Virginia Woolf spent most of her literary life writing about feminism and the importance of the writings of women and had even gone so far as writing essays wherein she fought for female literary equality and advocated for the importance of female figures in academia. Thanks to Woolf and other literary feminists, female authors have some sense of empowerment in today's society.
But that sense of empowerment is slowly dying away. The leading cause for this is humour - "go back to the kitchen and make me a sandwich", "what do you call the useless skin around a v*gina? A woman", and "sexism is wrong and being wrong is for women" are among the few things said to women by not just men, but other women too, usually in a joking manner. This frightens me because though they are best taken jokingly, they have some sexist undertones that still resonate through the minds of most of society today.
A month ago I finished from a class at university called 'Reading Contemporary Fiction'. We had to read some 'feminist texts', Tar Baby and The Summer Without Men, and having assumed the entire class had read those two books in the span of around two weeks, my tutor handled a class debate: "what do you think about feminism?" and "are you a feminist?" were two of the questions asked. The results shocked me. Most of the females in the class did not label themselves as feminists, in fact I did not come across one.
The word 'feminist' has a negative connotation that comes along with it, and I think that is why nobody owned up to being one. When you think of a feminist, your mind conjures up an old woman living with her female partner of fifty years on a farm and shooting laser beams from her eyes at any man that dares to come near her fifty or so acres of land - alternatively, she has a shotgun. Or you may imagine those wrinkled little old women Sacha Baron Cohen angered in his flick Borat. And that is what contemporary society labels as a 'feminist'. A woman who loves other women and deems every man she comes across a misogynist. But that is not the case.
Feminism is, put plainly, 'the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes'. It is the want to be included in society rather than excluded, the want to be paid equally, the want to be treated as a fellow human rather than having to relive the experiences felt by housewives in the fifties, who, if you look at the picture below, even were brainwashed by the media to feel inferior to the superior 'breadwinner'.
Without feminism, we would not allow pregnant women paid leave - in fact, they would not be able to have a job. We would not allow women to vote because prior to 1893 and the Suffrage movement, politics were not considered to be a woman's business. We would still be brought up to believe that we are housewives and an education is only for men. We would still be brought up to believe that all we will amount to in life is what The Good Wife's Guide tells us. That we should live in a society where gender constraints are the social norm.
A group of Year 10 boys in Sydney Boys High School participated in a project titled Gender Equality Project wherein they selected spokespersons within their peers to present to the cohort of the students at their school a powerpoint presentation equipped with confronting statistics to ultimately raise awareness about gender inequality. "I think that young men need to stand up and change this", one of these boys said in the video below. The fact that these boys have bravely taken a stand for equal rights, and I say 'bravely' because it was also noted in the video that the cohort of students they presented to laughed through the first part of the presentation and it is rather courageous of them to stand up against media and the social norm to present their viewpoints, shows that everyone has the ability to welcome social equality. And that is what feminism is, and in doing this these young boys are feminists. This is the face of feminism. And it is a positive one at that.
The picture that angered me horribly and influenced this post, though, is the very first one located at the beginning of this post. A seemingly innocent pillow, wrapped in a slogan that says 'if a woman is upset, hold her and tell her how beautiful she is. If she starts to growl, retreat to a safe distance and throw chocolate at her'. First of all, it is portraying the woman as animalistic, as a being that is not satisfied when fed with compliments. Second of all, it makes a link to a woman that is menstruating and how she needs chocolate in order to stop 'growling'. Men are falsely led to believe that menstruation turns women monstrous, and that it is a bad thing altogether because it stops the ability to penetrate, per se.
Menstruation is what gives women their ability to rejuvenate their bodies. We shed our inner lining to allow for the creation of a new one and to highlight our fertility. The video below shows Dominique Christina performing her poem The Period Poem, inspired by a twitter post that she found wherein a woman was being demeaned by her former boyfriend for having her period - he dumped her, and displayed this action in his Twitter post in a joking manner, the same manner in which the above pillow's slogan was sprawled out into the world.
"There is, for me, a necessary conversation that seeks to undermine the shaming that happens to some girls around menstruation. [...] To my daughter: [...] Just bleed, bleed anyhow. Spill your impossible scripture all over the good furniture, bleed and bleed and bleed on everything he loves. Period."
And I think Dominique captured the essence of today's society quite well, in terms of misinformed citizens about feminism and its many benefits - the escape from tyrannous stereotypes and gender profiling, the escape from gender ideologies and prejudices and inequality and the escape from women like the one in the picture below who still believe feminism is not needed; take a mental trip back to circa 1893 and attempt to thrive in a society where a man is deemed greater than you in every aspect and do not complain when your rights to an education is taken away, do not complain when your rights to being able to read or vote or work or partake in anything other than marriage are abolished, shut up and conform, and then come back to this slowly evolving society and slap it across its face to the point where you burst its blood vessels when it produces pillows which seek to alienate women with natural bodily functions, and when it tries to harness the stereotypes which cause people to believe that equal gender rights are only meant to be fought by wrinkly little women married to other little women.
Feminism should not be mistaken with the hatred of men - it is, rather, the hatred of the superiority of men and the inferiority of women. It is the abolishing of hatred and sexism and little humorous undertones in sexist jokes that work to defy our trust in a world where all is seemingly equal; our world is not at all equal until derogatory terms against those who fight for gender equality are diminished.
Fantastic!
ReplyDelete