International Day of the Girl-Are Women Human?

Saturday 11^th October is International Day of the Girl. A day declared by the UN as a day when we celebrate girls, and raise awareness of issues of gender inequality all around the world. But why do we need a 'Day of the Girl', you may ask? We have 'International Women’s Day,' and, to quote ‘Friends’ character, Phoebe Buffay, ‘we can vote, we can drive, what more do they want?!’ Well the truth is that no country in the world has achieved gender equality. In Emma Watson’s inspiring address to the UN, she outlined the reasons she was a feminist. Reasons such as wanting to have control over her own body, not be sexualised by the media, or the fact that she deserves the same pay as her male counterparts for doing the same work. You may read that, and have heard her speech (if you haven’t, listen to it!), and thought, ‘yes well Emma Watson’s a celebrity, she’s in the limelight, she’s a minority, that’s just the nature of the business she’s in.

I say to that is simply not true! As a woman in the West, we are not paid the same as men, we are sexualised for our bodies and we are not treated with the same respect afforded to our male counterparts.

But let’s look into this issue a little deeper. There are, at present, about 3 million women and girls worldwide, termed as ‘sex slaves.’ (Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl Wudunn, Half the Sky). 3 million. Sold to be raped. Often this persistent rape, up to forty times a day, leads to rotting of the internal organs, AIDS, and premature death. The practice of female genital cutting is also ransacking African countries today. The same source estimates that every ten seconds a girl is pinned down and her genital areas are cut, leaving open wounds and scars. Perhaps you have children, or would like to one day. It is worth considering that the equivalent to five jumbo jets worth of women die in labour each day. Take that in. Five jumbo jets worth PER DAY. That’s one maternal death every minute. I could go on and on: the fact that a female foetus in more likely to be aborted than a male one, or that girls are often not afforded an education simply because of their sex, or that 700 million girls alive today were married before their 18^th birthday. That’s almost ten percent of the population! (Girls not Brides). Many of these girls are forced into premature marriage because their families cannot afford to keep them any longer, so they are married to men much older, often left as prisoners in their own home, expected to cook, fetch food and reproduce, until they are left as a widow with no rights over their late husband’s few possessions.

International Day of the Girl isn’t about feminists whining. It isn’t about saying that girls are more important than boys. It isn’t about us demanding superiority. It is about facing these issues and saying that they are not acceptable. That we will not sit by and let this happen. And the campaign is focused on girls, because they are the ones who are suffering! They are the ones who are affected.

Catharine MacKinnon writes this harrowing poem on the lack of equality afforded to women around the globe. Read it, read it again, and allow the words to sink in. And next time you slay feminism, or someone advocating for girls rights, imagine if it was you. Your body, your future, determined in seconds as you are sold to be raped. And maybe, just maybe, allow yourself to be human too.

Are women human?

Fifty years ago the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what a human being is. It told the world what a person, as a person, is entitled to. Are women human yet?

If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels? Would we have our genitals sliced out to purify us (of what?) and to bid and define our cultures? Would we be used as breeders, made to work without pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn't enough or when men tired of us, starved as widows when our husbands died if we survived his funeral pyre, forced to sell ourselves sexually because men won't value us for anything else? Would we be sold into marriage to priests to atone for our family's sins or to improve our family's earthly prospects? Would be we sexually and reproductively enslaved? Would we, when allowed to work for pay, be made to work at the most menial jobs and exploited at barely starvation level? Would we be trafficked for sexual use and entertainment worldwide in whatever form current technology makes possible? Would we be kept from learning to read and write?

If women were human, would we have little to no voice in public deliberations and in government? Would we be hidden behind veils and imprisoned in houses and stoned and shot for refusing? Would we be beaten nearly to death, and to death, by men with whom we are close? Would we be sexually molested in our families? Would we be raped in genocide to terrorize and destroy our ethnic communities, and raped again in that undeclared war that goes on every day in every country in the world in what is called peacetime? If women were human, would our violation be enjoyed by our violators? And, if we were human, when these things happened, would virtually nothing be done about it?

(…)

When will women be human? When?

Are Women Human?

By Catharine MacKinnon Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 171 (Barend van der Heijden & Bahia Tahzib-Lie, eds., Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1999)