The new crown epidemic, a new nightmare for women
Last month, UN Women released global data showing that women’s withdrawal from the labor force and responsibility for household care both increased dramatically under the impact of the global new crown epidemic and the recession (women work more than three times as many hours without pay as men). Even when the economy eased a bit later, they were not given the opportunity to return to the workplace and remained trapped in the home. It’s safe to say that women’s rights and treatment globally are bearing the brunt of this oncoming epidemic, and that “everything we’ve worked for in the last 25 years could be lost in a year.” It’s a nightmare exclusively for women, both in the workplace and at home.
Women globally face huge gender inequalities in the workplace. Despite the fact that in 2019, nine departments jointly issued a notice explicitly prohibiting companies from discriminating against women in hiring, such a campaign against gender discrimination in the workplace is still “unfinished”. The gender gap in our labor force participation rate has “increased from 9.4 percentage points in 1990 to 14.1 percentage points in 2020. The situation of female medical and nursing workers, who are trapped in the lack of job security under the epidemic, has been repeatedly and truly presented before our eyes. At a press conference held on March 8, the health and Welfare Commission said that the proportion of female medical workers among the medical teams supporting Wuhan and Hubei was as high as 2/3. Even on the construction sites of Mount Vulcan Leishen, there were thousands of them mixing cement and delivering supplies …… Whether it was hospital sites or community homes, women’s The strength of women is indispensable in the fight against the epidemic. However, physiological hygiene products were not included in the unified procurement of essential materials and could not use the special green channel, making the female workers on the front line “unable to change sanitary napkins, and blood flowed onto the protective clothing”. What’s even more infuriating is that after the so-called “Most Beautiful Adversary” went on air, they were intentionally removed from the list and turned into “we are all male comrades who signed up for this, is it also a female comrade out of the ah”. Thankfully, the crowd’s eye is discerning. The play was scolded on the hot search as soon as it started, and netizens pointed out its reckless disregard for the facts and its reckless disparagement of women’s labor contributions in the workplace. The whole drama is a farce, but it is also a microcosm of society’s collective “gender blindness” that ignores women’s rights.
The huge family burden also aggravates the discrimination and prejudice women suffer in the workplace. The profit-maximizing capitalist mode of production was once thought to be effective in breaking down gender inequality in the patriarchal system by impacting the family system, especially the working-class family. But as we see more and more women caught in the burning pull of both family and work, it is clear that patriarchy and capitalism are highly aligned in their oppression and exploitation of women: in the global market system, women are required to play the role of not only the cheapest producer, but also the cheapest consumer. The patriarchy that sustains male dominance not only effectively helps capitalism achieve this goal, but also maintains the constant reproduction of cheap labor for it.
Thus, the family, with private ownership at its core, becomes the breeding ground that together nourishes patriarchy and capitalism, and the blood and flesh of women become its sustenance. “They spend 12.5 billion hours on cooking, caring for children and the elderly. Unpaid care work is the ‘invisible engine’ that keeps the wheels of our economy and business society running; then the real driving force behind it – those women – have little time for education, struggle to make a decent living, or have no say in the society in which they live. And then the real driving force behind it – the women who have little time to get an education, struggle to make a decent living, or have no say in the society they live in – are trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder,” Oxfam said in a report released earlier this year. The disproportionate amount of family care work that falls on women’s shoulders reduces their time in paid work and excludes them from the formal labor market. Because of the so-called dichotomy between the public and private spheres, any form of domestic work imprisoned in the private sphere of the “family” is selectively ignored, not to mention “valued”. This is despite the fact that Oxfam calculates that the annual monetary value of women’s unpaid care work worldwide is at least $10.8 trillion. Under the umbrella of the patriarchal “family,” this $10.8 trillion, which would have been the cost to capitalists, is converted into lucrative profits. That is why it is said that the free domestic work performed by women is both an important cause of female poverty and an important part of capital accumulation. Patriarchy and capitalism each take what they want and conspire to create a situation in which women are oppressed and exploited.
Say no to power erosion of rights, we are all your friends
It’s zero degrees in Beijing at the end of 2020. Although six years have passed since the summer when host Zhu Jun put his hand up String’s skirt, String has chosen to continue to speak out for accountability and has not backed down during those six years. Finally, she waited for the trial of Zhu Jun’s sexual harassment case. Even though Zhu Jun still didn’t show up, there were thousands of String’s friends at the scene.
“Who are String’s friends?” “We all are.”
Sexual assault is the erosion of power over power. Liu Qiangdong said, “You can be Wendi Deng”; Zhu Jun said, “I can give you a chance to enter the stage”; Yao Shunxi, a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said, “You don’t want to take my graduate exams if you don’t drink.” The system gives a certain part of the people power, the lack of supervision of power makes people reckless, reckless. String said that even if she can’t win her case, this is still a record of the law.
Sexual assault and harassment are written into the law and the development of feminism is inseparable.
The term “sexual harassment” was coined in the 1970s when a group of North American women were discussing how often female employees had been discouraged from submitting to sexual advances by their male superiors at work. Subsequently, Professor MacKinnon published Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), which clearly defined sexual harassment as the oppression of women by men in a patriarchal structure. Sexual harassment is not only the unwilling acceptance of sexual advances, innuendoes and actions by one partner, but also a form of coercion and coercion under the power structure. Who has more social resources and feels free to invade his/her body as he/she pleases? And who has almost nothing but his/her own body and has to struggle to defend his/her last bit of dignity?
If the core of the law is to guarantee equality for all, then first and foremost it has to protect structurally disadvantaged groups from having their rights trampled upon. In retrospect, sexual harassment was first raised in 1995; it was first included in the law in 1998; and the first lawsuit was reported in the press in 2001. Ms. Tong, who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit that year, complained that her supervisor had sexually harassed her in the workplace for six or seven years. The court found that there was a lack of evidence and ruled against Ms. Tong. Since then, sexual harassment cases have appeared in front of the public and in court, but the vast majority of them have ended with the plaintiff (i.e., the person who was sexually harassed) losing the case.
As of today, 2020 is coming to an end, and String’s case is not yet over. How much has our status quo changed? We have repeatedly sought an institutional public good. But what do we wait for? It is the logic of “immortal jumping” that explains the coercion and oppression of power under the patriarchy as “power and sex trade”; it is the result of the bone age test of the star that shows that she “lied” about her age. “And let Bao Yuming get away with sexual assault. …… The basis of power exchange is the great inequality of power, and the law should be the means to ensure that the inequality of power does not breed violence. The reality, however, is the opposite, which is chilling.
What kind of thoughts made Ram’s ex-husband vent his frustrations by throwing gasoline on Ram even after the divorce? The starting point of many domestic violence cases is “love”, but this so-called love is wrapped in the total objectification of one’s significant other. Only when a person is treated as an object, the mentality of domination and punishment is rationalized. A person, however, cannot be completely possessed. Unfortunately, our culture continues to glorify this “dominance”. Liu Qiangdong, Zhu Jun and Ram’s husband are all patriarchal spokespersons. Based on gender and economic dominance, they treat the woman in front of them as an object at their disposal from the very beginning. If the object belongs to them but does not obey them, they will try to retaliate and destroy her as a punishment. At this point, at the extreme end of the objectification scale, is to be completely objectified slaves. Women, however, have never been slaves.
Internet feminism: female fist feminism does not cut the seat
PAPI sauce published her postpartum photos and statement online. It was originally a mother’s day microblog, but I didn’t expect it to provoke a wave of criticism from netizens about “taking her husband’s name”. Some netizens believe that PAPI, as one of the most successful top-stream netizens in China, plays the card of an independent and successful woman, but in the end, she still has to be a “wedding donkey” or a “fetus”: working for her family like a donkey and being a reproductive tool for the male family.
In response to these feminists who use “abusive terms” to describe men and women who have entered the traditional marriage framework, netizens have returned the favor by calling these people “feminist”: going off the deep end, overemphasizing women’s interests and promoting gender antagonism. This has caused many “high-profile” feminists and “female boxers” to cut their seats, such as an article on Tiger Online that even quoted Chizuko Ueno’s “Misogyny” to say that this group of “female boxers” The real “misogynists” are the ones who “call (unmarried) themselves women, while all other women are ‘other’, and even expel them from their female identity and replace them with animal images and vessels. “
Tan Weiwei’s “Xiaojuan”, released at the end of the year, is majestic. The sobbing chorus enumerates the deep-rooted misogyny in Chinese: “God rape, demon, whore, whoring, concubine, prostitute, slave, play, greed, sycophant, delusion, amusement, suspicion, hindrance, jealousy. While the “abuse” of women that has been going on for years has never been questioned, the term “female fist” that has emerged in recent years with the rise of women’s consciousness has been divided and questioned from the very beginning. The “female fist” is not misogynistic, but it is misogynistic to use seemingly scientific discourse to suppress the power of these reflections on women’s status. Perhaps all anger has an irrational form, and what we need to do is not to cut seats, but to understand such anger, to sort it out into a sobriety, and then to gather it into a united force.
Women’s marriage and childbearing have always been at the heart of feminism.
Marx and Engels long pointed to the family as the institution that entrenches private ownership and places women in reproduction; and Firestone, a representative of radical feminists, questioned in his book The Dialectic of Sexuality that women could not be truly emancipated if the burden of procreation was to remain with them. The seemingly “reasonable” practice of taking one’s father’s name, living under one’s husband, and being “male dominated and female dominated” is a way to maintain and consolidate a patriarchal society. But often the feminist thinking that is widely disseminated on the Internet tends to fall into a dilemma: educated Internet users may think that if a woman is successful enough, she can escape from patriarchal domination, be exempted from reproductive labor, and live an “independent” and “free” life. independent” and “free to do as she pleases”.
But such “independence” is more or less a kind of outsourcing of reproductive labor with money. The targets of outsourcing are often other women who need money more, such as cleaning aunts and surrogate mothers in various gray areas. Secondly, the so-called “do whatever you want” life imagination is just a replica of the “domineering president”, the essence is still: “Whoever has the power, can do whatever they want, and crush people who are more powerless than themselves “. Feminists seek a world where the weak can live well. No woman can break a world that allows “power to erode power” because of her individual success.
A crack made by a “sanitary napkin” may let in light
No one expected that a small piece of “sanitary napkin” would run through the whole year of 2020: from the beginning of the year when people organized themselves to send physiological sanitary products to female medical nurses fighting the epidemic, to the issue of menstrual poverty in September when online shopping platforms sold bulk sanitary napkins, to the end of the year when sanitary napkin boxes swept the country in November. But it’s no surprise, after all, this little sanitary napkin even also runs through most of every woman’s life.
“None of us will see gender parity in our lifetimes, and nor likely will many of our children.”), which is the beginning of the Global Gender Gap Report 2020. Pessimistic and heavy. The report estimates that the time needed to completely eliminate gender inequalities in health, education, and the workplace is 99.5 years. In the article “Menstrual blood is not blue”, which recalls the “Sanitary Napkin Support Box Initiative”, the Majority wrote, “It is up to you and me to create a future for women, one hard and steady step at a time, to step out into a brighter future, even if regression is accelerating at this moment. “, “not blind optimism, nor foolishness, just still want to believe that you and I in, power in.”
Because of that, we see that a piece of sanitary napkin actually smashed out of the cracks, so that the dark future has some bright light. From the beginning to the end of the year, the sanitary napkin action is a qualitative change from support to self-help, its scope gradually becomes broader, across industries and regions; the topic also evolves from focusing on women’s biological needs, to focusing on women’s right to speak in public space and attacking the patriarchy and capitalist system’s slaughter of women. The action shows us the possibility of change. Focusing on such a “sanitary napkin box” action, it is a way to dispel the ignorance and shame of “menstruation” in the public space; at the same time, it is also a way to address the so-called “sanitary napkin” as a “woman’s problem”. At the same time, it is also a correction of the so-called “sanitary napkin” as a “woman’s problem”. Because this is a serious “social problem”, a problem of the collective compression of women’s space and deprivation of resources in a “gender-blind” society.
Menstrual shame goes hand in hand with menstrual poverty, and in 2019, the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics stated that 500 million women worldwide live in menstrual poverty. Not being able to afford to use sanitary napkins is such abject poverty. According to Zhang Ruwei, secretary general of the Social Welfare Foundation’s Love Little Girl Foundation, girls facing menstruation account for 10 percent of the 40 million children in poverty, and it is estimated that about 4 million girls of menstrual age face “menstrual poverty. The number of women suffering from menstrual poverty in second- and third-tier cities and remote rural areas is not known. This is because this social problem has long gone unnoticed.
Today, the “Sanitary Napkin Support Box” initiative has made countless women come forward, and breaking the shame of menstruation has become the slogan of our action. Then the question arises, what happens after we stand up? What is our next step? Where do we go from here? There is no shortage of suppression at the end of the campaign, with attempts to stop the campaign in the name of “gender dichotomy”; there are also those who are discouraged to see that the sanitary napkins in the support box are not coming out. The continuation of the action seems a bit unclear at this moment. Perhaps we can get some direction from the experience of workers’ actions: “The paradox of reality tells us that if we rely on spontaneous workers’ actions in one factory or one industry, the results obtained by workers are often not consolidated. Workers have to fight at a higher level (legislative, political) if they want to keep the benefits they have gained”. Last month, the passage of legislation in Scotland to eliminate menstrual poverty, the Free Supply of Physiological Products Act, ushered in cheers mixed with envy and a hint of despondency. If eliminating menstrual shame was our first step, eliminating menstrual poverty could perhaps be our next. Tax cuts, tax exemptions, and freebies, the road ahead is long, but collective strength cannot be dispersed. Standing up for ourselves is the first step, but it is never the last. We will all, hand in hand, walk on.
Recommended Books.
The Dialectic of Sexuality
Rice Rabbit in China (Thought 38)
The Second Shift: The Unfinished Business of the Gender Revolution
Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
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