Ontario Feminist Blogs

Neckties I mean.

As some of you may know one of my friends and I started what we call NeckTie Tuesday. Basically the premise is that on Tuesdays you wear a necktie to question the gendered (and classed) representation of it.

Necktie Tuesday was started because of a coincidence. Both my friend and I decided to wear a tie on the same day. So then we decided that through ties and looking awesome we could start a feminist revolution. Of course we were really only expecting a total of 7 people to join. To our surprise we have over 30 members on our Facebook group. Not many but it’s a start.

The thing that I noticed about my friend and I is that we tend to be much more confident while wearing ties. Like having that thing around our neck makes us a little more likely to say what we are thinking. It actually gives me so much confidence that I have been wearing them to my exams.

So this raised the question. Why? Why does it give us this confidence? What about that piece of fabric is powerful?

For me ties have always been a gendered thing. Only men wore ties. Women were to wear dresses (much to my mother’s dislike I refuse to do that anymore). When I think about ties I generally end up thinking about powerful, rich, white men who get to do or say whatever they want to. So to me by putting on a tie it’s like I get to indulge in a little bit of the power and confidence not normally afforded to me.

Maybe it just ends up gendering the tie even more.

But in the end I think that even when I take off the tie, even if I’m not noticed as much I still get to say what I want to and sometimes I am even heard.

So I got up today and went to check my email. When I did so I saw this:

I thought that this article would be very interesting. My answer to the question “Men or Women?” was automatically women. I thought it might be talking about abortion of female babies, feminicide in export processing zones like those in Northern Mexico, or maybe even violence against women in general.

I was wrong. When I clicked the link up came a video from Fox News discussing how males are the disappearing “gender”.

I put gender in quotes because sex and gender are different things. The easiest way to describe the difference is that sex is between the legs and gender is between the ears.

The titles at the bottom said things like:

Common Chemicals Feminizing Entire Male Gender

Study: Male Humans and Animals Vanishing due to chemical exposure

Then there was a selection of pictures entitled: Male Gender in Danger?

Not sure If you can see it but yes all of them are 'wearing' lipstick

As pointed out all of the pictures are wearing lipstick. Because what is the first thing feminized males do run to the local Shoppers Drugmart and purchase lipstick, especially when they are ferocious wild animals prior to said feminization.

At one point you can hear the other news anchors in the room laughing. The woman who is reporting this tells them that it isn’t funny. The laughing man say “No it’s not funny and you’re a woman. For the men in the room it’s really not funny.” As in “How could you possibly understand? You’re just a woman”.

The study in question found male deer with deformed sex organs, alligators with low testosterone and hermaphrodite polar bears.

But the biggest question was not about what we could do to reduce chemical usage for the good of the environment? This question is asked at the end but not for the good of the environment but to stave off the long term effects on males.

The biggest question was

Drumroll please………

Should men be worried?

The answer:

Male reproduction is very resilient.

Thank you once again for reminding us of that.

Luckily since I’ve started school I have been able to get a new family doctor because I no longer live in the same area as my old family doctor.

She was a piece of work. Her skills when it came to me telling her I was cutting was to tell me to “stop it” like it was just that simple. I often questioned her ablity to be a doctor (not because she was female.

The thing that I disliked most about her was the fact that she used to have a sign in her office basically saying in a round about way that she did not support abortion.

I was just informed by my younger sister today that this doctor now has a more direct sign which tells people not to ask her about abortion or viagara or cialis if you are an unmarried man.

To me not even giving information about a legal procedure should be illegal. I respect the fact that she does not wish to carry out the procedure but she should be legally bound to give *all* available options to a patient whether they conflict with her sensibilities or not.

It is doctors like her that lead to women being so desprite that they will do *anything* to get rid of a baby.

And the whole no erection help for the unmarried thing… I’m pretty sure that they are big boys now and they can make their own decisions. Who is she to dictate who can or cannot have sex?

Now this probably wouldn’t matter as much except that because of the shortage of doctors here the only way for anyone to switch doctors is by moving. That means if you are a pregnant woman or an unmarried man you are stuck with this woman imposing her morals on you.

This just really bugs me and I wish that there was something that I could do about it…..

So I was going to post this a while ago but have been overloaded with school. So I’m doing it now.

Forbes.com recently put out their evaluation of countries and their policies for women. 

The Global Gender Gap Report measures the size of the gender gap—the disparity in opportunities available for men and women—for 130 countries in four critical areas: economic participation and opportunity, health and survival, educational attainment, and political empowerment. A country’s rank is based on the overall score, which is expressed in a percent. The score represents how much of the gender gap the country has been able to close. A score of 100 per cent would represent perfect equality. The majority of the data come from various non-government organizations, such as the International Labor Organization, United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization. – From Yahoo!

Norway was ranked number one for women with a score of 82%.  Finland, Sweden, Iceland and New Zealand ranked 2nd through 5th.

Where is Canada? you may ask. Surely we ranked in the top 25? No. The top 30? No. We earned 31st place. Disgraceful. We got 71%. We even ranked behind the United States who came in 27th.

Our ranking was hurt by poor educational attainment and by low political empowerment. I mean look at our House of Commons right now. Not many female faces there.  

And the Ivory Tower? Still mostly an Old Boys Club.

Education here actually widens the pay gap between women and men. Women with post secondary education earned 75% of what their male peers did. By 2005 it had dropped to 68%. (From the Canadian Labour Congress)

And yet we stand by and watch as the government takes away funding, as it seeks to oppress us. Something must be done. Something can be done. We must make our voices heard from the streets of small towns to the offices of the Prime Minister. We are citizens. Laws need teeth. We should no longer fear demanding our rights from employers. We should have protection, not even special protection, just the protection provided to every citizen by our government.

Stand up. Make yourself be heard. You are not alone.