Feminism has become a word loaded with negative connotations and one that people don't like to associate themselves with.
This is because many people don't actually know the true meaning of the word. I understand the word 'feminist' as someone who believes that men and women should be politically, socially and economically equal.
A sexist, in my opinion, believes the opposite. Therefore if we are not feminists, then aren't we sexists? Another issue is that people don't believe that there is a need for feminism anymore because of the view that men and women today are in fact equal.
While I do not disagree that we have made great strides when it comes to women equality, we must understand that rights on paper do not automatically mean rights in reality.
I believe that the root of today’s gender violence is the way the educated talk about women, especially in our schools. Everyday sexism is so discreet that many people don't even notice it. Sexism seeps into our lives, our homes and into our communities, it eats away at our society one woman at a time.
Where the problems start is in our schools. One only has to listen to a schoolboy conversation to realise the true extent of the issue.
When boys call women bitches and sluts it has an impact. When boys refer to women as objects and not people, it has an impact. When boys tell sexist jokes and the people around them laugh, it endorses that behaviour and it plants seeds in the minds of future rapists.
Just because you personally are not raping or abusing women, it doesn't mean that your actions and words aren't contributing to rape and abuse.
Another
issue is that people refer to rape and sexism as "women’s issues", creating the
idea that women must solve the problem.
Rape
and sexism are not "women’s issues"; they are men’s issues. We need strong male
leaders who are not afraid to call themselves feminists. We need to learn that what we say and how we say it has an impact on the war on sexism, as well aswomen worldwide. That way we can be empowered to solve it.
It is always good to link issues, to put things like sexism and racism into perspective. Should white schoolboys start liberally using the 'K' word to describe black people, there would be a major outcry, it would be seen as racism (which is right).
When schoolboys liberally use the word slut, it is seen as normal, not sexist.
So where do we draw the line?
Is it okay to use socially degrading words to describe women, even if we are not beating them?
We think its okay to call boys "studs" and girls "sluts", and that it's fine to attach labels and tags to women such as "bossy" or "cheeky". The double standards that we have created affect the way women are brought up and how the world views them.
We need to stop condoning the use of such degrading words and start standing up: whether it’s to the boy who said bitch, the teenager who grabbed a girl's breast or to the men who gang-raped a girl from a neighbouring community. We must stand up as leaders, as feminists and as people.
The first step to standing up is understanding men’s issues and rooting them out in our everyday life.
The
first step to standing up is understanding men’s issues. We need our schools to start educating us with a radical (discreet) feminist agenda (in both boy and girls schools, public and private).
We need to start appreciating women for what they can add to our community and not just what they can add to our egos. We need the men in our communities to start standing up, standing up for every third South African woman who will be raped in their lifetime. We need men and women to start reclaiming that F word so that we change this.
If
our schools really wished to stop the raping and abuse of women in our
communities, they could.
We
need to start appreciating women for what they can add to our community and not
just what they can add to our egos.
We need the men in our communities to start standing up for every third South African woman who will be raped in her lifetime.
We need people to stop calling women 'bitches' and 'sluts' or any degrading words. Sexism is not something that people like talking about, it makes us feel uncomfortable, and thats exactly why we need to start talking about it.
Nicholas Farrell is a 17-year-old political activist involved with the DA.