Meeting of the Parliament 05 December 2024
Like many feminists of a certain age, I am tired of fighting a system that is so ingrained with inequality that it feels immovable and intransigent. It is as if the glass ceiling is becoming ever more opaque and could soon become the cement ceiling, which means that smashing the patriarchy is that much harder—a task so difficult that it feels impossible—and can make the yearly 16 days campaign feel futile. Then I hear the voices of our young women—my 16-year-old daughter and thousands like her—who raise their fists and their voices, shouting from the rooftops that what is happening today is not okay.
Today, the situation is worse than ever. Our young men are being captured by a pervasive culture of misogynistic hatred, dressed up as the greatest-of-all-time influencers, who peddle a brand of toxic masculinity that is so damaging and all-encompassing that I see clearly that we have gone back in time, to an age in which, daily, women and young girls are subjected openly to hatred in all spheres of their lives.
We need to ask ourselves: how did we get here? How did we empower the likes of Andrew Tate to poison the discourse so insidiously that he has not only taken too many young men with him but succeeded in helping to convince too many young women that feminism and the quest for real equality are damaging to society? How is it that we have left social media unbridled to the extent that we are only a click away from encountering extreme violent pornography that glorifies and normalises strangulation—meaning that our young people are at risk of becoming desensitised to normal, healthy relationships?
Many years ago, as a teenager, I railed against the use of women’s bodies to sell products, due to the damage that it did to women as a whole. Today, the internet age that we live in is dominated by influencers and those who seek to make money in any way possible. My teenage plight seems tame in comparison with the horrors that our young folk navigate every day.