All this stuff about empowering women, and especially the encouragement to donate instead of actually doing something is really starting to piss me off.
Gender equality starts at home, with the way we treat each other on a day-to-day basis. True, the laws we pass are a reflection of the prevailing attitudes among the people who make the laws, but in democratic societies at least, the people who make the laws are not required to be bigoted chauvenistic control freaks in order to get into power.
So the best story I've read recently concerns
a Japanese politician who is taking advantage of his legal right to.... This is a right that people already have, but rarely exercise due to convention. There isn't any point in giving people rights, empowering them, if they won't take the gift. There's no point donating to or otherwise supporting any worthy cause if we ourselves don't live the dream and lead by example. So, hats off to Hironobu Narisawa!!
But while researching this article I came across
this opinion piece in the Taipei Times, titled ‘Saving’ women from ... listing some of the small ways in which women remain inferior, the other, not like 'us' and needing to be protected instead of recognised as equals.
- The woman’s dormitory of Fujen Catholic University operates an 11:45pm curfew
- Taipei First Girls’ High School forbids students from wearing shorts as they are actually passing through the front gate of the
school.
- The Ministry of National Defense (MND) recently announced a rule in which enlisted women and female officers eating off-premises have to
cease drinking alcohol at 9pm and return to barracks.
- the armed forces are to tighten up gender-based rules in their bases, “strictly forbidding [male] personnel from inviting women colleagues off
premises for dinner at night,” ... “for their own good.”
- Women’s freedoms are curtailed to one degree or another, in how they go about their work, how they present themselves, how they spend their
leisure time, or what they wear — at times they have to wear a skirt and
other times they can’t show their knees or their legs.
(
By Chen Yi-Chien 陳宜倩, assistant professor in the Graduate Institute for Gender Studies at Shih Hsin University and a member of the Standing Executive Committee of the
Judicial Reform Foundation. )
You need to be a member of Urgent Evoke to add comments!
Join Urgent Evoke