Sterke Infographic: Why invest in women?
via @cturlingtonToday during the lunch break a male colleague said, hypothetically, and not to be offensive (hah!), what with the news nowadays about large family property settlements going to women, do we think that men are paying women too much, or that women always ask for so much money from men?
This is the sort of question that makes me so angry.
Women own 1 % of the world’s property. In many places in the world, women are just property. Somewhere in the world other people like me cannot go to school, cannot inherit, cannot even go out in public without a male chaperone. You can’t rape property. You can’t murder property. You can sell it, at a good price. You can beat it to death and get another one, for another good price. Some of us ‘mysteriously’ die after birth because boys are ‘better’. Women make up an overwhelming amount of the world’s poor.
Raise this point and I get the raised-eyebrow, oh-look-a-feminist look. Which brings me to another male friend, who blundered into my wrath a week or so ago by msn’ing me with the phrase ‘I hate dumb feminists’. Why is the concept of feminism now a bad word? I’m proud to be feminist. I think the world has some catching up to do. I know that I want to help, if only by spreading the word by correction. And I think that anyone who cares about the half of the world’s population born into inequality purely because of a different set of genitalia is also a feminist. Anyone who believes that women shouldn’t be victimised because of what they choose to wear is also a feminist. Just as there are lots of animal lovers out there who aren’t part of PETA, there are lots of feminists out there who don’t hate men. Don’t assume the worst of someone.
Anyway, I snarled at my colleague (and at my friend). I’m leaving soon, anyway, and he always likes to say shiet like this, he’s young and silly and comes from a culture that venerates the only son in the family. I know there’s no malice in what he said, and being thin-skinned in a law firm is sort of like being a goldfish that can’t breathe underwater. Still. So angry.
Calmer now.
Hey, it’s not being thin-skinned to be angry at something like that: that kind of ignorance - not matter how innocently said - is dangerous, and what your colleague said was out of order.
“I hate dumb feminists?” I would have snarled at him and them some. You’re not the only one who gets cross at this and it’s okay to be cross - you’re well within your rights to get angry.
If he comes from a culture that venerates the son, all the better. Things like that need to be stamped out - and ‘cultural differences’ is definitely not an excuse. One of these days he’s going to piss someone a lot more important than he is and land himself in trouble, mark my words.
On a side note, it’s ridiculous how everyone assumes the worst of any kind of civil movement - that all feminists are men-hating and bitter, that all animal rights activists are PETA, that anyone who believes in politics anything remotely to the right is a fascist, that sort of thing. But I digress.
TL;DR I agree with you, and you’re well within your rights to be angry :)
