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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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My Cuntry
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I’m a girl- it’s weird, I know, but girl doesn’t have the same connotations as it used to, so it’s okay to be a girl- it doesn’t mean giving up any of the power of being a woman, it just implies a sense of fun and youthfulness.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw an entry on the feministpeacenetwork blog that troubled me. It complained that women made up only 28.5% of Time’s 100 most influential people list. Now, the complaint itself is entirely valid. Women make up more than 50% of the planet, and they ought to make up a similar percentage in the world’s most influential people. But the blog entry took Time to task, going as far as accusing the magazine of “blatant misogyny.” Now, lest we forget, misogyny is in fact a “hatred of women,” not simply a subtle or even a pervasive bias, but an active hatred. The last person I know of who reacted to Time’s 100 list so strongly was Rick Santorum, when Bush was dropped from the list in 2007 (loathe as I am to admit it, I actually agree with the substance of his complaint, though he more than deserves the euphemism his name has gained- Google for it, just not at work, or while eating). According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, women make up about 18.4% of world legislators. Now, some of this low number could be because of reluctance for voters to elect women, but it’s also influenced by the number of female candidates in general (and don’t assume that less enlightened countries are dragging us down- we had a record number of women in Congress, and still only rated at 20.9%). And according to the Screen Actor’s Guild, only about 37% of roles in TV and movies go to women, indicative of another pool from which influential people are drawn. And I’m not defending Time’s list- half of their entries are entirely nonsensical (and I’d argue if I don’t know who someone is even after a synopsis, then their influence is questionable at best)- and less so than having a hole where women ought to be, for a world list it’s mightily US-centric- and that’s to say nothing of their rather strange stratifications of artificially-limited categories, or the fact that 4chan hacked the hell out of their polling. And don’t think I’m attacking FPN, because I’m not. It’s a line of thought I’ve heard before. Of course, in previous iterations, it’s been even sillier, like complaining about the lesser representation of women in history books. Now, to an extent, there’s a legitimate concern here. The role of women has been marginalized over the centuries, but the problem in history books is often that it’s accurately portraying the cultural and societal repression of women, the less influential and glamorous part in society we were relegated to. I’m not denigrating the contribution of a Betsy Ross or a Martha Washington, but stacked against John Adams, Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, they obviously took part in fewer of the epic events that shaped the beginning of the nation- they’re absent because they really weren’t even given the opportunity to participate in them. On that subject, I’m against the ghettoization of women’s history, too. I want to live in a country- no, a world- where at least half of the most influential people on Time’s list are women- but I want a world where they’re on the list because they deserve to be, not because we’d rather settle for the appearance of equality and fairness. |
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