This post might very well lose me friends. But I just calls 'em like I sees 'em, and this isn't something I take lightly.
I have never backed down from the idea that I am a feminist -- I'm kind of one of those people of the belief that if you or someone you care about identifies as a woman, than you have no right or sense to not support things that would help make the lives of women everywhere better.
But maybe I haven't been clear on my views towards those people who calls themselves activists who are, in reality, looking for something to complain about. I came across this tumblog that literally blasted everything from meat eaters to a
child abuse awareness campaign. The campaign in question won the Gold Lion award at Cannes and depicts the cycle of child abuse, showing each child being abused and eventually growing into their abuser. Actually, you can see them here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/powerful-child-abuse-ads. And why was she targeting this campaign? Because the verbal abuse image depicts a woman yelling at her children.
She said the campaign disgusted her -- not the acts portrayed as a part of it -- but the fact that it only depicted a woman yelling, which she thought fueled the "nagging" stereotypes about women. Statistically, it might have made sense to make the abusers in all three images men (each image represented a form of domestic abuse -- sexual, physical, and verbal) because an overwhelming percentage of abuse is male-dominated, but doing so would have been unfair to both men and women because, due to the structure of the campaign, it would eliminate the possibility of women as perpetrators or victims, and they do, in fact, fill both roles, more often than we'd like to believe. And, unfortunately, women are far more likely to perpetrate verbal abuse than any other kind of domestic abuse -- and would it really have been better for the global image of women to have the only woman in the campaign be a sexual predator or a violent monster? Or simply to put a woman as a passive victim?
This is just one case, among many, I'm afraid, where people get so caught up in the politics of activism that they forget what's actually important. This campaign
should disgust you, but not for it's content. What it depicts, and the fact that child abuse is still a prevalent issue in America, one that's still not talked about because it's taboo, which creates a self-perpetuating cycle of violence as children who feel mistreated grow up to mistreat others. Your need to be confrontational, to take an issue with everyone just so you have something to say -- has made you blind to the real issue, which makes you unable to do anything to stop it.
So until you start complaining about the real issues and stop letting the small details distract you from the problem at hand, I am still going to take issue with the way you handle things like this. Your loss of perspective is terrifying.
(infinitesimally) yours,
Rachel Leigh
