Women's World Part 1
Apparently, we’re living in a women’s world. Yes, we’re way better off than we were fifty years ago, but that doesn’t mean that sexism is just gone. The people who believe that won’t even listen to me when I try to tell them that they’re wrong. Feminism means equality, not that women are better than men.
What I really don’t understand is how they can’t see the invisible line in the middle of the room. The girls stand on one side and the boys on the other.
When a girl speaks to the male teacher, he cuts her off before she can finish or automatically assumes that she’s just not right. When she tries to put up a fight and prove her point, he’s not even invested in the conversation. He’s still half listening to the recapitulation of the last rugby game on the other side of that line as if the girl just doesn’t deserve the same amount of attention or he just thinks that her problems aren’t important enough. After all, he’s got other more manly stuff to be worried about. She just has to wait her turn.
But she’s already waited her turn. She waited for sixty minutes in the last P.E class. She waited an hour but she still didn’t get a single pass. Nobody gave her the ball because girls can’t catch. It doesn’t seem like that much, it’s only an hour after all, but it’s an hour of her life thrown out the door and it makes her start thinking that little bit more.
If this is how things are at the age of sixteen what will happen when she starts trying to follow her dreams? Will they be crushed by an over-imposing fist looking for something on which to cling to its male dominance, reaching for the last shred of its so-called masculinity? Will they crumble to the ground in a pile of ashes and dust? Will the space in her head she has set aside for her passions and beliefs start to rust with the slicing words made by an iron knife that cut her confidence down to the bone? After all, it is known that a man deserves more due to his “lucky” genetics.
Copyright © Jenny Dillon | Year Posted 2018
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