JFC IWD ikr
Why the coding of International Women's Day is still cooked
Is this how most of us blow the candles out on the stupid cake that is International Women’s Day? Its performative annual bullshit routinely finds me furious. Cupcakes and coffee while we politely discuss genocide in couched careful terms? Overpriced brunch in sunny air conditioned rooms while the world dies around us? Pretty empty speeches that change absolutely nothing from politicians committed only to re-election as femicide and domestic violence stats continue to rachet unchecked. As women continue to lose rights, respect and a long distance shot at equality.
What exactly is anyone trilling about today while the world is being decimated and we hurtle into war at the hands of psychopathic men and their inevitable end games. Explain to me how the rule of law has ever reigned in unchecked power. Speak to me again in hallowed tones about imperfect democracies and divine rights, how men are protectors and providers and hey, it’s not all of them. Not you too, right?
Violence against women remains entrenched. In war, where it is utilised as a brutal weapon, and at peace. Whether richer or poorer, in your sickness and our unresearched health. At home from men who refuse their own learning curve and in workplaces forever. The gender pay gap, published regularly to howls of outrage that are quickly starved of any real oxygen, remains staggeringly unfair. All while sisterhood and mother wounds - or patriarchy in drag - still white ant women banding together to protect ourselves, the children and each other.
Performative feminism is long dead, like most all of the old world tenets. While we continue with nimble fingers to try and unpick centuries of our own brutal occupation, the cracks widen by design. Even if you posted a fetching black and white photo of yourself across the world from Turkey a few years ago, to show vanity solidarity that cost you nothing. Even when howling outrage about Ukraine could not be extended to Syrian or Palestinian or indigenous women worldwide. Even if you marched as your nation’s leader threatened to shoot, or rape, or punish you. Even if your will is there in the world but your voice still catches in your throat at home.
Speaking out is risky business, it always was. You will be threatened into silence or punished. It has seen women hung, drawn and quartered. Burnt at the stake on a pyre of lies. Paraded naked to be shamed by those in glass houses hurling rocks and aiming low. Threatened and harassed, intimidated and maligned. Social media and online dating have become misogyny's modern playgrounds and nothing has changed. We are still being banned for our longing for a new way through this brutal minefield.
I could not be more fed up with the complicit silence of not all men who rush to defend... themselves. The men who still make sexist "jokes" and take ongoing benefit from the bias. The regularly abusive and covertly narcissistic. The toxic and tainted who pose as something else entirely, slithering into DMs and beyond boundaries they never respected. DARVO dickheads and poor me’s still blaming their own mums who make it seem as though the good men have all gone bad. Women can’t know a good man when they see him anymore, which is a shame for everyone.
Fixing this giant ongoing problem lies statistically and morally with men, who regularly proclaim themselves to be fixers but precious few seem invested in living that dream. We know and see the many men also impacted by men’s violence, who have also lost their beloved women to it. But here’s the rub because while men bank the cheque anyway when the status bro tips the scales relentlessly in their favour, what’s in it for them? Feminism is seen as a loss of power not a righting of the balance let alone a settling of the ledger. Or the score. Domestic violence is always framed as a problem for women; we are relentlessly its collateral damage. But the responsibility for rape lies with the rapist, for abuse lies with the abuser, for feigned ignorance lies with the rapid blinker. Women everywhere see the blind eyes and bitten tongues of men who do not even comment on the latest horrifying headlines, examples or statistics. Even when accountability languishes in the never never, silence ensure it stays there.
Empathy and entitlement have an inverse relationship so it is always interesting to try and have this conversation with the men in your life. What an own goal. The only real way to enact change - and this goes for all of us - is by unspooling the patriarchy that lives within. It is the most important shadow work because otherwise its dodgy decks still program your playlist. Which side have you chosen, consciously or not?
Who do you protect and what do you preserve?
How is it demonstrated by your actions and behaviour?
This shadow is both cultural and personal. It lives in your history and also in your belly. Its revolutionary front pulses in you now, hopefully a little louder on eye roller’s like today.
In 2020 International Women's Day got swallowed up by a global pandemic that would go on to indisputably prove the actual value of feminine currency. The work of the world that nurtures, gives back and then gives more, grows and tends, feeds and burps. As it turns out our world is held together by nurses and carers, teachers and childcare workers, check-out chicks and admins, householders and organisers and mothers most of all. Overwhelmingly female and grossly underappreciated until the bulk weight of pandemonium fell on minority shoulders.
Women's labour, so much of it undervalued or unpaid, remains the sinew that holds the backbone of our countries and our worlds upright. If women everywhere began to sue for their unpaid labour the way some have begun to in Spain of late, the foundations of all our very modern economies would be fatally quaked. Books and books have been written on brilliant women whose careers were automatically usurped by their husbands as part of the deal. Many before me have mused that the reason so many early diagnosed ADD men “grow out of it” is simply that women take over their executive function in adulthood, become buffer for an alarming unwillingness to manage the minutiae of daily life while expecting someone else to do so out of nothing but love for their weaponised incompetency. This was the old institution of marriage that women were sent away to for centuries. Have its implicit arrangements really changed where you live?
This year IWD breaches the status bro in the midst of world war three, making all of this arguably more galling than ever. Did this late stage psychopathic war on life itself also begin, like everything else, at home? Women are relentlessly blamed for the actions of men. What is becoming even more apparent this year thanks to everything from the Winter Olympics to the Australian PM is that men still largely aren't on board the equality bandwagon. Simply saying so isn't a ticket to ride it like you stole it.
As kids, home is where we intrinsically learn about the division of labour and the value applied to it. Attitudes to women and men are demonstrated not explained, distinct rights and darker unwritten rules emerge. This template was stamped upon you back in the last generation, or perhaps even the one before that, when everything was worse than it is now. It all gets set at home, and then at school, long before we are confronted with a deeply inequitable world. Home and school exist within larger systems, as cogs in greater wheels whose grind does determines shape and form through its greater force and larger power. Whenever I am asked about my noisy feminism, I too can say it began at home but not all of our shadows still live there. Mostly they ball in up the corners of our workplaces and clubs, yell at whoever they like on the internet with impunity, take cheap shots or make jokes that fail the pub test every time they move out of the Sports Bar, mutter or pull faces when you think no one can see you.
The tenets of feminism are still equality, liberty and safety. Crucially in case you have been misinformed or assumed otherwise, applied universally. The same rights across the board, equal reward for the same labour, freedom to move and do and be as we please without caveat or adjustment because of the body or place we were born into. Sound familiar? It is the call of every single other marginalised group that are not benefitting from patriarchy.
So if that equality isn't happening at home, behind closed doors when nobody is listening or looking in, it isn't going to appear outside first and come knocking. By the time the nest is flown, the tone is set. If we cannot wrangle consent or equally share the housework and the kids, the organising and the shopping, the time and space that makes up our lives. If we have different rules and standards for boys and girls, then what are we even on about? It shouldn't only be charity that begins at home. Unless equality finds a home in yours, it won't ever be a level playing field outside it.
Let me tell you a tale, all too common. It starts somewhere near where you live with once upon a time but doesn't end in happily ever after. Because as the statistics overwhelmingly prove, the epidemic of domestic violence in our country - and probably yours too - is beyond crisis point and getting worse.
We’re down to one in three here now, which sits us 44th in the world but who knows how that maths works. Think about how many women you know and then do your own. Consider now what all the women you know have to continually sacrifice on the altar of safety, ask if you never have. Every single one of the women you know has a handbag full of near misses and hits that scarred for life, whether you believe it or not. What still haunts me most days is that I keep opening the news to read of yet another woman murdered by a man who professed to love her, a society that still justifies his existence and a world that thinks she should have done better.
Cue the reaction in horror. The blame game starts. Feral euphemisms emerge and implied responsibility is shamelessly laid at the dead feet of the victim, who can no longer protest the society and its systems that failed her. Hypothetical debates ensue. Nothing changes. Because no matter the individual horror, the problem is entrenched. Casual misogyny and rampant violence against women are two sides of the same coin. I have heard the former carelessly tumble from the mouth of every man I have ever loved, and then how they have defended it. Women listen but lately, we don’t teach. We move instead.
What sits at the bottom of this ugly swamp is the most galling aspect of all. Nobody believes women. The benefit of the doubt is built in to our justice system to serve and protect… who exactly? Domestic violence, sex trafficking, child sexual abuse, coercive control, porn culture, rape jokes. It’s all just too uncomfortable for everyone else to talk about afterwards. Constantly minimised or marginalised. Glossed over or polished into something more palatable. Reframed or flat out ignored.
The horror doesn't go away, not even with cupcakes once a year, because it has not gone away. And so in a sea of performative annual feminism, women just get on with life as we always do. And this broken world actually keeps spinning, no matter the wars in the world of men or the disasters that lap at our homes and caravans of care. Running the usual gauntlets and battling the same old shit, getting more than our share done for less of the spoils and hoping for throwaway thanks.
Women are all too familiar with how this world actually works. We have each in our own way been fighting for change, safety, equality, parity, fairness and to not be spoken over the top of by far lesser gods, for millennia. We stopped playing the games of the patriarchy to earn a chair with three legs and no backing a long time ago now.
A few years ago IWD asked "us" to break the bias. Oh how we laughed. That bias lives in men, taught to them from the cradle by a world that cannot see properly out of just one eye. Women are still largely giving men the well laboured benefit of the doubt. The only way any bias ever changes is for it to be thoroughly examined by its owner. Hauled out of the shadows and thrown on the bench with the bones of a dying world. Held upside down to shake the awful truth from its roots. Untucked, unlearned and undone by a willingess to bear true witness to all it has scorned, shamed and sullied. The Western world’s unwillingness to go there is all just horror and headlines now.
Amends come next, to show that you know better and that you fucking get it even as the world still treats sorry as implied liability rather than restorative justice. Still the only real apology is changed behaviour. The only real responsibility is reparative action. Reconciliation can only be reflected in the grateful eyes of women. Change must come through the hearts of men. The proof is in the pudding not the recipe.
And so on this day of the year devoted internationally to women, I choose instead to lay down the gauntlet we are so sick of carrying alone at your feet, gentlemen.
May you reckon with your own shadows like a true warrior
May you pull the bias from you like a sword from a stone
May you lift up the women around you and the girls they protect
May you raise your voice in our defence and our honour
May you be the change we are aching to see in the world
May you do us proud and truly know the holy communion that follows right action and equal exchange
And if you cannot, may you reach out for help to learn how. Please, take other men with you for the ride.
Responsiveness is a love language
~ Jennifer Nurick
