According to the National Organization of Women, broadband is a distinctly feminist issue.

Sometimes my intellectual adversaries do my job for me. The text of this post’s title appears on NOW’s front web page on the same day Saudi Arabia’s highest court has unambiguously declared that a (female) rape victim shares in her attackers culpability.*

Seriously! I couldn’t make this shit up!

NOW’s explanation of the uniquely feminist nature of universal broadband goes like this:

In our struggle for equality, women have much to gain from the Internet, including access to the means and resources we need to stay informed and make our voices heard. High speed Internet (also known as broadband) could be a boon for women, people of color, the LGBT community, people with disabilities, younger and older people, and others who often find themselves on the wrong side of our nation’s power divide.

Of course! Silly me! By the same token, it’s also been a boon to White Supremacist / Neo-Nazi cults, 9/11 conspiracy wonks, and the last remaining remnants of the KKK. Not to mention Islamist groups who would like nothing better than to mount Kim Gandy’s head on their living room wall. I could, on these grounds, argue that broadband Internet access is an “asshole issue”, but I’ll leave that kind of creativity up to my readers (besides, given the composition of what passes for feminism these days, it would probably be impossible to discern a difference between the two labels).

In their extended explanation (never think that any argument is so bad that it can’t be expounded upon by a women’s studies graduate student at NOW’s national headquarters), NOW points out that in the U.S., broadband access speeds peak around 6 Mbps, when they could be as high as 100Mbps! What in God’s name one would do with that much speed is beyond me. I’m sure that teenage boys everywhere would immediately recognize the utility of such a connection with respect to BitTorrent and pornographic films, but somehow I think that’s not what NOW had in mind.

What they do have in mind is this:

Political Participation: Government meetings can be opened up to more people through two-way video technology.

Great. Because they’re packed at the seams as-is. Nobody where I live misses a meeting of the Washington County Commission. They should start selling tickets in lieu of a wheel tax.

Education: Students can learn from judges and other experts in their fields using two-way video right in their classrooms. Worker training courses can include streaming audio-visual material and sophisticated hands-on tools.

And you need a 100Mbps pipe in order to do this. I mean, who wants to watch a lecture on ontological empiricism when it’s not in high definition? And we all know that when it comes to adopting connectivity technology, educational institutions are way behind the curve.

Medicine: Specialists can be consulted from a distance to help diagnose life-threatening illnesses when every second counts.

Hospitals too, apparently.

Speaking Out: Organizations like NOW and individual activists can get our message out via the Internet at relatively low cost compared to other media. With high speed Internet, the complexity, creativity and distribution of our message can be greatly amplified. And two-way connections can help leaders and activists organize from across the country and even the world.

The irony is that this is posted on their web site.

I can’t go through the whole list. You’ll just have to check it out for yourself.

Of course, the reason why, compared to America, other countries have higher speed connections is because America is a particularly large piece of real-estate. While Helsinki Telecom is busy bringing fiber-optic cable to every doorstep, Verizon, Embarq, Time Warner and countless other communications companies are trying to figure out how to stretch their copper/coax to Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who live in the middle of a wheat field in southern Nebraska.

But it’s a feminist issue, folks. Whatever the hell that means.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

* Hat tip to my friend Tony for alerting me to this story. Not that we should be surprised when a Middle Eastern country flagrantly commits a human rights violation - but it’s still worth noting.