It’s International Womens Day! A day to celebrate brilliant women, to acknowledge the massive debt our culture owes to the many millions of women who battled uphill to get past massive sexism and inequality to shape the world we live in. To give thanks for the mothers and sisters and wives and girlfriends, friends and colleagues who teach us and with whom we partner in building lives, culture, society, friendships, homes, communities…
But it’s also a day of reflection, a day of lament, a day to acknowledge that pretty much none of us dudes do enough to correct the imbalance, that we are want to fall back on tropes about slow progress or even to use clever blogposts and Facebook statuses to hide our inactivity behind. It’s WAY, WAY easier to write this than it is to call out some dickhead at work telling sexist jokes, to make a fuss about those situations where women are constantly overlooked, to check our language for times when we put appearance first in the list of things we compliment a woman for, as though they need to earn the right to be complimented on their work by looking the part first.
It’s always easier to sound like a feminist than to act like one. To write inspirational bullshit on the Internet than to get off my arse and do my fair share of the housework, to daily resensitise myself to the systems that enable my male privilege… So don’t take this as a statement of success, but an admission that I’m not where I should be. And neither are you, dudes. No sackcloth and ashes, just take some time to fix some things, OK?
And here, to celebrate the day, is some incredible music by women I’m inspired by and aspire to be like. Geniuses all: