THE CHANGING TIDES
This year has been an eventful one for the feminist movement. Empowered by recent developments, women everywhere are stepping up to the plate, Corinne Redfern reports
Faranivah is 16 years old, with long black hair that she tries to cover with a loosely woven blue headscarf—except when she’s in a rush, and it slips onto her shoulders and causes her mother to fuss and sigh. But today her mother is nowhere in sight, and the teenager is so excited that one end of the scarf is almost trailing on the floor. “We’re going to the arcade to meet my boyfriend,” she whispers conspiratorially. “He doesn’t know we’re coming, so we’re going to surprise him.” Arm linked through the elbow of her best friend, she strides up the escalator in a newly-built shopping mall in her city Iligan, in the southernmost island of Mindano, and turns left, towards a chaos of bright lights, slot machines, and air hockey. Somewhere in the centre, a pimple-faced boy looks up and sees her, his expression clearly confused. Faranivah grins and waves, before doubling over laughing. “Muslim girls aren’t meant to surprise their boyfriends like this,” she says later, as her giggles subside. “We’re not meant to have boyfriends at all. But I’m tired of being told how girls should behave. So I’m trying this thing at the moment where I break all the rules.” With that, she nods to herself, before linking her arm through her friend’s again and descending back downstairs.
But Faranivah’s arcade games aren’t just teenage fun. They’re the start of something big—something really exciting that affects every single one of us. From miniature adolescent rebellions in Mindanao to million-strong marches and global hashtag campaigns, women and girls around the world have had enough of being told what we can and can’t do—and what can and can’t be done to us. Together, we’re speaking up for ourselves and our sisters, and standing up for everyone’s right to choice and equality. Finally, the world appears to be listening.
It’s been brewing for a while. The call for global gender equality has been in existence since Italian-French writer Christine de Pizan wrote The Book Of The City Of Ladies in 1405 and British suffragette Emily Davison was trampled to death by a horse in 1913 while calling for the right to vote, while beauty queen Pura Villanueva Kalaw published her own history of Filipina women’s rights in 1952. Plus we’ve all seen Beyoncé emerge on stage in front of the luminescent “FEMINIST” logo at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards—and if that doesn’t count, then what does?
But last year the stakes were, if not raised, then certainly bet upon in increased number. On 21st January 2017, the flagship Women’s March—created by Americans Evvie Harmon, Fontaine Pearson, and Breanne Butler to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States saw up to one million women, girls, men and boys take to the streets of Washington DC waving signs that read “This is What a Feminist Looks Like,” “Boys Rock, Girls Rock, The End,” and “Women’s Rights are Human Rights.” Another 673 marches followed suit worldwide—approximately 400,000 turned out in New York; 100,000 walked the streets in London; and more than 500 donned their best protest faces in Manila to campaign outside the US embassy. Even in Iraq, where less than a fifth of women are employed and women are twice as likely as men to be illiterate, hundreds of locals reportedly amassed in the streets of Erbil, Kurdistan to demand gender equality and equal rights. Suddenly, feminism wasn’t just fashionable—it was something worth painting a placard and physically fighting for.
This movement of united anger continued to simmer until October, when an article published in the New York
Times revealed a series of allegations against Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein—the financial force behind films such as Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting and
Shakespeare In Love. More than 12 women, including actresses Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, and Mira Sorvino joined forces to accuse Weinstein of sexually assaulting, raping, or harassing them over previous decades, and even threatening to destroy their careers if they didn’t agree to his requests.
As they spoke out, so Weinstein’s pedestal shattered, and the glass ceiling that has kept millions of other women silent throughout history began to crack. Accusations were promptly brought forward against 71 men in positions of power, including comedian Louis CK,
Gossip Girl actor Ed Westwick, and fashion photographer Terry Richardson.
#METOO
Faranivah isn’t meant to be on social media. She doesn’t own a phone, and her family doesn’t have a computer. But once or twice a week, when her parents and older sisters are distracted, she slips out the house and takes a bus across Iligan to the nearest internet café. There, she sits and watches YouTube videos, updating her Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as she goes. “It’s where I get all my news,” she says. “I can’t afford to go to school, so social media tells me everything about everywhere and everyone. That’s where I fi rst heard about girls having rights as well as boys.”
It’s also how one of the largest global movements of women and girls was launched. The phrase ‘me too’ may have originally been created by African American civil rights activist Tarana Burke back in 2006 to spread awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in society, but it was only popularised last year, when actress Alyssa Milano asked her followers to tweet it as a hashtag if they had also experienced harassment—to “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” It was promptly tweeted millions of times, all over the world, as women united to speak up about how they were mistreated at the hands of men. Some of their stories were about rape and assault. Others were about more subtle pressures not to ‘hurt men’s feelings’ or ‘let men down’ by cutting short dates, rejecting male advances, and refusing to laugh at sexist jokes at work. All were about that sickeningly familiar feeling deep in the pit of your stomach that something’s not OK— but that you might have to ‘put up with it’ because that’s the deal you get when you’re born a girl. “#MeToo is not about what’s legal, it’s about what’s right,” wrote feminist journalist Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. “It’s true that women are fed up with sexual violence and harassment; but it’s also true that what this culture considers ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is often harmful to women, and that we want that to stop, too.”
TIME’S UP
It’s about time. Whether you’re a fan of the term ‘feminism’ or not, globally
feminism wasn’t just fashionable—it was something worth painting a placard and physically fighting for
speaking, women are so far from attaining gender equality, it seems almost laughable. Worldwide, just 57 per cent of workingage women are employed, and those that earn less than 77 per cent of their male counterparts’ earnings. Over 62 million girls are denied the right to an education, 15 million girls are married off under the age of 18, while a third of all women have experienced an abusive relationship. If the #MeToo campaign highlighted the fact that every single one of us has experienced that feeling of fear while walking home at night in the dark (indeed, feminist author Margaret Atwood who put it perfectly when she wrote “Men are scared women will laugh at them. Women are scared men will kill them”), then the latest cause—catchily titled “Time’s Up”—is finally about creating actionable change.
Created in response to the post-Weinstein movement of speaking out about sexual harassment, Time’s Up was created on January 1st of this year by a team of Hollywood celebrities including Reese Witherspoon, Emma Watson, Michelle Williams, and Shonda Rhimes. The organisation has already raised US$20 million in legal defence fees to be used to support low-income women across the globe who want to seek justice after experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace.
“We actually have the opportunity to hand our children a different world,” explained Michelle Williams at the Golden Globe Awards on 6 January, where celebrities ditched the traditional painter’s palette of dresses in favour of a muted black colour scheme in acknowledgement of what had been lost over the years due to sexism and assault. “My hope is that this movement will now reach the grass roots, the small towns, the villages near and far, where women have been silenced, without resources in the face of gender disparity,” agreed Connie Britton. “We are all stronger when we work together with respect and understanding. Strong women equal strong families, economies, and communities. Everywhere.”
Back in her house in Mindanao, Faranivah didn’t watch the Golden Globes. She’s not sure what the Time’s Up movement is, or whether the #MeToo hashtag actually applies to her or not. All the 16-year-old knows is that times are changing, and that what her mother settled for might not be enough for her. “I’m launching a business to sell t-shirts so that I can save up enough money to go back to school,” she says. “I want to study and travel, and be a journalist or a translator, or a photographer—or maybe all three! I just don’t want any man to tell me what I can and can’t do any more. I want to take over the world, and I want to do it on my own.”