International Women's Day--Hasn't Really Come a Long Way.

by Dominique Millette

This post is in honour of International Women’s Day, because every year on March 8, half the human race gets officially recognized, before everybody blinks and goes home to watch reruns of Lost or 24.

Here in Canada, we women are represented by Helena Guergis. Guergis is Miss Huronia 1992 and therefore, the perfect stereotype of what little girls are told they should want to be when they grow up, whether they like it or not. Her website biography does indicate a track record of involvement in women’s issues, but we’re not sure what Prime Minister Stephen Harper was really thinking when he appointed her. Why? Because his government has been less than enthusiastic about improving women’s lives. He probably shrugged and figured no one would care, because her title of Minister of State (Status of Women) puts half the population in parentheses as the afterthought of what is called a “junior ministry”.  Recently, Guergis proceeded to inspire millions of persons of female gender by screaming at baggage handlers in an airport in Charlottetown and apparently calling their province a shithole.

Lately, the only Tory initiative to appease women was to ask Canadians if they would like a more gender-neutral national anthem. Canadians said no. The Tories shrugged and proceeded once again to do nothing, as if to say “See? We tried. Nobody else cares about your issues either.”

You’ll forgive me if I’m a little dispirited. It isn’t just Guergis, though she’s a symptom of what ails “the status of women” pretty much everywhere.  For example, if you google “International Women’s Day”, the second ad just above your hits links to “International Women” so you can “Find Your Dream Foreign Woman. View Photo Profiles. Join Free Now”. I wish I were kidding. I’m not. What does this tell us? It tells us that “woman”, whether she is “international” or not, is for men to look at, think about, meet, and use, and not for herself to become.

In Toronto, the first pic I saw March 7 on the Now Magazine web page for the week covering our historic day featured a woman, indeed: she was in a bikini with a roll of bills in her top, to illustrate the concept of a stag party. The next woman to be seen was a rail-thin fashion model off to the lower right. The serious news — politics and serious political music — was dominated by pics of guys. Further down there were more women, some in cute party hats, and one woman grimacing comically over the words The Goodbye Girl. Though it’s an article about dating, it sounds like a romcom akin to The Runaway Bride. The title in itself rankles me. It’s never the Goodbye Woman, or conversely, the Goodbye Boy.

In fact, I bet there would never even be a film or an article about dating called the Goodbye Man, because according to the Official Mythology of Male-Female Relationships, men leaving is somehow not news and therefore, not film-worthy. It’s only head-turning if the woman goes away, and if she does, she is either a victim, and must be protected; quirky, and must be tamed; or evil, and must be punished. Our mythology tells us that men are the ones meant to be happy-go-lucky creatures who never get attached to any particular woman, because this would make them psycho-stalkers and therefore deranged, or losers who can’t get laid by more than one person, while women are hanky-grasping Ophelias who sniffle their way through romcoms in their bathrobes and fuzzy slippers whenever they can’t get a date.

Have we really come a long way, baby? This is just one web page, in one day, from one single media outlet. Just as another example, the comments on the CBC’s coverage of the IWD march in Toronto are overwhelmingly negative. There are more of these sites and comments. They are legion. They illustrate that with all the liberation we’ve achieved, it seems that we’ve been liberated into a giant whorehouse where straight men must have a reason to stare at our tits and ass before we get noticed for anything, including potential career opportunities for which we are, usually, overqualified already. Should we fail to pass this test, we will go on the back burner of life, not only unable to get a date but unable to get a promotion. Should we pass, we get to face constant harassment, ogling, comments we don’t want to hear, touches we don’t want to feel, and be told repeatedly it’s all one big compliment. Yeah, thanks. It sure is a compliment every time some snide asshole says we slept our way into a job, even when we have ten more years of graduate and technical education than the majority of men who applied for the same thing.

I remember a low point in my life, when my brother told me his psychologist instructed him to think of women as “people with funny bodies”. He thought this was illuminating. Yes, you read that right: he thought it was illuminating to think of women as people, because the concept had never occurred to him before. He never even noticed the unstated assumption that default “people” are actually men.

This reminded me of a work situation I’d been in where the only other women coming to the office were the mother and girlfriend of one of the business partners. The mother was hired to clean things. The girlfriend hung around and helped her do it. Someone had to clean up, given that the glasses in the sink were blue and green with mold. I, of course, refused, since I never clean anything other people leave behind unless they do the same for me. Nevertheless, I felt distinctly uncomfortable. Imagine if I were a visible minority and the only other visible minorities in the office were cleaning things. It’s subservient. I spoke to the mother and she said she did it because she loved her kid. I remember my mother’s boyfriend in England had said the same thing. It didn’t make everything feel okay. All it made me feel was that internalized oppression is so deeply rooted within the women of the world that it will take more than a revolution for us to be truly equal and free.

So on March 8, I’m going to take my funny-body and my funny-brain and remember. And pray. And hope that all the above can change.

Happy International Women’s Day.