By Irene F. Starkehaus -
The big revolutions in human history don't happen in a vacuum. Certainly there are moments of historical import that utterly redirect the trajectory of human history. Such occasions may be flashy attention grabbers, but there are otherwise random events leading to revolution that actually summon social upheaval even as they appear unconnected to the transformative changes they encourage. Without those seemingly insignificant events, certain developments in human activity may never have occurred.
When we consider the equality that women have achieved in Western civilizations, we often incorrectly assume that emancipation began with suffrage. At a most cursory level, that may be true but – again – that revolution didn't happen in a vacuum. Other incidents acted as catalysts for that big bang we call suffrage. In actuality, emancipation began with Selfridge.
Harry Gordon Selfridge, an American-born businessman rose to a position of prominence in the UK by duplicating the Marshall Field shopping experience in London. Selfridge developed the idea for a ladies bathroom in 1909 so that women could be out of their homes for extended lengths of time. Prior to his invention, ladies could only plan to be out of their homes for one or two hours in anticipation of nature's call. There was a profit motive connected with a woman's ability to move about London unencumbered by bladder capacity…among other things. Selfridge was a visionary in this respect. He saw the possibilities in liberating women.
Do not undervalue the importance of that moment when women first became really free to go into public, to shop, to associate, to assemble, and then and only then to protest. The ladies room was a pivotal invention that changed the lives of women forever by offering them sanctuary and privacy for those delicate moments in life when a woman is most vulnerable and truly in need of a safe space.
And now American companies like PayPal and Apple – that are self-proclaimed champions for human rights – are placing a trade embargo on states that are fighting to protect women from sexual predators by keeping biological men out of women's bathrooms and changing rooms. Through discriminating trade practices, companies like PayPal and Apple plan to aid and abet the disenfranchisement of 158.6 million women and girls in the United States, and make those women more vulnerable to sexual assault, molestation and rape.
A growing number of companies seek to punish states that are upholding a woman's right to privacy such as North Carolina by pandering to less than 1 percent of the population that – for one reason or another – is living in a flat-earther denial of irrefutable DNA evidence. These companies attempt to blackmail states into politically motivated policies that will necessarily increase a child's and a woman's risk of assault, unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.
It will not be long. Within five years or less, we will witness a reduction in the freedom of women in this country because of the ill-advised policies against privacy that companies like PayPal and Apple have chosen to propagate. The so-called emancipation of the transgender population, which is in actuality just a poorly disguised political excuse for the denial of biology and other enabling, anti-science movements, will come at the expense of women's rights through the enslavement of their XX chromosomes.
We are on a precipice. Like the year 1909, 2016 too marks a pivotal moment in history as the trajectory of freedom takes a downturn, and women are threatened in an unprecedented reversal of equal rights in America. A loss of actual physical privacy and safety, unlike any curtailment of infanticide rights that wannabe feminists claim as their one true path to liberty, will force women back into the home and back into a half-citizenship.
Conservatives have taken the brunt of every histrionic diatribe produced by the Left since the early 1920s because conservatives emphasize personal responsibility en lieu of nanny state solutions to everyday problems, but the Left's War on Women symbolized by the Great Potty War of 2016 will reveal anti-conservative, dystopian melodramas such as The Handmaid's Tale to be the literary pap that they are.
Women, be aware. No matter what they claim, the actions of progressives will be the catalyst for your submission to a patriarchy. You might as well wrap us all in green burkas and call us Marthas because the Left is on a roll and is once again at the forefront of actual human rights suppression.
Shame. Shame on companies like PayPal and Apple, American Airlines and NBC for strong-arming states that are bound by their constitutions to protect women from violence. Companies that would have absolutely no compunctions about restricting legally licensed Americans from their constitutionally guaranteed, concealed-carry rights on the grounds that they make people less safe will have no problem exposing women to sexual predators in the name of inclusion. Their pretense is painfully fractious.
I predict that if other states won't follow North Carolina's example and restrict public bathroom usage down biological gender lines, the number of assaults on women and girls in this country in public bathrooms will outnumber the entire population of so-called transgenders within half a decade. It's already happening. The trend will not improve but rather worsen.
How can wannabe feminists stay silent in the face of such a violent overthrow of women's rights? How can companies like PayPal and Apple endure their own duplicity? Better still, how do American consumers who care about equality fail to stand with North Carolina against real gender subjugation?
