I will always remember this recording: 1938 in Sweden. The first female voice had just finished reading the news in the radio and the phone line of Radio Service was congested with angry people. A woman should not read news! This is outrageous! A woman is not capable of reading the news! Let men read the news! Can you guess the sex of almost half of those furious people? You are right, they were women.
Almost 80 years later one can still conclude that the main obstacle to why women don’t have equal rights with men is the same. It is a faulty assumption to expect equal treatment from men whilst women, who outnumber men in the world, continue discriminating other women. To say that the world is man-tilted is to focus on the wrong end of the same problem. Where do these men grow up? Most of them surely have mothers. Do you believe that the way mothers raise their children has no influence over how their sons and daughters treat women? Think again.
“Girls do not need math,” said my female math teacher to all the pupils in my class when I started in high school. “The new head of unit X is Mr Y”, announces a female manager who has several much more competent women in her team than Mr Y. “What did you cook for your husband today?” my mother keeps asking even though she knows that we take turns and I dislike this question. “Let him do it”, my female colleague points at a male colleague when I ask her to make a presentation on a topic she is the best expert in.
Expecting men to do what women should do themselves is holding “the weaker sex” back from boards, political posts, equal pay, it keeps them being treated as a property, raped, circumcised and objectized. I have for a long time been disturbed by the way women let themselves to be exploited in the music industry, either due to their ignorance, limited understanding or complacency. Would you like to look like a hooker, walk with nipples and clitoris almost revealed and spend most of your time hurling your hips? Well, in music industry you do regardless of whether you say you are a feminist (Beyonce, Zara Larsson, etc) or not. And the male star of the same caliber is, as a rule carefully wrapped in, no penis in sight. As a male singer, you do not have to pretend on the stage that you are on the verge of an orgasm. Madonna, Rihanna, Kylie, Mariah Carey etc, etc do – the list is endless and the quality of the voice plays no role whatsoever. Of course, there are some rebels – Sia, Adele to name a few – but those are exceptions. In the oversexualised pop music world, full of nauseating stereotypes, there is no equality between the two sexes. Poor teenagers who consume music not only by listening but watching – their role models provide them with images of gender equality which date back to the middle ages!
Why do women let so reluctantly go of habits and traditions which are not in their interest? Why do we lack solidarity? I guess the things that once upon the time gave us an evolutional advantage do not work so well during the smartphone and social media era. Being constantly pregnant during the fertile age is not anymore necessary in most of the developed world where infant mortality is extremely low. The biological relics which we have inherited from our ancestors don’t fit into birth-controlled societies where time can be spent on issues much higher up in the Maslow pyramid than ensuring survival. But the biological evolution has not had the time to adjust to the necessities of the modern society. Girls and boys can reproduce at a very young age. Today there is no advantage in carrying a child as a child. It only adds to the misery of young girls in the countries where they are forced into marriages at an early age. Mind you, forced by mothers as much as fathers.
Remember the moral code 100 years ago in Europe, still potent in some countries? It was a disaster to lose virginity and become pregnant before one got married. There were not many options – some committed suicide, some tried to get rid of the baby. Some died in the hands of incompetent midwives or due to complications after the abortion. Some kept the baby and endured psychological and sometimes even physical terror from the local community. Single women with children were ridiculed, their parents were ashamed, sometimes they openly banished their daughters. But there was one particular group of opinion leaders which invariably exercised their power to augment the suffering and humiliation of the poor “girl with a child” – old ladies in the community.
Yes, for centuries women have been living in a patriarchal world where their primary meaning of life has been to attract a more or less intelligent and potent partner and become his property, produce many children, raise them and take care of the household. But these times are over although we ourselves are not over them. Collaborating is not easy when you regard other women as competitors who need to be neutralised. Research has proven that women judge other women harsher and find faults that they never see in men. Sorry if you are an exception. I am not. My brains are too washed and I discover myself discriminating when I least expect it (perhaps even now…).
Take Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. I don’t know what was going on in the heads of the women who voted for Trump. I guess it is best not to know. But it would be an interesting experiment to analyse the latest US presidential election from the gender perspective. At least one thing is sure – Hillary was discriminated by both men and women when they judged her capabilities, looks, temper, voice, conduct, experience and intelligence to be inferior to Trump’s. Otherwise the outcome of the presidential election had been different.
I don’t really agree with the definition of man-made norms. Every time the norms that discriminate women have been in the making – women have contributed to them either passively or actively. It is a well-known fact that in the developed world women are more educated than men. With educational enlightenment comes also the responsibility to make use of one’s knowledge. After all, it is not the strongest that survive but the smartest.
Women have greater possibilities than ever before but we are still clinging to values with make us our own biggest enemy. The day we stop doing this, the world will become a much better place. Until then…. well, it is what it is…
I will continue the topic of gender equality in my next blog, this time from the yoga and energy angle, stay tuned!