I have never wished to be a boy and I like who I am and what I am but I do find that I get treated differently and I don’t get treated at the standard that I would like to be which is increasingly frustrating.
Women’s Day (9 August) in South Africa exists to commemorate an event in our history where women stood together despite differences like race or religion and displayed strength and bravery. We are supposed to look back and learn, appreciate and try and utilise the characteristics that those women stood for. Sadly I don’t believe that this is really achieved at all. Women’s day for me was about a failing ANC Women’s league and a distasteful and rude stationary advert which symbolised the lack of forward progress towards equality.
Um hello? I would like to know who was the idiot in charge who authorised it? There is no way to view this where it is not insensitive, infuriating and rude. I am not surprised that somebody came up with this what I am surprised at is that they thought it would be okay to publish this and that the appropriate moment was Women’s day.
I am angry. I am furious in fact and I am battling to come up with an eloquent way to call them sexist pigs.
This proved to me that we haven’t made much progress. Every day I fight to have words like “cunt” and “pussy” taken out of people’s vocabularies as an adequate way to degrade someone. Calling someone a vagina to make them feel insignificant is not appropriate. And because adolescent teenage boys are so self-absorbed that they couldn’t care less about how there selfish use of language could be adding to a socially accepted way to entrench the dismissal of women, I am constantly hitting a brick wall. Despite this I had faith that the more grown up version of society at least kept their ill-use of words to themselves but Bic showed to the entire world that this is not true and left much of equality-aware society reeling with shock.
The other issues is that of the ANC Women’s League. Now much like the Youth League they rarely come into much focus despite the desperate need for them and the very many problems surrounding their specific group of people.
This organisation is a subcategory to the current leadership of our land and is intended to represent the issues specific to women and try and draw attention to gender equality within the decisions made by our government. Now on a whole this group doesn’t really do much. Occasionally they get involved but it is rare that the general public sees any kind of representation or results.
It is very difficult to make a comment on this because of the complex political association and for the most part this isn’t really comment about the ANC. Women are one of the groups of society which are not yet at a level of equality to their counterparts and so in decisions made by whatever group in any part of society their needs to be a consideration of the effect this will have on gender rights now the ANC women’s league is supposed to be representing us in government.
On Women’s Day for the first time in months the general public were exposed to the organisation and this was in celebration of women and the only thing that really come out of it was the idea that maybe South Africa could have a female president for the next round. I felt like I couldn’t really celebrate anything because in the last year, in fact the last couple of years we still haven’t made much progress in gender equality in this country (hence Bic’s ability to publish such an incredible failure of an advertisement) and so I felt the celebrations were sort of self-congratulatory and unreasonable and put a damper on the day for me because it simply emphasised the lack of achievements we’ve made recently in the struggle to uplift our gender. Although without looking at the general politics of it, it is about time that South Africa got a female president from whatever party.
On a more personal level women’s day did allow me to appreciate the strength that some women manage to show despite adversaries and a lack of encouragement but it also made me sad that even in my own degree there still is such a low inspiration for young women in this arena that we still only manage to make up a quarter of our classes.
I want to not acknowledge myself as a woman but as a person and I don’t want the fact that I am female to define the choices people make in viewing me or dealing with me. However this is an idealistic view and I cannot live in this society and expect it to come true on its own without dealing with it.
And so I will claim my gender (or sex depending on how you define the words) and I will claim my right to being treated equally to my counterparts.
But why would I place such an issue alongside a fashion post? The connection may not be an obvious one but to me it is crucial. Fashion has for many years been a fundamental part of the so called female-culture and it is linked to much of the dismissal and issues associated with our struggle. Religious control is maintained by female dress code, media created body image is entrenched by clothing, even rape is excused based on women’s outfits. And yes I will not deny that male stereotypes are effected by outer dress as well but I do not believe it is executed to the same degree.
Fashion has formed a part of ever leap of empowerment that women have made. With freedom came pants, short skirts and bikini bottoms and today they may seem trivial in some cultures although in others with more entrenched gender inequality we still note women whose freedoms are even dictated in there dress sense.
For me clothing has never acted as a way to fit in with the commercialized norm but has rather been a tool for me to fight stereotype and express myself physically.
Fashion, like most art forms, can be utilized on the path to revolution. At the moment fashion is being abused as a way for women to be shoved into stereotypical roles and their supposed freedoms abused. Whereas I’d like to inspire a generation (of men and women) who use their clothing to express rather than conform and to break gender defined roles.
When I cut my hair I got questioned, dismissed, and left out. My decision was not accepted or liked and most girls and guys did not appreciate what I was doing. To my peers it was strange and required bravery and stupidity but why is this so? My male friends are going through stages of growing their hair which they now have the freedom to take control of (something I believe they should have had in school too). But, if they one day decide they are bored and cut it off to what is considered the standard, no body bats an eye or cares. It’s there decision and their haircut doesn’t seem to have the magically Rapunzel like properties that ours does (this might be because princess stories -also deeply sexist- weren’t a major focus of their childhoods).
Girls should be allowed to make decisions about their looks without being judged. Currently we tend to make fashion choices based on the dictation of society, a male run society, but I yearn for the day when we can choose to wear whatever we want and it not be questioned. Where you can wear a short skirt because you feel good in it and not have your motives interrogated or your body judged.
In this particular look I am wearing an old trench coat, new MRP Shoes (which have been declared to me as guys styled shoes but I don’t think any style should belong to a specific gender), my favourite pair of TopShop Mom jeans and my usual sweater-and-collar look.
Now many aspects of this look could be described as boy-ish or masculine which I have two issues with. This first is that I genuinely believe that a choice in clothing should not have to be defined by gender. What do your sexual organs have to do with your clothing? And secondly the description of something as being that of a gender which is not your own is often intended to be off-putting and derogatory. Boys tend to not like be called feminine and girls tend to not like being called masculine. I wish for a society in which we do not fear being associate with another gender. Gender should not define our thoughts about ourselves or others.
There are plenty of colours in the world other than Pink and Blue.
“All through life there were distinctions – toilets for meb, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women – then, at the end, the graves are identical.” – Leila Aboulela in Minaret
All photos on Middle Campus of The University of Cape Town by Refiloe Mokgele from allzuri.blogspot.com
Plain Old Glasses 