14 Valentines- Day 14
Today I decided to veer from the topic...The officail topic of today is international, but what i wrote focus much more on equality because I feel that the only way to the reach the goal of this project is it through equality. This was the first prompt that I completed for 14 Valentines, it was written in its entirety on the day that I signed up and joined the community
Unfortunately we live a split world. It’s a place where the mom and dada tell us we can have it all, the TV says that the world can be ours for a price and the internet shows us that any person can sell their soul and/ or dignity to the YouTube/Facebook/MySpace/Google gods for ½ a week as a viral star. At the same time half way around the world, or one country away, girls as young as seven are having to hide from their families in foreign embassies because they want to divorce husbands in their forties, young women have to leave school and marry men twice and three times their age at 13 because their families cant provide for them, and then when they get pregnant the babies that their bodies cant handle birthing give them fistulas which makes them pariahs in the homes that they were born or married into, resorting to desperate painful harmful and ultimately fruitless remedies to stop their suffering. In Canada, western minded, free speech, empowered Canada, a middle school girl was murdered by her father for not obeying the religious customs of her family, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg world wide.
The honor killing (read: public stoning) of Du’a Khalil Aswad was seen globally on YouTube and news programs, to a divided chorus of voices shouting both outrage over the senseless murder of a young woman and satisfaction of the death of worthless disobedient child, a whore. These and so many injustices face all of the worlds people, not just the women, because the sad unfair truth is that in the places where some would say the change is needed most the only ruling class is that of men.
In a culture where women are made subordinate their only hope is that if one wife speaks to one tolerant husband to protest the marriage of a daughter, or the treatment of a sister that he will listen and then speak to more like minded men who can then begin to change the minds of more. That is their reality, and as a result it is ours as well. We need to tell our husbands and sons and brothers and sisters and daughters and wives and spread these words of injustice and the need for change, and teach them how to treat other women and men alike: as humans, because that is all that any of us are at the end of a day, humans who see the suffering and oppression of other humans and see a greater need for it to be stopped.
On the day that I was accepted into this community I read an exchange on the FAQ post about whether or not men were allowed to participate. From what I gathered there were three points made:
1. The post said everyone was allowed to participate and that everyone meant that men didn’t need to be explicitly mentioned
2. This was a women’s thing and that was the focus so yes men were allowed but they weren’t the target audience for participants or viewers
3. We should encourage men explicitly to join us plain and simple because my excluding in and way we essentially were only reversing the actions that we hope to abolish
As much as this is an awareness issue, it’s also a civil rights issue because as we have detailed over the past 13 days even though some of us have triumphed far too many women aren’t getting what they deserve. Even here mothers are the last to take care of themselves, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen my own mother that last one to sit at dinner after serving everyone else, pulling back on the things she should do for her well being to take care of the rest of us, our needs before her own. Around the world women come in last and so long as one woman is behind we all are and we are failing her.
So that being said, ALL civil movements that have been successful in my lifetime and before it takes all parties involved to make any change happen: Jews and gentiles, blacks and whites, straight people and the rest of the rainbow, men AND women. We have to do it together. If the men have the power make the changes then women have the passion make them keep at it, if women have the balls to get things started then men have the good sense to see a problem and see it solved.
We can’t do this independently of each other I can’t say it enough. That isn’t the way. We need to call up our guys and get them in here too. Too many of the guys I talked to about this said that they didn’t have and opinion or worse just didn’t care. Too many of them gave the answers that were “correct” even though what they felt was different. We can’t avoid the issue, and we definitely can’t say that because you aren’t a woman your opinion counts less or not at all. That is what happened to us for so long. That is the sexism talking even if is comes from the “right place.” The Vagina Monologues, had two things that had this written all over that screamed at me when I though about that comment exchange in relation to them. The omitted line about “good rape” and the list of alternate names for vagina. It’s masking a horrible thing as a righteous move based on circumstance/perpetrator or conversely taking something that should be at the least shameless and at the most a source of pride, and turning it into some thing crude and disrespectful. We can’t afford to let that happen no one can, not with all the suffering that is still so widespread. If all mothers and fathers teach sons and daughters that all people should have rights to life, speech, love, health, peace, and freedom, then you have success, but that won’t come until women leave their girls only clubhouses start reaching out to men. This is the start of that, now we just have to hope that we make it on phase two.
The banner was made in photoshop with th original posted on the main page of the community.I'm really glad to have been a part of this It's somethng that the world needs more of.