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.

I had no idea you have no idea

Oh, the places you’ll go on Netflix. With Netflix. Talking about shows on Netflix. Like Unbelievable. Have you seen it?

It was a miscellaneous group trading viewing recommendations, and it was a revelation of the disheartening kind. And I’m not talking about personal taste in television, I’m talking about a discussion that ensued around sexual assault. If this topic is too raw for you, please feel free to stop reading. If you think this topic has been blown out of proportion and doesn’t merit all the attention it’s getting because it can’t possibly be as bad as advertised, you have never harassed let alone assaulted anyone and don’t know a single guy who would, then you, my friend, should read on.

First, tell me if you agree with the following: Sexual assault is just that. An assault like any other. That is what a gentleman in that miscellaneous group admitted to. He didn’t understand the "fuss” (his word). Why is sexual assault such a big deal? Men get pummeled since the day they enter a playground and take it in their stride. Fact of life: If you’re male, you’ll probably get mugged at some point. Women run the risk of being raped. Same difference.

My heart sank there and then. This is it, isn’t it? The reason for the lack of empathy, the nonchalance. How many men see and think of sexual assault in exactly this way? How many women feel the same? What’s the fuss? Stop fussing. Stop overstating. It’s an assault like any other. It’s just an assault.

Now. Listen carefully. It. Is. Not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. If you have trouble believing women, try finding a man who has been both battered and raped and ask him if it’s the same thing, an interchangeable assault.

I know it can be difficult to internalize something that has never happened to you and probably never will. I know it’s difficult to imagine something as horrendous as rape happening to someone you care about. But if a woman (or man, any fellow human) comes to you with the most painful thing that ever happened to her, I hope your first instinct is to believe her. Maybe you don’t know a woman or girl who has been assaulted, but maybe you just don’t know that you know one. Sexual assault is a highly under-reported crime. The sheer trauma of the event, the knowledge that you will have to relive it and recount it several times if you come forward, makes women and girls think twice. The fear that maybe you won’t be believed, that your every word, piece of clothing and action, past and present, will be scrutinized doesn’t help. The feeling that you will be held accountable until somehow proven otherwise, is too much for too many. 

So, women and girls end up suffering in silence, coping. Or not. It’s hard to move on when even the stats say that justice won’t be done. The perpetrator won’t get caught. Or if he is, he will get away with it, or he’ll get a slap on the wrist. What kind of message is that, to victims and offenders alike? What sort of system is this? These are not trick questions. These are questions that remain unanswered, and every yeah-but hurts victims while letting perpetrators off the hook. Nothing justifies or legitimizes rape. A sexual act without explicit consent is not a sexual act, it’s assault. An assault is not sex, it’s just violence. A felony. You know what is unbelievable? That in 2020, it’s still not investigated and prosecuted as such. Without exception. Until it is, women and girls will continue to think twice before reporting these incidents, and perpetrators will keep thinking nothing of it.

Same same but different

Temperature: a slushy 4/39 degrees

Eating: Heading out to dinner later today to meet up with my tribe of fierce fabulous fearless women. Happy International Women’s Day! ✊

Drinking: Oh I’m sure there’ll be a toast or several.

Watching: the new Moominvalley series. We need a Moomin emoji. To the Unicode Consortium, let's go!

Listening: to the X Ambassadors

Reading: How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals by Sy Montgomery, illustrated by Rebecca Green. This is a beautiful book on so many levels.

Thinking: Don’t judge me, exalt me, berate me or underestimate me/anyone based on my/his/her sex. What we do, think and say is what counts.

Feeling: A tad bit under the weather from the flu my son gifted me with. But thanks for waiting until carnaval was done!

Hey brother

Lances at the ready, gentlemen, I'mma climbing on a high horse. Cue groans oh gawd it was such a lovely day what now? International Women's Day! Yes, I know, but I was kinda busy on Saturday, and this year's theme stands every day of the week/month/year. Equality for women is progress for all.

You gotta wonder sometimes, and gents please don't charge before I've had my say and please please don't take offense because I do not mean every man on the planet, but are men stupid or something? You really want to shoulder the burden, financial, political, enter areas of overrepresentation here, on your own? Like really really? Because women sure feel that way sometimes, that you're making life unnecessarily hard for yourselves keeping your own counsel, upholding your old boys' clubs, anti-social networks closing the door on fully capable, willing and able women, people differentiated by the fact that their breasts tend to be bigger than yours.

Considering that our breasts have nothing to do with our brains, they sure play a big and baffling part in the oddest of times and places. The same goes for other discriminating factors. Irrelevant. At least they should be. So don't go there. With your eyes, or your hands. Your thoughts? Keep them to yourselves if you're with Camp Chauvinist. And go camp somewhere else. It's 2014 for crying out loud but you wouldn't believe it reading the Everyday Sexism Project stories and suchlike.

I have one, every woman does, starring that part of the female anatomy that makes many a man stir and stare and many a woman insecure for life. This was way back when I had hardly anything to make you stare or stir, a time when I didn't know if I liked what I saw or what I would be seeing in a year or two, but there they were. Now. Picture a bus with many school girls, young and a bit older, on board. Along comes a gang of three boys, 17 to 19-year-olds, about to play a game as they make their way to the back: breast spotting. Breast spotting with running commentary.

I had plenty of time to realize what they were doing. Plenty of time to watch their faces, see those smirks, listen to their lewd remarks and laughter, hear other girls hiss and curse. Time to wish I was someone else, somewhere else. I intended to look away, pretend I saw or heard nothing, brush it off with indifference. I ended up looking the boy who stopped in front of me straight in the eye.

Big mistake. I still remember what he looked like and I still remember what he said, but I was thirteen years old and I hated them, those boys I didn't know and never saw again with the fire of a thirteen-year-old, and that makes the whole episode that much harder to forget. To them it was just a stupid game. To the girls in that bus they were just stupid period. But when the games and comments start piling up some girls really do stop listening and some girls stop talking and some girls stop believing they'll ever meet a decent guy and if they do he's probably just pretending or a recovering asshole about to relapse and who wants that, you know.

I'm not kidding, gentlemen. I kid you not, I've held a girl's hand, tried to talk her out of giving up on you, told her there are plenty of good men out there because I knew there were, just you wait and see. So for the love of all that is holy please don't make your life unnecessarily hard, okay. Don't be an insensitive jerk. It's 2014 for crying out loud meaning you're very much at risk of being on the receiving end, the punch line of a sexist joke and who wants that, but what goes around comes around, you know. Or as a former card-carrying playboy now a father of three girls put it: "Poetic justice much?" I wonder what he'll teach his daughters about men, what he'll tell them about his wild days and ways.

Many women have turned feminists, and I mean hardcore, card-carrying feminists, after breaching the gates of power or breaking through the glass ceiling only to be confronted by some card-carrying chauvinist questioning her every move and word. Many men have turned feminists, and I mean hardcore, deeply concerned feminists, upon the birth of a daughter. They look at the world through the eyes of a woman and don't always like what they see. They know what kind of boys their girls will face along the way because they've met them all, maybe even been one of the worst kind once, and there's nothing they can do about it now but be responsible, empathetic role models not just for their daughters but their sons as well.

I know men who wish women ruled the world. I know women who wish we did. Most people I know just wish we could get on with the business of living and loving without having to hide or exploit or abuse or excuse or resist or explain our own sex, or the opposite one. Making a power struggle of it is a monumental waste of time and resources and we're kind of running out of both on this planet so...truce?

Empowering your sisters benefits all you misters. There's nothing in this world we wouldn't do for you. You've capitalized on that. There's nothing in this world we can't do. Why not capitalize on that too.

All yours,

D.

Let's hear it for the girls

A girl passed me by the other day, her coat open. It wasn't that warm but at least it had stopped raining, and standing in the sun you could bask in the illusion of spring warmth. She was about fifteen. She could have been seventeen. I'm not sure. So much eye shadow. Even more mascara. I remember myself at that approximate age, putting on extra years by applying too much makeup.

She was young. She was lovely. And she was stacked. Her breasts were oozing out of a v-neck top one size too small, a top that revealed more cleavage than it concealed. They were beautiful breasts, no two ways about it. They were also so prominently on display I couldn't help but notice. Or stare, just for a second or two, before I jerked my eyes back to her face. She looked quite lost in thought, not at all conscious of my ogling. Or maybe it was the confidence of youth, the one that alternates with deep uncertainty.

I had the sudden urge to stop her and ask her what she wanted to say with that chest so...out there. That she thought her breasts were beautiful? That she hoped others noticed exactly how beautiful? Or maybe that her coat was too warm for such a lovely day so she had opened it and the top was what she happened to be wearing? Does it matter? Since I've been obsessing over that sight for days now, wondering why it plagues me so, maybe it does. Since today we celebrate International Women's Day, I say it does.

A part of me wanted to compliment that girl. You got it? Flaunt it! The other part, the maternal, protective part, wanted to walk up to her and zip her up, tell her she didn't have to do that to feel good about herself, or beautiful. Because I sometimes feel that all we've accomplished is the right to take our clothes off when and where we please. And that maybe we shouldn't, you know, not everywhere and all the time, as if the only woman worth listening to and noticing and taking seriously is a half-naked one and that's no way to represent, not until we are free of misunderstandings and misrepresentations.

But the only way I know of getting there is acting as if we already were. Maybe she had arrived. It's just that she may have meant that sexy semaphore for someone in particular, or only herself, but she was flashing all the world while at it. Then again, you can't control how your messages are received and you're not responsible for the reactions they invoke. It's our responsibility to keep our hands and thoughts to ourselves, not assume what someone does is for our pleasure, that it's a mating call, anything at all besides, for example, a pair of very nice breasts. Luckily, not all men have to be reminded of that. Unfortunately, the most obstinate ogres will never get it. But we are free to set them straight. We are free. (Ladies, please exercise that freedom, even when it begs the question why are we forced into these situations time and time again in the first place.)

But never forget it wasn't always so and that for too many women in this world, it still isn't. For centuries, women's bodies have been a battleground. For cultural reasons. Religious. Historical. Socioeconomical. Political. Personal. You name it, they have had their say, even if no woman asked for their opinion. Our bodies come with baggage, baggage a girl has no concept of when she's born. As she grows, the contents of that bag are gradually revealed. In looks, comments, touches. Some welcome and well-meaning, some unwanted and unjust.

On a global scale, Western women in general and Scandinavian women in particular are men, equal in rights and responsibilities and in no danger of being arrested, jailed, tortured or killed for being women. (Not by our governments, at least.) But are we free to define what and who we are, free of the baggage, free of the interpretations and beliefs and definitions, caricatures, stereotypes, simplifications, competing with our own, a woman first, everything else we are second? Anyone else feel we are called to task for them, slapped in the face with them every time we open our mouths? Or our coats?

I don't know a single woman who hasn't been sexually harassed at some point, verbally or physically. You never forget your first one. I had just turned fourteen. He was pushing forty. I was helping out my aunt over the summer holidays. He worked in the same building, an office close to hers. It started quite innocently in the break room, hello and what you're eating or reading there. I thought nothing of it. I certainly didn't think that politely answering his questions would lead to the day when he would bluntly tell me what he had dreamed of doing to me for weeks, and if I was even a bit curious or interested, he would pay me for the privilege.

I should have gone to my aunt that very instant. Called my parents. Called his wife. Told him off. He's long dead but he lives in my head, an animal disguised as Average Joe, a predator I never talked to or glanced at again but who surfaces on occasion. I must have done something, said something, to make him say and think such things. That's how he made made me feel. That's how he made it sound. That's what he said, that I had reeled him in, become his sweet summer dream one day and word and gaze at a time. And here I thought I was merely going about my day, living and breathing, having a snack and trying to be courteous.

Of course it didn't matter what I said or did or didn't. Apparently my mere existence was a provocation. I was somehow responsible for his actions, reactions and impulses. How's that for twisted logic? That is still the logic and responsibility thrust upon women and girls day in day out all over the world. I don't know how else to fight it except to refuse it, time and time again, by being and doing what I want and saying to those who stare or snarl or snap that you don't own me and you can't talk to me like that and that you don't get to boss me around, my body and my mind and my choices are exactly that, mine and mine alone. Act and talk like you do with an unruly child who has to be told a hundred times what goes and what doesn't, a thousand times, before it starts to seep in and have some effect.

It's a tiresome task that takes guts and constant alertness when you'd rather not represent every woman or girl on the planet, when you'd rather just go about your business thinking let them shout or stare, fuck you very much, see if I care. It's a tedious task but you gotta do it, you just have to because if you don't stand up and talk back talk back talk back nothing's ever going to change and you can't stand the thought that nothing's ever going to change, for anyone, and you contributed to that, and that that animal had no right, you were just a kid, but you're all grown up now and never again. Not you. Not anyone.

He

"This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries. At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.... The truth is that male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter."
― Jimmy Carter, Losing My Religion for Equality

Right now

[We interrupt the current state of play to bring you this message.]

There is a massacre under way. Single incidents that together spell gendercide.

A baby girl is being aborted. The child is not unwanted, only the wrong sex.

A baby girl is born but not cared for or fed. Soon, she's left for dead.

A young girl switches households. She is nine. He is forty-seven. She is his wife now. His slave. His family's slave. Of not much more value than the dirt she sweeps.

A father sells his daughter to the highest bidder. They break her in. Break her will, break her body, then sell it, the only thing she owns, except she never sees the money, only a train of faces. When she has served her purpose, she disappears.

A girl is being raped. It's a punishment. It's retribution. An act of aggression. A means to secure a wife. An attempt to dispel disease.

Yet another is buried in the sand, her head pummeled to a pulp by a hundred men, a thousand. She may or may not have done something to disgrace her family but they suspect.

A young woman lives in fear of abduction, imprisonment, torture, death, because she dared open her mouth, voice a grievance, demand change. Is today the day? Will they get her in the market, in traffic, her own doorstep, while she sleeps? Every second, in fear.

A woman breathes a sigh of relief as her husband goes off to work. With a few hours of respite to look forward to but with no money and no place to go, she decides to try to make it through another day. She makes it through four more. No more.

A woman dies at eighty-seven praying to the heavens that if she has to be born again, please let her be born a man.

A deficit of one hundred million women. More women killed and girls unborn in the last fifty years than men lost in all of the wars of the twentieth century. That deficit has repercussions, effects that in some countries spell trouble for the women who have survived, who were allowed to be born. Some really wish they never had.

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, dearest denizens. The official theme this year: "Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women." That is a good one, a highly commendable one. Education and economic empowerment, putting girls through school and women's vocational training can make all the difference.

You may have heard of micro loans or microfinancing. There's Women's World Banking and then there's Women's Bank, which I prefer because it's not just about money, it's about skills and rights as well. Feeling galvanized? You too can support a sister and become a shareholder.

Or, if money's too tight to mention, call your mother and/or grandmother, meet up with your sister, give your daughter your undivided attention, make a date with a girlfriend, smile at a stranger. Let them know how much you love and respect and admire them. And those chicks you really really don't... Maybe today you'll refrain from any badmouthing. Your thoughts don't hurt them, only make you miserable, don't they.

And as for those important men in your life, those who rarely raise their voice against you and who would never ever raise a hand...a kiss, a hug, a compliment wouldn't hurt anything, would it. Let's face it, sweetie darlings, as Phil Collins used to sing, it's just another day for you and me in paradise.

Now go love someone and shine on.

[This concludes today's sermon.]