To give those not in the know some context. The contraception mandate in the Affordable care act requires all employers to provide birth control for their employees. Craft store Hobby Lobby (a Family owned company) appealed this mandate stating that it was in violation of their religious freedom. The ruling given out today (in a 5-4 decision) was in favor of Hobby Lobby and their corporate personhood, over the body rights and agency of women. You can read a bit about this decision here, here and here.
The idea of corporate personhood has been in contention for some time, mainly because by law a corporation can buy and sell property and be sued like any other person in court. However, what makes a corporate person different is that they can not be tried for murder as a non-corporate person can. Also, even though corporations have been sued for crimes and human rights abuses, unlike most people, corporations have the money to pay settlements and if not, they have armies of lawyers to tie up the case in the court system. With this lack of accountability being so common, some research has identified a corporation as a textbook Psychopath.
The source of this major social problem is The profit motive, inherent in Capitalism as an economic system, which results in the exploitation of both the workers and the consumers. Unchecked and unregulated Capitalism leads to the complete deconstruction of human rights across the globe. As a sociologist, what I didn't consider is that corporate control would be so absolute (a part of what Mills calls the The Power Elite ) that the they would be able to roll back civil rights so completely to the point where over 1/2 of the US population would be considered sub human.
In protest to this ruling, many feminist scholars and organizations have taken to the internet to show their justifiable outrage. They mention that the 5-4 decision was made by men and that all of the Supreme Court Justices that are women decided against this ruling. In fact, in an act of pure awesomeness, Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote a 35 page dissenting opinion where she had some amazing things to say . Essentially, these are individuals and organization that are railing against the very tangible reality of the patriarchy and male privilege.
A prime example (in this context) of male privilege is that women in our culture are burdened with responsibility of birth control more so than men. Men then have the privilege of not being responsible for birth control (assuming women are either on the pill, or if they get pregnant they will "just take care of it") leading to some men being coercive to reduce condom use ( typical storylines being: "I want to be closer to you, I want to feel you etc.). Because of the aforementioned burden, there are more options for female responsible birth control, and while they only recently became federally funded (long after pills like Viagra), the Hobby Lobby court decision makes federal funding of female responsible birth control a moot point.
What is the most telling by this court decision is that patriarchy is still alive and well in the US. In the most recent Supreme Court election, many people celebrated a landmark event when 3 out of 9 women were seated on the Supreme court at the same time. Yet, as this court ruling painfully illustrates it is not enough to make tangible legislative changes. Women only make up 1/3rd of the Supreme Court, but women make up over 50% of the US population, therefore a majority of men on the Supreme Court are making decisions for all women.
The question that I am plagued with is: what does corporations have to gain from excluding women's access to birth control, aside from controlling women's bodies and reducing their personhood status in the US? It would seem that since women make up the majority of all part time workers, which many corporations take advantage of (due to the exploitative behaviors inherent of the profit motive), wouldn't they elect to work somewhere else that gives them more reproductive agency? Are corporations like Hobby Lobby, relying on the gender pay gap and the poverty trap to keep women in under employed( so they can't go anywhere else) in order to maintain their staffing needs? But like the kerfuffle with Chick-Fil-a, this is not about rationality, this is about inequality and with court decisions like these they are becoming more overtly (instead of covertly) structural in nature.
Part of this source of this shift in our cultural context is due to the belief that we are in a post feminist society, that we have reached equality of the genders. a barometer of this change is in the increasing inability of young women to define themselves as feminist, even though they may support and defend feminist policies. To them feminist is a bad word, it is old fashioned and unnecessary. This is due to not only the minimization, and vilification of feminism in the media ( books like "The Decline of Men" and "The End of Men" to anything that Rush Limbaugh says ala "Femin-azi") but the rise of exaggerated femininity and enlightened sexism . The point, not only have many young women been socialized and enculturated to hate other women (going so far to denounce and deny the struggles of women in the past whose victories they benefit from), but to validate the male gaze, and the hypersexualization of women as forms of empowerment. This is the quintessential example of how patriarchy has won...for now.
