The human rights experts concluded that the country falls far behind most others.
The United States continues to embarrass.
The delegates were appalled by the lack of gender equality in America. They found the U.S. to be lagging far behind international human rights standards in a number of areas, including its 23 percent gender pay gap, maternity leave, affordable child care and the treatment of female migrants in detention centers.
The most telling moment of the trip, the women told reporters on Friday, was when they visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced the hostile political climate around womenâs reproductive rights.
âWe were harassed. There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,â said Frances Raday, the delegate from the U.K. The men repeatedly shouted, âYouâre murdering children!â at them as soon as they neared the clinic, even though Raday said they are clearly past childbearing age.
âItâs a kind of terrorism,â added Eleonora Zielinska, the delegate from Poland. âTo us, it was shocking.â
In most European countries, she explained, abortions are performed at general doctorsâ offices and hospitals that offer all kinds of other health services, so there arenât protesters waiting to heckle the women who enter.
The women discovered during their visit that women in the United States have âmissing rightsâ compared to the rest of the world. For instance, the U.S. is one of three countries in the world that does not guarantee women paid maternity leave. The U.N. suggests that countries guarantee at least 14 weeks of paid parental leave. Some countries go further â Iceland requires five months paid leave for each parent, and an additional two months to be shared between them.
âThe lack of accommodation in the workplace to womenâs pregnancy, birth and post-natal needs is shocking,â Raday said. âUnthinkable in any society, and certainly one of the richest societies in the world.â
Another main area of concern for the delegation is violence against women â particularly gun violence. Women are 11 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than in other high-income countries, and most of those murdersare perpetrated by an intimate partner. While the Obama administration has talked a lot about combatting violence against women, its efforts have been frustrated by Congressâ inability to pass new federal gun restrictions.
While the delegates were shocked by many things they saw in the U.S., perhaps the biggest surprise of their trip, they said, was learning that women in the country donât seem to know what theyâre missing. âSo many people really believe that U.S. women are way better off with respect to rights than any woman in the world,â Raday said. âThey would say, âProve it! What do you mean other people have paid maternity leave?ââ
So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And Iâve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isnât really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.
The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. Itâs very pretty and it is skillfully painted. Itâs a nice piece of art. Itâs also just a landscape. I donât recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.
The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didnât study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)
The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhartâs paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isnât easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the âblueâ is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewerâs perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, youâre left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isnât as absolute as you thought it was?
People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.
Reinhartâs art is utterly genius.
âBut anyone could have done that! It doesnât take any special skill! I could have done that!â
Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didnât.
Give abstract art some respect. Itâs more important than you realize.
*reaching into my memories of art history classes*
One other important thing to remember is that the invention of photography made all future abstract and modern art movements possible. Now that there was a device that could capture the exact likeness of the world (save for its color), artists were no longer bound to the goal of creating paintings that were as close to reality as possible. They were free to experiment with line and texture and color and shape in ways that bent reality, explored different realities, examined the very meaning of reality (and thus the meaning of art).
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