Let's Talk Misogyny

Do you know what should be discussed but very rarely is? The way women’s interests and skills are consistently devalued in our culture. It is everywhere; people work so hard to undermine a woman’s interests or a woman’s skill set, or a woman’s profession, or any number of things that can fall into the category of “feminine”. I don’t think it’s any secret that there are double standards when it comes to men and women; be it at work, where at best, according to CNN women make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes (and that’s at best, where white women stand – it becomes worse when we look at the even larger gender pay gap that women of colour experience), or even in how seriously they are taken in day-to-day life.

We can start by looking at the seemingly inconsequential way this dismissiveness presents itself. And that starts with teenage girls and the things they like. If you were to take all the jokes, and flippant remarks about teenage girls, you would get an image of how society sees them; trivial, silly, superficial, more focused on pumpkin spice lattes, and the latest boyband then anything of any real importance. Now, there’s a couple of things to unpack from that. First of all, this is a totally inaccurate picture of today's generation of teenage girls who include passionate activists, but also, we should acknowledge that there is no real reason that society should have such a vehement reaction to said lattes or boybands (the Jonas Brothers are back together and people are excited, what’s so wrong with that), other than that the primary audience are teenage girls. These things, which draw a large audience from women often also draw the same amount of ridicule from society. All the jokes may seem harmless, but if you take a closer look at what is continuously mocked, a correlation becomes apparent: why are Ugg boots, and yoga such easy targets? Why do they become jokes? Easy, because they are associated with women, and our culture works to systemically shut them down.

It's not only girls’ interests that are mocked and labelled inconsequential; the way women talk is too. Have you ever heard someone tell you that if you want to be heard out, you need to speak up, and sound more authoritative? It’s fairly simple if damaging logic at play here: act more masculine and you’re more likely to be listened to, and to get what you want. But rather than encouraging women to subscribe to and emulate men – something that doesn’t actually work, as those women tend to be labelled difficult, or any number of derogatory terms, should we not instead encourage people to take women more seriously as they are? Why are women being told that the only possible way to be taken seriously is to be more like the men around them?

The same issues appear in the work environment as well – besides the gender wage gap for men and women in the same position, work that is usually considered a woman’s job (generally, care positions such as teaching or nursing), is consistently devalued. Recently, according to Bustle, the number of male nurses has risen significantly. Alongside that, so did the annual pay of nurses. Computer programming, part of the STEM field used to be a primarily female position, and was considered a low-paying job; now, men dominate the field and it is considered a relatively important job. On the flipside, when women begin to move into a field, it’s value decreases: it’s not originally a low-paying job, but employers seem to value it less when women are doing the work. It is easy to see, looking at these trends that when it comes to work, people tend not to find value in it, until men take it on themselves.

It’s time to examine the subtle, and not so subtle misogynistic behaviours that permeate our society. The takeaway here, I hope is that just because 56 per cent of men believe sexism is over, and overt misogynistic acts are no longer widely acceptable (though not entirely punishable either), does not mean that sexism is not still persistent in our society. Acts of microaggressions and the devaluation of the work that women do are different, more subtle ways in which misogyny still affects our culture.