This is such a short talk, yet there's SO much in it! Every single sentence is a nugget of power. Every person on the planet should read this!
- In a literal way, men ruled the world. This made sense thousand years ago. Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival, the physically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men, in general, are physically stronger. (There are, of course, many exceptions.) Today we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person, it is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved, but our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
- Gender, as it functions today, is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry.
- We teach females that in relationships compromise is what a woman is more likely to do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishment (which in my opinion can be a good thing) but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.
- The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.
- Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically. But socialization exaggerates the differences, and then starts a self-fulfilling process. Take cooking, for example. Today, in general, women are more likely to do housework than men, cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene? Or because over years, they have been socialized to see cooking as their role. I was going to say that perhaps women are born with the cooking gene, until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world, that are given the fancy title of Chef, are men.
- When it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. Many of us think that the less feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken seriously. A man going to a business meeting doesn't wonder about being taken seriously based on what he is wearing, but a woman does. I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. Had I had the confidence then that I have now to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching because I would have been more comfortable and more fully myself. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femineity and I want to be respected in all my femaleness because I deserve to be.
- I often wear clothes that men don't like or don't "understand". I wear them because I like them and because I feel good in them. The male gaze as a shaper of my life's choices is largely incidental.
- Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general, but to chose to use the vague expression "human rights" is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending is was not women who have for centuries been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically being a female human. For centuries, the worlds divided people into two groups and then excluded and oppressed one group. it is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that. Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not naturally in charge as men.
- Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can, and must, make it our culture.
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