I’m still working on my companion piece to Homework but I have this belated International Women’s Day post for you.
On Sunday author Laurell K Hamilton blogged about IWD, Hamilton, or Lala as some of us call her) is not known for being deep or sympathic. No, I’m not linking to her POS blog, you want to read it you can find it on your own.
It’s all about how we shouldn’t need a day to remind us that women are important. And then it goes downhill into how equal her house is. Before we go on I would like to say that if we didn’t have an IWD on November 19 Lala would be wailing about the inequality because that is International Men’s Day. And World Toilet Day. Really.
Lala waxes on (and on) about her household and how they “celebrate” equality every day and I guess we should all just be ever so grateful for her showing us how wonderful life could be. But that isn’t what IWD is about, it’s about things Lala seems happy to ignore, things that aren’t pretty or easily solved within a paragraph in a blog. I wonder if she knows who Brianna Wu, Caroline CriadoPerez or Malala are.
Well, she certainly inspired an online poster so I’m going to post her reply here because this is what IWD is about.
The reason why we need International Women’s Day:1) because globally 1 out of 3 girls in developing countries will be married before they are 18
2) because millions of girls are forced to drop out of school every year because they’re so poor that they can’t afford basic feminine hygiene products once they start their period so they can continue with their education causing them to miss up to a week of school every month, making them fall behind and eventually having them give up on their education totally,
3) because still even in this country for every dollar a white man makes a white woman makes $.75, a black woman makes around $.60 and Hispanic/Latino women make about $.50
4) because globally women make up the vast majority of people living in extreme poverty of less than $1 per day and many times far less than that.
5) because statistically when women speaking makes up 30% of a conversation when asked afterwards men and women both say that women dominated the conversation.
6) because 1 in 6 women in this country will experience rape or sexual assault and they still get asked questions like what they were wearing or if they’d been drinking as if that is a reason to rape them, and the rates are even higher globally.
7) because racist white people ask the same question ever year as to why February is still Black History Month(notice it’s the shortest month of the year)
8) because you write one of the worst examples of a self hating female gender character I’ve ever read as if anything that makes someone female or is seen as feminine is inherently bad and all of the qualities that are seen as masculine are good and superior, and by the way, you don’t write strong male or female characters.
9) because female politicians like Hilary Clinton are asked how they’re going to juggle being a mother/grandmother if they’re going to run for office again and men are literally never asked that.
10) because in Iowa where I live a women is beaten by a partner or spouse every 9 seconds and of all the women killed in Iowa every year 75% of them are killed by an intimate partner and they’re 70x more likely to be killed within 2 weeks of leaving their partner.
11) because I could go on for 20 pages worth of reasons why doing something as little as having a single day to bring attention to all of the amazing accomplishments that women throughout history have done and all of the many things that women still suffer but continue to fight on in spite of.Because you, even as a women don’t recognize the privilege you have in terms of your race, your economic status, the fact that you were born in a country where your life isn’t threatened by war, poverty or sickness and think that because your life is relatively easy that everyone else must have the same privilege. I thought I’d read the most asinine thing LaLa had ever wrote but this one makes me want to spit nails it’s so full of carp.
” As women, we need to stand up and say no to this defeatism. To this status quo that views us and our needs as expendable, the first thing to go when we need to save money. We need to start getting together, determining what the parts of our society are that foster a climate where women are seen, but not heard, abused, but not given redress, and fighting back. The internet is without doubt an enabler of misogyny – but it’s also an enabler of other voices. Women’s voices. Women are using the internet in ways that give them a platform like nothing has before. We start and we win more campaigns than men do. We support other people’s campaigns more than men do (these are actual stats, not my feminist propaganda). We need to start understanding how formidable we can be, when we stand up together, start fighting back, start making demands of our politicians, and not backing down.”- Caroline CriadoPerez
Maybe next year Hamilton could focus on the world beyond her doorstep, just a thought.
38 Caliber Reviews 