Wow... Really, SHAME ON ME.
I have been lazy about updating, and that I apologize for.
But trust me when I say I will be better about it during these summer months! I have so much unpublished material that I am really going to focus on finishing and getting out to you guys. (:
But on to today's topic...
I don't think it's any secret where I stand on the feminist's movement. I am an advocate of women's rights and gender equality and just equality in general. So yes, I am a feminist.
However, I don't think it's any secret either that I put most of my energy into environmental causes.
To put it in perspective, if there were a week-long fest of environmentalist and feminist events/rallies, I would probably dedicate 6 of those days to the environmentalist movement, and one of them to the feminist movement.
My point of starting of by mentioning this was to just say that I have not spent significant amounts of time on the feminist movement. And I'm not one who is overly-sensitive or nitpicks over ever little patriarchal aspect of society.
However, I have been able to notice subtle things regarding how women are spoken (or not spoken) about that have made me look around and go "Am I the only one who noticed that...?" And it's interesting, because I am the only one who notices it--because these things are just embedded so deep into society that it seems almost normal for us to think that way. And really, that's the most harmful part.
I'll mention just a couple examples.
-Since I've been home, I have come across this television show called 'Celebrity Wife Swap'--a show that has been around since I was a child, with a slight twist put on it by starring individuals who have acquired some amount of fame at some point in their lifetime. Usually, the marriage situation in each household was made up of the husband, who was the celebrity, and the wife, who was...well, the wife. (Which is one problem in itself, if you ask me, but that's not my main issue.) When the "wife swap" occurred, and the families were meeting their replacement wives for the first time, the question was always the same: "Whose wife are you?"
Notice the phrasing of the statement. They don't say, "Who are you married to?"
In theory, both statements express the same idea, but the connotation behind them are quite different. The concept of "marriage" usually implies a mutual agreement between two equal individuals formed on the basis of love and commitment. However, being "someone's wife" has a more possessive undertone to it. Not only that, but it makes it seem that the worth of the husband is, in some sense, greater than that of the wife (never-minding the fact that one of the wives was a successful lawyer and business owner, arguably possessing more talent and financial stability than her "celebrity" husband, who played football for a living).
It was just interesting for me to see that in each episode, the default was to have the women be described as a mere possession of their husbands.
(Don't get me wrong; we could go on all day about how this gender inequality is built-into the show, since it's called "Wife Swap", and yada yada yada... But it was just specifically this narrative that was casually used that I found to be interesting.)
-At school, I am on the Speech and Debate team. And as you would imagine, many of our practice sessions consist of debate rounds. Sometimes these rounds are judged by qualified judges, but sometimes when running low on trained judges, we just use other debaters in place. This was the situation at one practice, and I was one of those placed at the judge's table. There were initially four of us, but two of them had to leave halfway through the debate. Coincidentally, the two that left were the trained judges. So that left me and another guy to provide the verdict at the end of the round.
In order for you to understand the situation, I have to provide some brief background on debate etiquette. Although there are usually more than one judge at the judging table, one judge is named as the 'chair'. From what I can tell, this judge is usually the one with the most experience at the table. This is the judge that is directly addressed throughout the debate, often as "Mister Speaker" or "Madame Speaker" (however, there has been a push recently to use more gender-neutral titles, like "Honorable Chair" or "Most Esteemed Chair"; I have been judged by one who wanted to be referred to as "Dopest Speaker").
Now back to the situation. The boy and I both were in the same boat as far as experience: we were both novice (first-year) debater and both had never judged a debate before.
However, three-quarters through the debate, I couldn't help but noticed that the debaters had subconsciously designated my co-judge as the chair of the table, referring to him as "Mister Speaker".
It wasn't something I was angry or bitter about; it was honestly interesting to me. At the end of the debate I pointed this out to the debaters, whom (all of them male) quickly responded by saying they thought he was the chair because I was last-minute assigned to judge that room, while he was initially put at the room's judge.
I'm sure that they felt bad and were scrambling for any excuse it, because their assumption was sexist (and their excuse didn't really make much sense either, since being chair is never based on who gets assigned to a room first). But I wasn't out to make anyone feel bad. I just really thought it was interesting. Because that was a prime example of a male outranking a female merely because he is a male--and no one noticed it, because it just seemed normal to make that incorrect assumption.
Do you notice what I'm getting at?
I'm not setting any cities on fire because of these incidents. Because I know that this social mindset isn't simply because of a few ignorant individuals, but is the result of a mindset that has been perpetuated through time. The first step to changing this narrative is recognizing that it is engrained in our culture, and in order to change it, we literally have to change our culture. These days, people who don't think about this are so quick to get offended that they actually end up doing more harm than good for their cause.
I'm not asking you to dedicate your entire self to the feminist movement; I have by no means done so. But I am asking you to just take a moment to look around and notice these subtleties. That's how we as a society can begin to change. And realize that this kind of change doesn't just come overnight. Although that change seems radical and scary, we may very well see ourselves come out as a better species altogether on the other side of this movement.
Thanks for reading.
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