Time to Woman Up
It has been a very tough month to be a woman. It is a very tough time to be a woman.
A man has been elected as US President who, best case, does not respect women and wants to remove their rights to have control of their bodies and, worst case, may be guilty of repeated sexual assault. Women in Afghanistan are denied post-primary education and banned from speaking in public places. Women in Iran face beatings and imprisonment if they don’t comply to hijab & modesty regulations.
Taken in this context, this month’s Equal Pay Day (the day women effectively stop earning due to an average 11% salary gap versus men) seems like a gentler issue - even though it translates to women losing millions over their lifetime. Meanwhile we learnt that women wait 30 minutes longer than men for treatment in emergency rooms - and that we know as much about the female reproductive system as the Elizabethans did about the brain.
It is hard to conclude anything other than that women are considered as lesser beings of lesser value, to be ruled over and controlled by men. That the world wants us to to focus on producing children instead of being in the workplace (where men are seen as ‘better performers’ and thus earn more and get most of the top jobs) - oh and, let’s not forget, on being sexually attractive and available (but in a non-threatening way to men of course).
This is the awful reality that we have to face: this is how men see us, or at least how too many men see us. One of the most worrying things I heard about the US Election result was that these are very tough economic and political times and that people don’t trust a woman to lead us through them. That this difficult job needs a man. Because we virtually always think the man is better, stronger, more equipped for the big job - even when he isn’t. And we virtually always choose him for the leadership role - even when we shouldn’t (I wrote a whole book on this…) Men are biased from birth to see women as sex objects, mums, carers - not as leaders. Every woman is fighting every day against this perception - and usually losing.
Are men responsible here, do they need to take action to drive change? Of course they are and of course they do.
But I’m going to say it and I know it’s not going to be popular: women are responsible too. We are allowing this. We are collaborating in it.
We are dancing around the edges of this enormous issue. We see what is happening and we shake our heads and sigh, but basically we accept it as ‘the way things are’ for women. We respond to a social media post about high level sexism with an angry face emoji. And too many young women feeding the sexualization with Instagram posts that fuel the perception that women are here to look gorgeous and nothing else.
And, worst of all, we are enabling all of this by voting for it. 52% of white women voted for Trump. Put another way, 52% of white women did not vote for women.
So yes, shame on men for allowing all this - and we need more ‘allies’ to become true FeMANists and take action.
But shame on women too. We need to stop collaborating in this. We need to stop accepting it as the way things are. We need to stop accepting that men get to control us and our lives. Men are not superior to women. Men are not our rulers. We are their equals.
We need to Woman Up and act like it. If we do this and we do it together, if we vote and act for women and for equality and against sexism and misogyny we can change everything.