Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hey Dames! Guess who's poorly again!
Meee!
You can probably hear it a little bit.
I wasn't actually going to do a video
but then I took a little look on the International Womens Day site
Just out of curiosity 'cause this week is supposed to be International Womens day week
'cause it's International Womens day on the 8th. I'm gonna say International Women's Day one more time.
Yeah.
I think the irony is it seems like the entire event has nothing to do with internationality at all
From the looks of it, it looks like it's all about Western white women getting better jobs
"Better" jobs.
Jobs with more power that enforce this kind of
patriarchal , capitalist structure and hierarchy.
Um, yeah, so not so happy about that.
Especially 'cause there was this, er, little link -
well, it was quite a big link in the sidebar
er, of "Where Women Want To Work"
And I thought maybe it would be, y'know, a little kind of
geographical thing. Y'know, women want to work in places where they don't suffer *** harrassment.
Where they get paid a fair wage.
Where they don't have to see their children indentured, er, once they are too old or weak or ill to work.
Er, women would like to work in places where they don't have to fear for their lives.
I thought it was gonna be something like that.
'Cause, y'know, that happens a lot in the world.
Women would like to work in places where they get a pension scheme.
Where they get paid a living wage.
Y'know, just pretty simple little things but no.
It was companies like E.On and BP and BAE Systems.
[disbelieving laugh] some of the most corrupt and oppressive businesses on the face of the planet.
Like, these companies make their money from oppressing and destroying peoples lives.
[Sarcastically] How very international of them.
I'm really frustrated because I was expecting better.
Er, I was expecting that on a site which claims to be for an international holiday
That they would have a history that went outside of the kind of American/English suffragette movement.
I thought that it would kind of go a little bit beyond, y'know
"Oh, as another thing, lets just give some money to poor countries because that will help other women"
I thought it would really go beyond this idea that our primary objective as white feminists
is to get into boardrooms.
Erm, I've been reading a lot of Angela Davis recently [laughs]
And maybe that's why I'm so angry about this, erm
For anyone who doesn't know, she's a marxist feminist, erm,
Black marxist feminist who wrote quite a lot in the eighties, er,
under Reaganism. She writes some brilliant things.
And she was talking about how you can see the feminist movement
and I mean the *entire* feminist movement, not just, y'know
the white hierarchy bit.
But she says that you can see it like a pyrimid
and at the very bottom you have the most oppressed people
so you have black women, latina women, asian women
you have working class women
so it kind of goes up
so then you've got middle class women
and then at the very top you've got, like, upper-middle class, white women
who are fighting for these things like better boardroom positions
And she says that every single time someone at the top of the hierarchy kind of gets a "win" for feminism
That only shifts up that tiny little section at the top.
It doesn't do anything for the women at the bottom.
But when they women at the bottom of the pyrimid achieve something
workers rights, non workers rights, benefits, that sort of thing
er, that makes it better for everyone on the pyrimid
The entire pyrimid structure goes up
and so I think if we're going to be talking about international womens day
we can't just be focussing right at the very top.
International women's day shouldn't be a day where we take all of the things that Western, wealthy women
are concerned about and then tag charity onto the side of it
That's not helping our sisters around the world.
That's not helping anyone
That's just having an inflated sense of purpose and ego in society.
And I don't want a part of it.
Apologies because this has been super ranty, erm
but that's because I didn't have a script or anything, erm, because I was poorly
and I was only expecting, like to do a little two minute thing
and this is probably going to be a lot longer than that.
And I hope that on the 8th feminists get the recognition that they deserve
and that people think about women's issues
it's certainly not going to happen through a site which encourages
women to go for jobs in companies that exploit people.
[blows kiss and waves]
Oh, I probably shouldn't blow kisses 'cause then you'll get my cold!
That would be awful.
[gurns] grim.
Erm, yeah, anyway
see ya, see ya next week. [salutes] Bye Dames.