Yeah, yeah, Happy Women’s Day. I appreciate the thought, but it still feels condescending to me. Limiting appreciating or even noticing an entire group of people to only one day, or to only one month a year (Black History Month, looking at you), seems a bit short-sighted. Though it seems very tolerant and liberal and appreciative, it may in fact be saying that we can dedicate this one day a year to doing this so that we can move on to the other 364 Man Days.
We can of course take advantage of it to highlight causes that are worth fighting. I’ve seen great posts by people on Twitter showing different NGOs that help women, and if people will only donate one day a year to those, then that’s better than no days at all. Maybe they will look at it today, get hooked on it and keep donating. It’s worth the shot.
But we also very much risk losing our souls to mindless cheezyness and pandering. I heard, a year ago, a radio commentator on Colombian radio say “so when you go home today, kiss your wife or girlfriend on her special day”, and everything they talked about that day was very much in the same vein. Well, that is not what Women’s Day should be about, at all. It’s not about doing something that should come natural to you anyway, or doing it in a condescending way: a kiss, a pat on the head, a “Good Girl!”.
It’s about acknowledging that the work that women do is real, that it is important, that they matter. Governments should use this day to demand women quotas in Congresses around the world, to rewrite rape laws, to fucking STOP the insane outlawing of contraception, stop the attacks on abortion rights, stop humiliating women in more creative ways than necessary to bully them out of choosing what they want to do with their bodies.
Nobody talks about maternal mortality, this blight on modern civilization, or the booming sex trafficking industry — no, people today were all about “women are like flowers”, or whatever. Bu the pressures, the horror that some women go through just to make it alive in this fucked-up patriarchal douchebag world, even just to make a decent, or indecent, 76 cents on the dollar, are very real, and happen every day, not just today, the only day the world fails to notice.
If you want to be inspired by women who are badasses, if you want to do something about this, and really celebrate International Women’s Day as it should be celebrated, go here or read below
- How to involve, educate and inspire girls on International Women’s Day (feministconscience.wordpress.com)
- It’s International Women’s Day! 6 Women Who Are Making History Right Now (self.com)
- Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama Honor 10 Female Heroes (abcnews.go.com)
Femination 
Reblogged this on The Melting Points.