Sexism (6th entry)

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6849600.ece#


The above URL is a link to an article titled "It's time to challenge casual sexism". This article really caught my attention because I do believe that casual sexism is one of those problems in today's society which is not being addressed. Women have to deal with this on a daily basis, be it in the form of television commercials, magazines and even the kind of treatment they receive at the office.

In the past, women had to put up with sexism because they did not have much power or say in the kind of treatment they received. Essentially, women were living in a man's world, and they had to adhere to the framework that meb built for them to live by. What is incomprehensible is how sexism still exists in today's day and age. The modern working woman is supposed to represent power, authority, independence and inner strength. Why then, do we allow ourselves to be subjugated to casual sexism.

"Does casual sexism matter any more? Aren’t we all too cool and liberated to care? It is always crass and reductive to draw up cause and effect. But there are certain things that make you wonder. When Britain, with just 19.7 per cent women MPs, is 51st among democratic nations for female representation — not just below the groovy progressive Scandinavians but Bulgaria, Latvia, Eritrea and, for goodness’ sake, Pakistan — you have to ask if the stench of misogyny deters good women from standing, or insinuates to those who might select them that really they have no place being there." (paragraph taken from the article)

I think the author raises a very important and valid point in the article. "Are we too cool to care?" Could it possibly be because of the this environment and culture that we grew up in. Many women do not want to be labelled feminists. To majority of our society, the term 'feminists' does not carry very positive connotation. Many women are afraid to point out casual sexists acts because they are afraid of being labelled feminists. Why this fear? It is once again because of this culture that we have created for ourselves. Essentially, as much as many of us hate to admit it, the world today is still pretty much a man's world. Cultures are our "templates for living" and by adhering to this particular template women are not doing themselves any favours.

"There is no point making an official protest about a sexist advertisement: a friend who complained to ASA that a huge, soft-porn hoarding advertising a lap dancing club opposite a sixth form college degraded women was outraged by the judgment that “in the context of an ad for a table-dancing club, the image was unlikely to be seen as unduly explicit or overly provocative.” So that’s OK, then!

Somewhere in the free-market driven moral relativism of the past decade, we have lost the ability to say, without fear of being called uptight or fun-sucking, that selling sex on the high street, raunchy outfits for toddlers or scabrous attacks on female public figures based upon their looks just ain’t right."

Do we really want our own children to be exposed to this kind of culture growing up? I highly doubt so. In comms class, we learnt that culture represents our understanding of what is true and that it involves the programming of the mind. Once certain patterns of thinking and mindsets have been established within a person's mind, he or she must unlearn these before being able to learn something different. I think the only way to tackle this problem is to teach the general community to have a little more respect for women and correct the views and perceptions that they currently hold.