The little things

[mhuzzell]

Or: why we still need feminism.

This article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/twitters-tales-of-sexism makes a good point, I think. It's about how the author made some offhand twitter comments about What Has Feminism Done For Us? (answer: loads), and got treated to a deluge of replies about just how bad things were back in the Bad Old Days ... and also some that she describes as "surprisingly recent". The takeaway message, I think, is this:

"Worse things happen to women every day including rape and domestic violence, than being snubbed or ignored. These horrors indicate the continuing vast inequality between the sexes. No, it's not the worst thing in the world, but that doesn't mean you can pretend it's not happening."

Little (and "little") things, irritating things, things that "don't really matter", all contribute to an atmosphere of oppression, even when they are not, themselves, inherently oppressive.

__________

Meanwhile, yesterday, Twitter was trending the hashtag #ididnotreport, which is/was a mixture of people sharing their stories of unreported sexual assaults alongside the "small", "insignificant", "everyday" sorts of sexual harassment that is a part of many women's daily experience, and all women's lifetime experience, but which is generally ignored, and certainly de-emphasised, by the wider culture.

Discuss.

Comments

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Saying some incidents of sexual harrassment are small is like saying each bite out of an apple is a small thing. In the end, the apple's destroyed.

[kama-of-the-roo.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I read that, and while it's almost an awesome idea, it also seems to presume that bigger and more dangerous forms of sexism don't happen to women in the West, which is wildly inaccurate.

[mhuzzell.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to hear what gave you that impression -- I didn't get that from it at all.

[kama-of-the-roo.livejournal.com]

The wording suggested to me that the writer thinks most of the "worse things [that] happen to women every day" in other, more thirdworldy countries (where "much of the struggle for women's rights today is taking place"). But maybe that's just my reading.

It also seems to me to suggest that the relatively less severe indiginities suffered in the described tweets are being touted as the primary reasons that feminism is necessary in the West, rather than secondary and tertiary reasons to the more severe problems women face thanks to discrimination (poverty, rape, domestic violence, and homicide). I think in this sense I prefer the approach of microaggressions.com regarding the small forms of discrimination that women and minorities face every day -- not as "Someone said something mean to me in the 80s, so feminism is necessary" but rather "these are small parts of larger problems."