international women's day
read the globe today ... saw this interesting column on international women's day. enjoy.
Dear mothers and sisters
By PAUL KNOX
Friday, March 8, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A15
Tonight is women-only night in Bogota, the capital of strife-racked Colombia. For the second year in a row, the city is marking International Women's Day by asking men to stay at home between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. Last year, women went out and had a ball at bars and concerts. Men caught roaming the streets without a good excuse were ridiculed. The city's eccentric mayor, Antanas Mockus, sought to show how gender-specific petty crime is, and he got what he wanted: Murder and traffic-accident rates dropped by 80 per cent.
Outside North America, they make more of a fuss over March 8 than we do. In Russia, it's been described as a cross between Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Women get chocolates. It's also a day off and, this year, that means a long weekend. A journalist from The Sunday Telegraph of London found a hard-working subway attendant who said March is the only day of the year that she gets breakfast in bed. The Moscow Times Web site carried a picture of a police officer with a huge bouquet of flowers "to give to the ladies in his life."
In his March 8 message, Russian President Vladimir Putin decried what he described as a wave of child neglect. He linked it to a decline in family values. Mr. Putin and George W. Bush are sounding more alike every day, but at least the Russian President was hipper than Imomali Rakhmonov, his counterpart in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. Here's part of Mr. Rahmonov's message:
"Dear mothers and sisters, I sincerely congratulate you on the people's favourite holiday, International Women's Day, which we joyously celebrate with the approach of the spring every year. Women and spring portray each other. Spring enlivens the nature whereas women and mothers give life to mankind."
Sounds quaint to a North American, but not as quaint as it should. Turn on the television and watch a few commercials -- generally a good barometer of where a society's at.
You see tough women, sure, and plenty of them at work. Then you see them in the kitchen, and you see them with the kids, still intellectually challenged after all these years. For some reason, Wonder Bread thinks watching a woman who can't tell her kids what riboflavin is will persuade us to buy their loaves. (Maybe, just maybe, in Tajikistan.)
As for the television male, he isn't big and strong, but he generally doesn't get to be all that bright, either. On a good day, he can toast a Pop-Tart without burning down the house. But cars and team sports are still the buttons he wants pushed. And he still has the emotional agility of a tree trunk.
A generation ago, dreaming of radical change wasn't regarded as laughable pretension or illegitimate hubris. It seemed reasonable to imagine a time where relations between the sexes were no longer governed by ignorant assumptions about tastes and desires. It seemed plausible to think of a world where success didn't require embracing a male-imaged ethos of drive and growth.
Maybe some day, it will seem so again. Meanwhile, there's a real world to fix. There's mass rape in wartime, genital mutilation, domestic abuse, the feminization of poverty, the denial of education and opportunity to girls. There are a hundred other outrages. One of the worst is how often we all have to be clubbed over the head and reminded that whatever social or political or cultural development we are taking part in, or talking or writing about, we ought to think from the top about its impact on women and girls.
Just getting that right would be real, even radical, change.