‘This is finally the age of female power.’
How many times have we heard, or even articulated, this sentence? While we love how those words sound, the toughness of real data brings us abruptly back to the ground: we will have to wait till the year 2133 to eliminate the real economic gap between men and women. And this is said by the World Economic Forum, which I will not dare to judge as feministic, or not.
The role that our society currently see as an appropriate for women is something between ambiguous and surreal. As a girl you HAVE TO be excellent in your professional career and academia, get to a leadership position, be more than a perfect mother and, not to forget, always upload bright and shiny pictures of oneself enjoying life and stretching on Instagram. This post-capitalistic storyline seems a bit scary to me, and can generate quite a lot of frustration.
The female media and blogs are feeding this monster with interviews and reports from the life of real superwomen from the top of the world: Mary is the CEO of the Super-Female Power Company, she always gets up at 4.a.m., eats tofu with chia and goji seeds for breakfast, and runs 20 kilometers. After the whole day of virtual meetings and skype calls, she finally gets to her yoga and meditation class, which allows her to make a wonderful spin within her impossibility and arrive with a perfect make-up to pick-up her kids from school. Great, on the next page you can see a terribly thin female human being, looking as if just before losing her consciousness.
I do not want to fit in the image of ever-present superpower and irresistible strength, although I definitely dare to call myself a successful female. I am absolutely convinced that we, women, have a tremendous potential, intellectually and emotionally, but we also need some safe space to grow and spread our wings freely, without being forced to fullfill a pre-prepared recipe for perfectness. The pressure and the narrow-minded, black-and-white image of what a ‘perfect female’ nowadays should incorporate, created by the society, is far from consistency, and more importantly, far from reality.
Feminism isn’t about making women strong. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength. — G.D. Anderson
I personally do not agree to wait till 2133 to achieve equality between men and woman. This is our job, and our mission, to get there as soon as possible. Data are there, but the real development of the story depends on nobody else but current habitants of this planet.
By the way, none of us will be alive in 2133 and apart from that, I hate tofu.
Originally published at medium.com