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VIEW POINT

Patriarchy and Nuclear Power

What follows is a brief map of relationships between nuclear power and patriarchy, with suggestions for further investigation,

My Own Geography...and Theirs

I wore my Rape Crisis Center T-shirt to the May 6 anti-nuke rally in Washington, D.C. While listening to a speaker, someone came up to me, read the T-shirt's message, and said, "That's what it's all about.'

My T-shirt says: "My Body Belongs to Me." After the Three-Mile Island accident I starting thinking about what that means and began to wear it as my anti-nuke statement. The more I think about it the more I see nuclear power as rape.

The most obvious connection lies in the question of who owns our bodies. In a rape culture, women's bodies belong to any man who comes along, to be used for any kind of violence. In a nuclear power culture, those who own and/or control the sources of nuclear energy claim ownership to our bodies, as well as animals, plants and the earth.

Men use the weapons of rape and assault to keep their power over women. They also use physical weapons as a way of diverting the attention of powerless men away from the system, so the anger they might direct against racism and capitalism falls on women instead. Similarly, seeing nuclear power as a weapon, I find that there are three ways to analyze its potential: (1) radiation is a side effect of the international power struggles that require nuclear war technology; (2) the ruling class tries to weaken the people directly by affecting our health and killing us with cancer; (3) they want to use the dangers of nuclear accident as a justification for a police state. I offer these interpretations only to stretch our thinking about what's going on here, to push us to consider that the hurt we receive may be given intentionally.

Intentional or not, the fact is that in a nuclear power culture, we all receive a little extra radiation and all take the risk of nuclear accident. The added radiation from nuclear plants is less, they say, than that from natural sources; the increase in cases of cancer is less than one-half of one percent of the population. As if it's okay for one million people (one-half of one percent of 200 million people in the U.S. alone) to get cancer just so we can have nuclear power. Those who will suffer the most are people in the working class rural areas where most nuclear power plants are located. They cannot afford to leave their jobs to get away when an accident happens. Such people are not "real" to those who are making the decisions about nuclear power.

Those in power say we've agreed to this: we're unwilling to give up our air conditioners and gadgets, and, we don't want to take the trouble to insulate our homes or use public transit. They spend millions of dollars training us to seek happiness by consuming goods and then blame us when energy use goes up.

Unwinding the Path to Destruction

Who are the decision makers? Why do they do such things? It sounds too simple to say they are men, but it's true. Men own the corporations and make the profits; men wage the wars and make the major political decisions. They are also white and rich. (And if there are any exceptions, these people identify with rich white men.)

The powerful men embody the male consciousness, which schemes to control and shape the way we live. "Universal Man" (who they insist includes all of us), the consciousness of this culture, is properly called Man because it is based only on those qualities that men possess—aggressiveness, competitiveness, a drive to know and control all that is not themselves: the natural world, women, and even each other.' Universal Man's culture includes women only as a

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buffer, a protection from the harshness of his world. Consider the image of a man coming home from a hard day at work, escaping from the "jungle" to a wife who listens, consoles and strengthens him to face another day. Her nurturing helps him keep working to make money for the owners.

The roots of this male consciousness lie in the primitive hunting/gathering societies where men's and women's roles were sharply divided. Women gathered most of the food, acted as the center and the source of stability for the tribe, owned property, raised children, built homes, and knew how to heal with herbs and diet. Men hunted, providing a small part of the food (which was given great symbolic importance), and waged war. People interpreted the world through their religion, by way of myths that gave spiritual meaning to events. They used magical objects and rituals to tame the uncontrollable and fearful side of nature-earthquakes, lightning, disease. Men honored and feared women as the creators of life. But they controlled women through rape and other violence.

Western Man is still a hunter. He sets himself apart from the earth and seeks to control all of it, including women. The natural world seems less fearful to him; he can now scientifically explain lightning, earthquakes and disease, replacing spiritual myths with logical laws. He breaks the universe down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to explain,

MART

Photo by Janet Century describe and predict. Metaphysics went out of fashion because science appeared to explain everything.

But the science that seemed to put the whole universe in order began breaking down in the early 1900's. Man's orderly universe contained flaws: unexpected radiation appeared on X-ray plates in an experiment; oddities emerged in the orbits of planets; stars presented themselves in the "wrong" places during an oclipse. Every effort to "clean up" the annoying discrepancies led instead to further problems and eventually destroyed the theory itself.

Then Einstein, struggling to develop a theory which' expressed his philosophy of nature, found energy and matter to be 'one substance: matter is enormously concentrated energy. Scientists began 10

build a new and complex view of the world, trying again to explain everything in one coherent theory. (It never works, of course. The more they learn, the less they know, and the more they sound like mystics and religious philosophers of centuries ago.) That matter and energy are the same was perhaps the most radical concept physics had ever seen. But it had to be tested, and proved. Most of the scientists eagerly accepted the government funding offered for research. Who wouldn't want to be one of the people who unlocked the secrct of matter, the substance of the universe? "Matter into energy" rings of magic, of the ancient quest to turn lead into gold, of the fulfillment of Man's ancient longing to hold the key to the universe. How could they think about politics, about who would use their discovery for what? So, using all the help Western technology could give them, they began their search. And found the answer in an atomic blast. They willingly risked their own lives. They didn't consider who else might lose in their quest for truth.

So their burning drive to master the secret of the universe was harnessed by other Men who wanted to control the human world: bombs fell on Japan to show their power. For the first time Man felt equal to the god he'd battled so long. Man too could work death and destruction. Yet the new force was terrible, mysterious, uncontrollable. Though Man could set it off, he couldn't control its effects. He had the power for evil but not for good, for death but not life. And the struggle to own this force, to tame the deadly magic, brought us "The Peaceful Atom" (sponsored by the warmakers to generate more plutonium for bombs and at the same time provide a “civilized” cover for war research).

Our Present Location

The deadly magic is not tamed, as we all know. At all levels it has failed: nuclear power continues to bring sickness and death; it is not a reliable source of energy; and it does not even consistently make money. So why does the dangerous work continue? Why not admit we failed, close the plants, and invest in solar power?

The best answers to these questions so far have focused on capitalism: there's already too much money invested; they're trying to earn back their investment; they need a centralized power source that fits efficiently into a pattern of monopoly ownership. A "bad guy" mentality suggests that the owners are to blame. Such a view implies that taking the profit out of nuclear power will change it all. But socialist and Communist countries use nuclear power too. Although economic solutions arc somewhat enlightening, they do not explain the irrational behavior of most of the pro-nuke people. Consider the last pro-nuke person with whom you discussed the feasibility of nuclear power. Was he making any money from it? Most of the people I've met were not.

Why, then? Men discovered a near-magical force linked with the very substance of the universe, dreamed again the age-old dream of mastering nature, thought they had done so, and failed. Yet they simply cannot accept it. They will not believe that Man is still small in a large universe. They deny it, even to themselves. Dollars buy a researcher who will state that nuclear power is safe. Safety violations at operating plants are overlooked in order that nuclear power appear economical to the public. Since every nuclear accident has an explanation, Men imagine that we can correct every human mistake and each inachine error, making nuclear power safe. They pretend that the dead bodies are not dead, and that the higher cancer rates of uranium miners and other nuclear workers don't relate to nuclear power. Increasingly, desperate to .control their discovery,

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