On IWD 2019: “Girls cannot be superheroes”, #MeToo and “transformative shifts”
I remember feeling embarrassed when my 4 years old son told a bunch of radical faeries in Tennessee — including superhero Mx Justin Vivian Bond — that “girls cannot be superheroes” (with a shrug I believe). He was quickly given multiple examples to challenge his prejudice. It was one of many occurrences I got to observe in the past six years of how gender socialization contributes to keep women subjugated. Like that time, a friend pointed out how very few women figurines inhabit the gigantic Playmobil population we have at home: a performer at the saloon, maybe one cowgirl and a handful of mothers with their children. I had never noticed.
More than two years after Ashley Judd first accused media mogul Harvey Weinstein, the #Metoo movement is still going full steam. It is the music industry that is now in the spotlight with Ryan Adams and R. Kelly responding to dozens of allegations here. In France, it is media since last month, a group of young French executives were condemned for running a macho “boys’ club” — the infamous league du LOL — that harassed female colleagues online.
Still this remains confined to some industries in some countries. The Independent reported today that a survey found the movement was virtually unheard of by women in developing countries. The movement also only landed in Japan around the time I visited last June, to the consternation of a country that is known to be rife with sexual harassment in the workplace but is strangely oblivious to it. One of many places among developed nations that have yet to achieve much progress in gender equality. In Japan, just one in every 10 politicians in Japan’s parliament is a woman.
#Metoo remains the tip of the iceberg of the way power is exercised by men over women. Not to undermine the horror of sexual violence in the workplace, there are multitudes of other ways women are exploited and hurt globally. In the UK this fall, a report uncovered how BBC was still failing women over equal pay. Last week, a decade-long World Bank survey reported that only six nations achieved a perfect score for equal rights between men and women under the law (Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg, and Sweden by the way). Only after having been called out by La Barbe, a French feminist group founded in 2008, for seating on panels where women were under-represented did I become aware of one of the ways I am complicit of patriarchy.
We are now admitting that progress has been extremely slow since the first International Women’s Day took place in 1911. As Simone de Beauvoir told Le Monde in 1978: “I believed too quickly in the proximity of a victory for women”. And if the momentum does not accelerate, the UN now claims women will have to wait another two centuries for gender equality. That’s several more generation of women and girls sacrificed.
Fundamental cultural barriers to human rights are hard to remove. In fact, social change may never really be “won” as these barriers only lay low in our subconscious and can be reignited overtime as other social issues such as racial equality or antisemitism illustrate. It is a constant assault. There is no finish line or victory.
#metoo has been a positive catalyst for change, yet it does not constitute the transformative shifts that are really needed to attain Goal 5 of the SDGs “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”. These shifts will require engaging personal responsibility of every single individual in every country. A call for each of us to design our own yearly intentional assault on patriarchy until the next International Women’s Day.
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