I had a funny post lined up about making an ass of myself at my Jeopardy! audition, and I’d be delighted to be having the kind of day where I could let that run, but right now, even as I type, I’m seeing something happening outside the window at work that I’d never seen before and hoped never to see.
I can’t say anything else, because it involves my work, but I am reminded today that it’s still a dangerous world to be a woman. We may have jobs and coalitions and our own brand of cigarettes (baby), but that only makes it easier to let ourselves occasionally forget.
Happy Mother’s Day, loves. Be very wonderful to the women in your life, though I know that’s what you were planning on anyway.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
We just went over sexual harassment training again here at my job. I am so thankful to have supervisors who care about my well being and mental health. I hope whatever you saw is sorted out. We women need to stand up for ourselves when others won’t!
e-HUUUUUUG. So sorry.
Ick. Some days it really sucks to be a girl. But it always beats the alternative.
good grief. sounds horrifying.
last night at the conference i am now leaving, the “entertainment” at the cocktail party was the miami heat cheerleaders. i was talking to a woman probably 20 years older than me, and we both rolled our eyes. “the last vestiges of the old boys’ club,” i said. she agreed. and that was just benignly sexist and weird. this sounds much, much worse. sorry you had to see it, and sorrier still that whatever it is happened.
it is perenially a challenge to be female in america today. and we’re even way luckier than our sisters elsewhere.
My goodness is that awful. What blows my mind — or blew it today, anyway — is that I think about feminism, a lot, and I’ll admit it’s usually framed pretty ideologically: the double burden of being expected to excel in a career and do the lion’s share of raising a family, subtle sexism in the workplace, body confidence and advertising and things. I read about, like, female genital mutilation in the Sudan and think, “Wow, we are so blessed that women are comparatively physically safer in the United States.” I know that raw and bleeding abuses of women go on everywhere — I read and think and hurt about domestic violence and rape — but it is sometimes hard to imagine these things as viscerally as I should. I always say this is a dangerous world for women, and I believe it, but I don’t always think about it as literally as I need to. Just really painful to see.
Interesting way life events work together. I’m currently reading a book about feminism and how though we of the current generations feel our world to be good for us, there is still systematic and institutional measures to keep us out of power.
Sociology ruined my brain.
The attitudes about what they do, the clothes they wear, and how they act might be sexist, but at least they can do what they want to do– because we’re in America. Because we have that privilege. Those girls get paid, and because of that, they must have had to work to get where they are, and be good at their job.
It just seems like you’re somehow looking down on them, the same way the some men do. I don’t know. Just assuming.
I can’t understand what you’re responding to. Is it the cheerleaders story? magnolia was saying it was absurd that that was considered appropriate entertainment at a business function.
Honestly, this comment makes so little sense to me that I was hesitant to accept it, because I think it might be weird keyword-targeted “blog post about feminism” spam. But it was grammatical, so responding on the off chance that it’s from a human, not a robot.
I dislike the current ‘brand’ of feminism that I run into regularly – where people are campaigning for superiority rather than equality. I do find it somewhat sobering to realise that there are still battles to be fought though, I always (subconciously) felt like battles must be won if we were trying to push so much further. If that makes sense?
Yeah, I was responding to magnolia. It wasn’t too thought out, though. But a machine? Geesh, I didn’t know it was that awful.
I just couldn’t make sense of what it was responding to. There are some pretty good spambots out there.
You’re a dumb cunt. Shut the fuck up. It’s a joke you dumb cunt.
That’s the point. When companies make jokes about rape in the public eye, it prevents sophisticated, erudite dudes like you from seeing what a problem rape remains.