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| Twitter 29-05-2014, 14:24 CET |
This is exactly what happened with the #YesAllWomen (Yes All Women) hash-tag action currently sweeping Social Media. The screen capture on the right was taken only a few minutes ago. New Tweets keep appearing fast and it seems like the #YesAllWomen hash-tag is shaking up the world. And rightly so, because the way some men continue to objectify and mistreat women is simply unacceptable. The Guardian explains how #YesAllWomen came to be:
"In the days since Elliot Rodger murdered six people in Isla Vista, California, citing hatred of women and sexual rejection as the reason for his rampage, women across the world have come out en masse to share their stories of everyday sexism and misogyny – and to tell the world that enough is enough."
Source: #YesAllWomen reveals the constant barrage of sexism that women face, The Guardian
What alerted me to this trend was a friend's sharing of a Slate.com article on Facebook. The article starts off by talking about Elliot Rodger's views about women. It then goes on to talk about male attitudes to women in general. I very much enjoyed the article and agreed with the writer. One paragraph from the article really spoke to me as it described a situation I've often been in myself. A situation many women will have been in quite a lot, one where we feel the need to 'invent' a partner to get rid of unwanted male attention.
"The night after the murders, I was at a backyard party in New York, talking with a female friend, when a drunk man stepped right between us. “I was thinking the exact same thing,” he said. As we had been discussing pay discrepancies between male and female journalists, we informed him that this was unlikely. But we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him."
Source: #YesAllWomen in the wake of Elliot Rodger: Why It’s So Hard for Men to See Misogyny, Double X, Slate Magazine
The way some men harass women, objectify women, treat them as lust objections and belittle them through every-day actions... I am very glad that women the world over are uniting and are speaking out against mistreatment of women by men because as the hash-tag so rightly states, it really does happen to All Women. Myself included, which is why I will be sharing some of my own experiences with men who simply don't seem to understand or care how their actions impact others. It is time to speak out.