Feminism

By Kat


So recently, reading of Ancient Greek myths took an interesting turn, when I read a story about our dear Athenian friend Theseus and the head-over-heels princess of Crete, Ariadne. Now I know how some versions of the story differs, but here is the account I experienced.
After the troupe of Theseus, his comrades and Ariadne slay the Minotaur and escape Crete, they find themselves on an island called Naxos. Theseus then stays awake while the others sleep, because he doesn't love Ariadne in return and doesn't want to take her to Athens. So he and his comrades escape into the night on their ship and the last line of the short account is "Theseus, where are you? Did you leave me behind? Come back and save me!"
Then later, Dionysus the god loves her and saves her where she ascends to heaven and becomes a goddess forever.
What? No! Granted, this is Ancient Greece, but we live in the 21st century. Hell, this girl could have taken a note from Jack Sparrow and fashioned an escape raft out of sea turtles and human hair. In these kind of stories, she might as well have floated over to Athens in her goddess form and took revenge on Theseus in his sleep.
My point is, the portrayal of women in stories seems so dated now, and yet we still are in the midst of a gender split, where feminists are labelled 'feminazis' and stereotypes run rampant in all interactions. And it's not just women, because the stereotypes are everywhere, for both men and women. Emma Watson couldn't have put it better in her 'He For She' speech at the UN Women He For She Launch.

"We don't want to talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that they are. When they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence."

*For the record, feminists might consider a name change to move away from the opinion that all feminists are man-haters. Maybe a name like...the Equalists? (Legend of Korra fans, you with me?) Anyway, I digress.*

We seem to isolate such feminists in society, even when it's likely that the majority of the population believes in equality between genders. There seems to be a false perception of the term, and for what reason? There's perfectly sound logic behind the principles of feminism. We both need to be able to feel strong, as much as we both need to be able to feel vulnerable. Of course there shouldn't be a gender gap- we've progressed as a society enough to move away from all those old ideals.
Yet we see things like the wage gap still occurring, in which a study showed that the exact same resumes with a different name on top ('John' or 'Jane') found that those dubbed John were offered a higher pay.
Some may argue that there's no such thing as a gender gap anymore. And in so many things, we seem to have conquered it. But the problem is that so much stigmatisation and stereotyping still does exist, all across the world and in all forms. We still find education in the developing world discriminates, we still find that people label, and the pre-existing roles for men and women in relationships seems to be socially accepted as right. Fighting for feminism is a losing battle, because there's always going to be that one person who thinks that men are aggressive and disgusting, or that females should never be allowed any sort of control or leadership. But the point is it's getting better, because more and more people are understanding the fundamental concepts of gender equality. And it isn't something to hate on. So it's time to ditch our old perception of feminism, the same way we ditched the role of damsels-in-distress as lazy character work. One day, hopefully gender inequality will seem as crazy as that Greek girl who is whisked away to heaven after she is abandoned by a Minotaur-slaying Athenian warrior.