Tuesday, January 24, 2017

"We Should All be Feminists" Response - Henry Wilkinson

Masculinity and femininity are topics that are discussed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk. A particular point that stood out to me was when she said that “we do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys.” Vulnerability, weakness, she says, are things that boys are taught to fear. She says if we start raising our boys differently, in 50 or 100 years we will begin to see the inequality between men and women begin to disappear. “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,” Adichie says. This is true in two ways- girls are taught to be meek and body size is directly related to femininity. A girl who is not petite and frail is perceived as non-feminine and a girl that speaks out is also regarded as non-feminine. She also talks about how reality is more complex than just not participating in the oppression. Sure, you can try to avoid sexism but its effects will still dominate your life.

“The problem of gender is it prescribes how we should be rather than how we are,” Adichie says. Whatever women do, cooking, sewing, men master and are given the title of chef or designer. Still, a boy is shunned for practicing these activities growing up. The gender dichotomy is a double-edged sword, and though girls can play sports without reprimand (as long as they are feminine sports), boys are not allowed under any circumstance to pursue things perceived as “girly.” Only when boys display some glimmer of talent or passion, they are allowed to pursue their true wishes. Similarly, girls have to worry about looking too feminine and not being taken seriously. They have to be true to themselves, but also not too masculine, but not too mannish.


Adichie says “a man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved but it seems to me that our ideas of gender have not evolved.” She talks about how as a society, our qualifiers for positions of power have shifted but somehow we haven’t been able to realize that they apply to both women and men. Somewhere along the lines, something went wrong. The plight of inequality often goes unnoticed or is invisible altogether, with only reactions to the inequality showing rather than the inequality itself. As Adichie says,“these are just little things but sometimes it’s the little things that sting the most."

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