This Women’s Month, let us own who we are
THE month of August belongs to us.
All of us who identify as women: women of colour, women of the LGBT community, disabled women, women of all sizes and women of infertility.
Our unapologetic claim of this one month pays no mind to the drone that comes with it: “If there is a Women’s Month, why isn’t there a Men’s Month?”
A simple, yet sad, answer to this question is that every month is men’s month.
It is the month of men when the rapist of a woman is not convicted because he is called her husband.
Being sexually assaulted because you accidentally walked into the men’s locker room instead of the women’s is an attribute to men’s month.
Young girls being told that boys who bully them in school actually like them is men’s month.
Every single time a women is slutshamed, catcalled, raped, molested and subjected to domestic violence, it is men’s month.
The month of August is the one month in which every South African woman has her chance to feel empowered, with a sense of belonging to her community, as it is the one month where we choose to stand up for our sisters and our own social, political and economic freedom.
Although people are becoming more socially aware of women empowerment, 2017 has seen more and more ways to exploit the misogyny attached to being female.
If you have been tuned into any social media platform, including Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you would be aware of the latest craze of internet humour, fondly known as memes.
A meme could either be an image, video, or piece of text, generally humorous, that is copied, shared or retweeted and, in this way, rapidly spread by internet users; but something as subjective as humour has today created one of the biggest forms of female exploitation.
Everything young girls and women choose to do, and be a part of, seems to fall under immense negative scrutiny from men and women on the internet – schools, places of work, and everyday life.
From being slut-shamed for the clothes we wear in the pictures we post on social media, the filters we use on our pictures, the make-up we wear and own or choose not to wear, our hairstyles, body shapes, skin tones, relationship status, likes and dislikes and essentially everything that makes us who we are is used as a mocking device to entertain others.
When a woman is criticised and judged by a man, she feels insulted. But when a woman is criticised and judged by another woman, she begins to believe that the judgement is true.
This is why female empowerment is so important and the absence of it so dangerous to the way we feel about ourselves.
Internalised misogyny is defined as the involuntary belief by girls and women that all of the lies, stereotypes and myths told to us and delivered to everyone in a sexist society are true.
It is when we throw around the phrase “I’m not like most women” because we are so conditioned to believe being a woman is inferior that we would actually want to disassociate ourselves from our own gender.
It is when the only way to give a compliment to one female is by insulting another, ie “Real women have curves”. Although a statement like this aims to eradicate fat-shaming women, it, in turn, shames women who are thin; one could simply tell a woman with curves she is beautiful, because she is and not because thin women aren’t.
This Women’s Month, let us acknowledge that we are all part of a sisterhood of women that should be and will be supporting each other, supporting the minds and bodies of all women.
Let us own who we are, own the misogyny in everything that we do, without internalising it because it is ours to destroy.
Own our shades of skin, types of hair, scars and stretch marks, shapes and sizes, sexual behaviour and preferences, own our infertility because it never makes us any less of a woman, own the clothes we love to wear, the make-up skills that we perfect or are choosing not to, the words we should no longer be shy to speak, the genders we want to love… We must own every essence of who we are because we do not owe perfection and femininity to anyone, especially not each other.
Jennifer Murugan is a commerce student majoring in marketing and business management