Unity

It's International Women's Day and I'm exchanging clinking glasses, kisses, hugs and flexed biceps emojis with friends. It's a celebration, a chance to lift and carry one another, but one laced with sisterly sorrow. The world keeps torturing women in such subtle and sadistic ways that it's hard not to take it personally. The mere knowledge of millennia of torment can be dispiriting and debilitating, as if we can feel the fates of our foremothers in our bones.

And to those now thinking "I'm sorry but it's 2021, get over it and get on with it": I'm sorry but I can't help you, I simply don't have time to educate you, get smart and then get cracking, it's an emergency and we are all on call. 2020 was a major setback for women and women's rights (women's rights!! we need a separate term for what ought to be universal and inalienable, for fuck's sake) and we will keep on sliding in 2021.

In a perfect world we present our case, a perfectly justified one, and presto, the world tips the scales and we find ourselves on an equal footing. In the real world life is a steeplechase without handicaps; men have a disproportionate, institutionalized, age-old advantage over women. It's possibly the stupidest thing humanity has ever invented and perpetuated. Gender inequality hurts women and men alike. Our lives would be easier, happier, more prosperous and peaceful were women given a fair chance. Gender equality is in everyone's best interest, economically, ethically and environmentally. Every vote, voice and act against gender equality is self-defeating and self-destructive.

And if you still don't know what I'm talking about then you've just figured out what I'm talking about: men and women share a planet but live in two different realities.