#sf525

(via I'm Not Just Pretty For An Indian Girl)

Please read this. My ethnicity is a huge part of my identity, but I am also so much more than it. I am beautiful because of who I am, not because of your fetishes.

April 12, 2016.

I was naive, I thought Equal Pay Day meant that men and women would be paid the same amount on that day. No, no. The reality is much worse.

Equal Pay Day symbolizes how far women have to work in the new year to catch up to what men earned during the previous calendar year. For example, if a man earned X from January 1, 2015, to December 31, 2015, a woman would have to work from January 1, 2015 to April 12, 2016 in order to make the same amount X.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the Women BUILD summit named “Women at the Intersection of Business and Technology”. The keynote speaker was Tawana Murphy Burnett, who works for the global marketing department at Facebook. She spoke for half an hour on the importance of social media in our lives and how Facebook has affected women across the globe.

Ms. Burnett also brought up the important question: what would you do if you weren't afraid? She spoke of it in a business sense, like asking for twice your salary and going for interviews to learn if not to get the job. However, I related it more to equality: if I wasn't afraid, I would call out people for discriminating on gender, race, age, sexuality, etc. This would make our world realize our biases and work to fix them.

Another important section of the summit was the panelists and the questions that they were asked. One of the questions that was raised was what is the biggest challenge for women in business in the future. The answers given by the different panelists, who were all women in the field of business and in positions of leadership, all referred to uniqueness. For example, one solution was to differentiate yourself, while another spoke of the fact that we can leverage each other's opportunities

When I first entered Voorhees Chapel yesterday, I was apprehensive: I felt that listening to a speaker discuss Women in Engineering wouldn’t help me because I am not in that field. Happily, though, I enjoyed listening to Bobbie Ridgely speak about her experiences in the workforce, as I felt this was the way she could connect to more girls in the audience.

There were several lessons that I learned from Ms. Ridgely yesterday. One was to “don’t ever change” your perspectives on life, to hold strong to who you are and what you believe in. Another consisted of tips for success: community service and persistence pay off! This touched me personally as I’ve always enjoyed engaging in the community, so it was nice to see that Ms. Ridgely has done official work with an organization in that field.

As a marketing major, I know it is difficult to get a job, thus I appreciated the career ‘hacks’ that Ms. Ridgely provided us with during her speech. Networking, mentoring, putting yourself out there were all attributes that I found that I needed to incorporate more of in my life.

Finally, the most empowering phrases I learned from Ms. Ridgely yesterday were “Make decisions that affect yourself”, “Don’t care about the fact that you’re a woman, do it anyways”, and “Keep doing what you were doing until you finish it.” The last ties into her idea of grit and how important that is to succeed.

I can’t even begin to comprehend the sexism behind these products. This is by far the best list of gendered products for this class!!!

Monterey Jill? Really? Gendering CHEESE??? It’s portrayed as low-fat Monterey Jack with a female cow on the front.

I AM SO FUCKING MAD AT THIS, BUT IT’S ALSO HELLA HILARIOUS.

The weekend before spring break, I attended Rutgers University’s annual leadership conference: The Mark Conference! It was a great experience and I learned a lot from it; the speakers were so inspiring and gave me new insights and ideas on how to approach life. However, the speaker who stood out the most to me was Professor Ruha Benjamin (in the departments of Sociology and African American Studies) from Princeton University. Her presentation centered around the topic of how we misdiagnose problems in our society.

One of the most compelling ideas she shared with the audience was about inequality, and she used the metaphor of ‘code switching’. Code switching occurs when a person alternates between two or more languages within the context of a single conversation (according to Wikipedia). However, Professor Benjamin used code switching as a symbol of “the game of life”.

Her key sentence for this point was that “Not all social codes are the same or created equal.” She was referring to the fact that women use very different social codes when in conversations with men; their body language becomes docile and they’re more apologetic. They are less assertive and thus appear less powerful. Her concise depiction of what it meant to be a woman and the ‘code’ we use appealed to me because it’s so applicable to all of us; we must strive to change that so that women are treated as men’s equals!

Okay, yes, maybe I am a little bit addicted to Buzzfeed, but this compilation of posts simply filled me with awe. It’s amazing how these nameless women on the Internet reply to posts so perfectly.

Here’s my short analysis of some of the posts:

Number 3 scared me... I saw it as fearful before I realized that it meant we were supposed to be sexy. When I first read it, I thought it meant you were supposed to walk fast but not look afraid; only after reading the comments did I realize you were supposed to ‘swing your hips’ and walk seductively so you could attract the attention of men.

Number 6... basically every conversation about what it means to be a woman, and the power that we currently lack as compared to men. I love the bow metaphor, because it makes it clear that power does not go both ways.

Number 9: it’s awesome to see the official Star Wars account prove women don’t have to look sexy and feminine in order to be in a movie! A clear, concise shutdown of someone who tried to sexualize women as portrayed by media, even though this is probably one of the few examples that treat women like human beings and not objects designed for male pleasure (going against the male gaze).

Number 10 is about women’s fashion and how some people expect them to look good so society expects them, but women would rather dress for themselves because they are strong individuals.

Number 15 related to our class discussion about cisgender, assigning gender and gender stereotypes to babies before they are even able to identify themselves or learn from their environments.

The music artist in this video is Nicki Minaj, an African-American female rapper (I am pointing out her race and gender to understand why she is so objectified). Both African-Americans and females are mistreated by the white male population. 

In this video, Minaj mocks the populace by using sexual and racial language such as “p*ssy”, “n*gga”, and “*ss”. These show that she is perfectly aware of how she is treated by the media and that she is unafraid from standing out. She also uses negative language to reflect the insults that she and so many others like her have heard. She is standing against the sexualization and fetishization of African-American women.

All three gazes are used in this music video. The gaze of the camera lingers on different parts of Minaj’s body; the gaze of the male actors rests solely upon Minaj; and the spectator is focused upon Minaj herself for the duration of the video. Specifically, the white gaze and the male gaze are the most obvious.

Fragmentation is used when the camera focuses on only certain parts of her body, for example her legs and her breasts. This made me extremely uncomfortable when watching the video but that is what Minaj was aiming to show - her discomfort and utter disgust at being treated that way.

The relationships between the characters are clear. Nicki Minaj is solely a performer, while the men (and viewers of the video) construct her audience. By lingering on different parts of her body, the camera essentially breaks Minaj down from a human being with ideas and an identity into pieces of meat meant for viewing pleasure. Frankly, it disgusts me that men watch this for their own sexual pleasure - Nicki has the freedom to wear and move as she wants, but the men shouldn’t objectify her.