Earth-shattering news: women are not to blame
It’s not like the British woman arrested was uneducated — she has a masters in aeronautics (no, sorry, no idea), but appeared clueless about cultural good manners. Not just her, of course — there were ten of them. Ten backpacking numpties.
It’s unlikely they meant offence, but that’s irrelevant — if you are adult enough to travel, you are adult enough to be culturally respectful. Nobody likes their sacred places to be peed on by naked tourists — try it at the Alamo, or or St Patrick’s Cathedral, and see what happens. Also, much of the world is easily freaked out by nudity.
The most basic guidebooks would have alerted the backpackers that one doesn’t get naked in public, unless in Magaluf. Still, an earthquake? Really? Isn’t that, maybe, pushing it a bit? Yet men blaming women for acts of nature goes all the way back to the earliest mythologies of Adam, Eve, snakes and apples. It’s called ‘blamestorming’, and it frequently involves men — sorry, guys, but it’s always you — speaking on behalf of an unseen deity, who echoes their own prejudices with uncanny accuracy.
These days, gay people get included in ‘blamestorming’, as well as women. It’s fascinating — not the natural disasters, which are horrific, but the magical thinking that goes with them. In a more rational world, it would be called psychosis. Because that’s what it is.
Hurricane Katrina was blamed variously on the banning of Jewish settlers in the Gaza strip (6,841 miles away, but who’s counting), on a gay festival planned for New Orleans on the date the hurricane struck (attributed by a Northern Irish DUP member), and on abortion (by the right-wing preacher, Pat Robertson, who suggested the cloud formation of the hurricane was foetus-shaped).
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was blamed by one religious leader on what women wear — he made a direct link between promiscuity, female clothing and earthquakes. Nearer home, a member of the UK Independence Party (whose members were famously described by Conservative leader, David Cameron, as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”) suggested that last year’s winter flooding was caused by gay marriage.
Here’s the thing. Earthquakes are caused by a shift in tectonic plates. Floods and hurricanes are caused by climate change. Breasts, burqas, bikinis — none of these things can cause environmental events. I bloody wish. The only natural disaster caused by women’s bodies is giving birth to men who will later come out with bigotry so bonkers it’s almost funny.
And we didn’t hear any of these chaps falling to their knees in praise when that double rainbow appeared over Dublin on May 23, in the middle of the ‘yes’ vote, did we? It’s almost as if they would have preferred an earthquake/flood/hurricane/insert disaster of choice. It’s as if the double rainbow, in terms of divine signifiers, was backing the wrong horse.
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