The week began with International Womenâs Day when inboxes and social media feeds were flooded with positive affirmations; âfight like a girlâ slogans gracing clips of women doing martial arts, women of all shapes, sizes and colour climbing mountains, loving family, breaking glass ceilings and climbing corporate ladders that should rather be dismantled and burned. However, it quickly became a grotesque showcase for all the reasons why women still need a day, a week, a year, a lifetime to also highlight discrimination and unmitigated horror.
In America, Meghan Markle calmly outlined the misogyny and racism of âThe Firm,â and very many people decried her stance: she was entitled, privileged, seeking attention, outspoken, rather than being simply a person, a woman pleading for compassion and opening about her mental health issues.
In Britain, Sarah Everard was murdered during a walk home from her friendâs by a serving police officer. She had spent fifteen minutes of that walk talking on the phone to her boyfriend, no doubt following the advice that she grew up with: call a friend, be ready to run, have your keys in your hand, donât dress to draw attention to yourself. At protest rallies held over the weekend, women were held down by police. One dramatic photo shows a woman held face down on the ground by male officers, head uplifted, eyes pleading above her face mask. It is a photo that has had many iterations throughout time. A suffragetteâs face muddied in the streets, petticoats deliberately raised as she dared to voice her rights to vote, a young Maori mother having her baby uplifted from a maternity ward in New Zealand; women held down, held back by men.
In New Zealand, I sit and read in one morning of an Australian man laughing and filming a policewoman die after he had run her and three of her colleagues down. He rained down expletives on her as she breathed her last: she had ruined his expensive car; he had only been going to buy sushi. The crash, and so her death, was her fault. I also read of a man, who had breached his electronic bail, murder his ex-partner in a fit of jealousy. The police were aware that he was not meeting his bail conditions but had not followed it up, just as in England police had known of indecency complaints made against the officer who killed Sarah Everard.
New Zealandâs Prime Minister, Ms. Jacinda Ardern, has just been made a Lego figurine to commemorate International Womenâs Day, yet, when she announced her pregnancy, she was confronted with diatribes of misogyny. Men openly wondered whether she would be a better fit in the kitchen, looking after her partner. How, they questioned, would she ever be able to keep her mind on the important matters of state when breastfeeding a child? Yet, she did and manged a country through the devastation of earthquakes, a terrorist attack that killed 51 people, a fatal volcanic eruption and tsunami warnings. However, despite our strong feminist leader, the fact that New Zealand was the first to grant women the right to vote in 1893, we have one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the western world. My father and ex-husband were perpetrators and now, each day, I wait for my husband to turn, to call me a bitch or worse, to label me as deluded, hysterical, or even a rabid feminist. It all must stop.
