When you visit your great grandparents during Christmas, you might be expecting some sort of gender prejudice. Yet you would never want to be the one enforcing such values. Well, despite thinking of myself as someone progressive, I still found myself in the kitchen after the Christmas dinner. I hadn’t made a conscious choice to go there, but there I was, elbows deep in dishwater with my other girl cousins. Meanwhile my boy cousins were playing cards.
I’ve been babysitting a ten-year-old boy for a couple of years now. Out of the blue, he said to me, “you know, you aren’t the prettiest girl but at least you run fast like a boy”. I was stunned, contemplating on whether to make this a learning experience or let it go. In the end, I just let it go while replying to him that I am, in fact, a fast runner.
Both of these incidents involved completely different people and circumstances. But the result was the same, I wound up reinforcing the misogynistic ideals I despise. There are no excuses, whether it was because of negligence or pure laziness, in both cases I just let it slide, hoping the problem magically fixes itself. It’s no wonder that gender issues linger when they keep on being swept under the rug.
Such complacency will no longer be tolerated. While I might be an absolute menace to the germs on the dishes and I may run faster than Usain Bolt, I’d still like to play cards and be called pretty. We shouldn’t be subjected to such gender biases any longer. So, my fellow ladies, shall we make a stand?