban life, birth control, globalization and modern attitudes about women's empowerment have created new opportunities for some, the collapse of traditional economies in the South and the loss of masculine blue collar jobs in the US, have created poverty and social dislocation for many, many more. This poses challenges to the idea of masculinity itself, and makes it easy to mobilize weak-minded men to "put women in their place". This in turn creates opportunities for cynical leaders--from religious zealots who equate birth control with murder, to warlords who use mass rape for political purposes. In the angry minds of their followers, attacking women's rights--and even attacking women themselves--can seem like some kind of "justice."

What to do about it? There are a growing number of programs that attempt to address the attitudes of men and boys, and some have been successful in reducing rates of domestic violence. But these efforts are very small scale and don't begin to address the bigger issue of how the battle over repro rights is so easily politicized. Increasingly, political leaders around the word are using the issue of gay rights in much the same way they have traditionally mobilized people against women's rights. Thus, women's rights activists might want to join forces with the gay rights people, and see if there isn't a shared strategy here.

The battle against women's rights, and gay rights, is often used by politicians as a distraction, to keep people's minds off far more important issues, such as poverty, public health, corruption, pointless wars like the Iraq adventure, etc, ad nauseum. So feminists, the UN, etc should try to keep the debate focused on these larger issues, not only because they are important, but also as a strategy to beat the anti-repro rights demagogues in the race to the "moral high ground". This doesn't mean abandoning the struggle, just broadening it, as advocates for female education and maternal health are already doing. All this is well captured in Michelle's wonderful book.