The He for She campaign is really important to me. Now I’m sure most of you would know I’m considerate of equality as a given, but it wasn’t always this way. I probably didn’t really have consciousness on the issue until the last few years. Regretfully I made comments towards female friends telling them they couldn’t be Prime Minister because they were women, and while statistically this was true, it was also oppressive. Looking back on it now I didn’t know better, yet this isn’t an excuse, I was an idiot. Societal sexism was the bread and butter to my world, even if it was hidden. I definitely got upset when women wouldn’t date me because I was a nice guy, and as the trope goes, women only date bastards and fiends. Yet again not true, women date people who treat them like people and not trophies for the most part.
I digress within my own failings though, I wanted to get back to the whole Prime Minister thing. My fear now is that my stigma against women in power at the time is shared by many others. Margaret Thatcher is to date the only female Prime Minister in Britain and I’m sure if you asked a large majority of people who the least popular Prime Minister was, they’d probably pick her. Furthermore we had the primary battles for Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 2008. A battle between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. After Obama won the primaries there was a ‘joke’ going around that America had finally decided who they’d rather run the country, a black person or a woman. This speaks volumes about the type of people making such commentary. Then again, it’s not the first time we’ve heard rhetoric about what happens if the female world leader PMS’ and launches nukes or starts a war. Yet we don’t consider most violent outbursts of aggression are on the whole caused by men.
Now to an Australia Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. While her rise to power was fairly cut throat, her time in office was brutal. She was picked at by the media in every way possible. Her lack of children, her partners sexuality and even her own body image. Finally the media got to attack Julia more on the gender she represented than evaluating her policies and politics.
I think these cases alone can show why the He for She campaign is important. If women in power can be picked apart and made to seem weak, then how does the everyday woman feel. The cat calling on the street, the fear of attack by a drunken man and the sense she has to dress conservatively because it might draw in unwanted eyes. Even further than that, how do we feel about women without any power to protect themselves, women whose society controls and binds them, who will speak for them.
In the end I agree with what Emma Watson said in her speech to the UN. This is a man’s problem and it’s time we addressed how we treat women. It’s time we treated them like human beings. I’d like to see a world where we teach about people like Emily Davison alongside the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. I’d like to think we can bring equality to everyone in the world, and hopefully make feminism a less dirty word.
thefeaturedthought 