Hi Readers,
With all that’s been going on in the media and the online
world this week I thought it’d be silly to not write a post about this hot
topic – feminism. In this day and age, I feel like it’s almost impossible to
not be a feminist, and more importantly; why wouldn’t you want to be? Feminism
is "a range of political movements, ideologies and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, personal, and social rights for women" and I find it so hard to believe that in the modern
(specifically Western) world there are still people who don’t identify as
someone who believes in the equality of both men and women.
There are four main points I’d like to discuss throughout
this post, all things that have been signs to me that I needed to write this
post. I’m going to try and keep it as short as possible, I know I’m liable to
tangents and rambling!
The first frustration that caused me to write this post
stemmed from a heated discussion in one of my sociology classes a couple of
weeks ago. The discussion started out as being about race and ethnicity, but
when the tutor told us an anecdote, this moved onto gender issues and feminism.
The story the tutor told us was about a staff meeting she attended in which
some departments were reflecting on the recent change resulting in the Sports
and Cooking courses merging together. One of the student evaluations had read
something along the lines of ‘that Eastern girl was HOT… and she could cook.’
Yes, believe it or not this was the evaluation that teacher had decided to use
as an example of the success of the two departments merging, which says a
million things about why feminism is important on its own. The discussion was
kicked off by one girl raising her hand and saying something similar to ‘it’s
just a laugh… people are too oversensitive these days.’ This brings me to the
point of this paragraph. Even if people are ‘too oversensitive’ (which personally,
I don’t think they are considering that poor girl who has probably been working
as hard as she can to pass her cooking course but all the students AND TEACHERS
can comment on is her image) there is always going to be an issue unless we
start to pick up and point out every time someone is affected, on no matter
what scale. Oversensitivity is good, it means we’re not standing for a problem
anymore and things are beginning to change.
In the past month it has been unfair to mention feminism and
not Kesha. You have no doubt at least caught the gist of what her recent story
has been, but just in case you haven’t, in a nutshell she is being forced to
remain in a contract with her producer who allegedly physically and mentally
abused her. The high publicity of this case has caused thousands of people (not
just women) to take to twitter and facebook and show their support, voicing
their opinions that this is not ok. As well as doing a lot for feminism this
case has also raised a lot of awareness about victim-shaming (but that’s a
whole other post!)
Thirdly, I wanted to mention Kim Kardashian’s selfie. Her
naked picture that she posted on the internet received a mixture of support and
backlash. Personally, I thought it was great and her open letter that she
posted in response to the backlash was especially good. It is amazing to see a
strong woman, a mother of two and someone under so much scrutiny be so
comfortable in their own skin. More than that, she even says she’s empowered by
it, how many of us can honestly say that? I know I can’t. I think it’s great
that Kim has been able to inspire so many women to be body confident and to
embrace their imperfections and unique bodies.
Last of all, it was obviously International Women’s Day this
week and I think this is the most participation and recognition I’ve ever seen
it get. Good, this also means things are changing. Although I did see one
article that immediately asked, without even acknowledging IWD, ‘why isn’t
there an International Men’s Day.’ Because every day is men’s day! White men
are at the top in our society and we need IWD and other days like this in order
to move forward and change the system.
So Happy International Women’s Day ladies! I hope you (women
and men) enjoyed this post!
As always, you can follow me on:
Facebook - jess.massie.73
Twitter - @jessmassie_
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