One billion rising

 

Genital mutilation because women do not need to feel pleasure during sex.

Domestic Violence because a woman should know her place.

Human Trafficking because women are just there for men’s pleasure and to work.

Forced labor because that’s what women are supoose to do while the men lead them.

Forced capture because women don’t need to do anythigjn but have babies, take care of the babies, and take care of their man.

Mysogyny because women are not as good as men

Force wage discrimination because a woman does not worth as much as men.

Sexism because women are seen as mere objects, not living human beings.

Rape because women are only here for a man’s pleasure.

These are the pervasive beliefs around the world towards the female gender.

The same gender that populates more of the world by 2%.

The same gender that creates life.

The same gender that has been creating what every one of us craves since the beginning of time (no matter what else she does) – A Home.

The same gender that gets recognized on poster boards, lips, and screams every time a camera is at a sports event or in a crowd.

The same gender that has fought for equality for their entire existence.

The same gender that has uplifted every single one of us.

Why is this acceptable?  It’s not!

On February 14^th, world wide, billions of men and women will stand up, dance, and speak out and say in one unified voice…

NO! WE will not stand for this violence against women anymore.

Violence against women will end…NOW!

All Violence(verbal, mental, physical, sexual) against women must end!

 

Go to this link.  One billion rising is an organization dedicated to stopping worldwide violence agasisnt women. This organization was created by Eve Ensler, a advocatre against gender violence, writer, poet, and creator of The Vagina Monologues. Do something. Learn the dance, make a video, start a march, a campaign, whatever….we must do something!  Become part of the one billion rising movement.

Factors that influence abuse and inequality – Culture (part 5)

Before you can truly think of society, you have to look closer to home and into someone’s culture.

Before we can even speak about culture we have to speak about what culture is:

Basically, culture is defined as the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group.

In order to identify ourselves as a certain culture, we have to identify with that specific culture.

There’s the

“add country here” culture – i.e. australina culture

“add nationality here” culture – i.e Italian Culture (crosses many borders and countries)

“Add race here” culture – i.e. Black culture

“Add religious affiliation here” – i.e Methodist Culture (Culture created by the doctrines and ideas of a specific religion)

and the list goes on and on.

In each of these cultures, people have these ideas, thoughts, and beliefs that have been handed down through generation and generation and generation. Some of these cultural ideas and ideals have been handed down so long that the modern people don’t even know why they do the things they do…they just do them because everyone else in their culture has taught them to do it.

Then there are people who identify with one culture, but their looks and ways of acting are connected to another culture. For example:

A black Jewish man. – Part of the black culture he was raised in. Part of the male culture he was socialized and brought up in. Part of the Jewish religious culture he has adopted. No matter what culture he identifies with, all three cultures are part of him.

As I’ve said many times, we as humans are observational learners. We will learn what we see most. This is the first indoctrination into socialization and culture. We watch what everyone else is doing while we are gnawing on our binky or pacifier.  This is where we get our first understanding of how to act and how to behave in the family and the groups we are part of.

There’s a young man who I know that was brought up in an Irish culture. Now, like any culture…there’s variations and various thoughts of how this culture lives. However, he grew up with a 1st generation American-Irish father and an Irish born Grandfather. From them and the culture that they embraced he learned that the Irish culture said that:

1.Men drink, enjoy drinking, and drink a lot.

2. Men are the leaders and the ones that make the decisions.

3. Women cater to men and if they don’t, their worthless.

4. Women are secondary to men and they deserve to get hit and beat if they forget this and don’t do as they are told.

5. The only way to get things solved is through violence.  The more violent you are, the more you are respected.

This was the cultural handbook that he was given to go out into the world with. He is not unlike many other people in the world.  Many of us have been given similar handbooks….how to be a lady, what a girl does and doesn’t do, how to be a good person, how an Italian man acts, how a real man acts, etc, etc.

What type of adulthood and world will our Irish friend create?  Given the cultural teachings: He will create a misogynistic, violent world consumed with alcohol and fighting. Respect will only be given to those individuals that can drink, fight, and treat women as he does and has been instructed to do through his family. If he has a sister, she will accept that getting hit and beat up is normal, and all men are violent alcoholics. She will see herself as only having worth if she can take care of men or be used by men. In her world – love is violent and attention is given tot hose who behave.

They will teach their children the same and the cycle continues!

According to many anthropologist,  the cultures of the world were created during the time of “the great unrest”. This was the time shortly after the fall of matriarchal  power and the rise of the patriarchy. This is the beginning of most of our towns, cities, nations, and religions. Many of the cultures created a civil make-up of women as secondary to the normal society and women became creators of the home and care takers of the children and family unit. From these archaic beginnings come many of our inaccurate ideals to this day.

Some of these are:

sexualization of women as only sex objects

acceptance of violence against women to teach them “their place”

seeing women as body parts not people

seeing women as secondary citizens(If you’re not part of the working world, you are secondary)

The people who still identify with the origins of these cultural ideals, cite their culture for the way they are and the way they act. In fact, many cultures site religious reasons for violence toward women and violence in general. Christians and Jewish alike cite many parts of the Christian bible and the Torah that states the need for violence towards women and the depictions of how women are supposed to act.  The same is true in Islam and the many forms of Islam.  In fact, many of these cultures cite the idea that the one who destroys the most-wins. OR Might makes right.

However, these same religious culture also state humanity and good will towards all people. They cite love and nonviolence as their main purpose as well. There are many many groups that are poking holes in these religious beliefs in order to understand that violence towards women and violence in general are not ok.

Violence towards women does have a cultural basis to it, but it is extremely biased created in a bygone era during a rise of fear of the unknown and mass upheaval of past cultures and organizations. These are not traditions that needed to be handed down, in fact they are traditions that the modern world and the modern-day human being can not relate to. These archaic cultural traditions do not hold us together as culture and societal norms do, instead they tear us apart and cause suffering and harm to its individuals.

Culture is not an excuse to demean, hurt, abuse, destroy, and sexualize girls, women, or anyone for that matter. In the end, we must pull the nagging strings of our current cultural fabric and re-weave that fabric to include equal treatment of all people no matter their gender, their race, or their ability.

Opt 4 a culture of acceptance and understanding.

Opt 4 a world of no violence.

Opt 4 a world of no gender violence.

Opt 4 a world where women are seen as human beings, not anything else.

Opt 4 a world where we are seen as partners.

Part 1 – Factors that influence abuse and inequality – Print media

You’re flipping through your favorite magazine, newspaper, or just general rag that happens to be around. You’re focusing on 1-2 things per page, and if you asked most people they wouldn’t know half of what they saw while they were flipping the pages. You noticed a phone number here, a dress someone was wearing there, an interesting 100 word article that you skimmed, but nothing truly significant…and you put the mag down and (if you’re like most of us, like the majority of the people int he world) you’ll pick up another one and do something very similar.

What you don’t realize is that though you thought you were just flipping, your mind has allowed you to think that through the use of many many filters.  If you consciously knew everything you saw, you’d go into brain overload.

SCARY PART – Your brain is imprinted with every single thing that crosses your eyes. It’s imprinted ont he main central control unit, or the CPU of your brain, the part of your brain that is in complete control of your thinking, your emotions, and how you live your life – your subconscious.

So in your 10 minutes of flipping, your brain was imprinted with every picture you saw.

Now, a lot of research has been done (by marketing and advertising agencies…this is no coincidence) as to what will catch your eye, what colors will entice and shock you, and what images and shapes will cause your eye to imprint onto your subconscious.  The breadth of research is phenomenal…and it’s where a lot of our optical illusions come from. So everything that crosses your eyes’ path, is immediately imprinted on your main central influence section of your brain.

To begin this series we’ll start with Print media consumption.

So what are we looking at on a daily basis…here’s a group of print ads:

This blog has spoken about the problems of print media for years:

Images create our reality

Can you believe these pictures?

Iron Girl?

Woman not girl

No sexism in these mags

 

Go here for more of these kinds of ads.

 

These are a very very very small example of ads that are seen throughout the fashion magazine, glamour magazines, and women magazine industries. Ads depicting women in brutal, abusive, object-like ways are churned out by the millions.

Most magazines are on average 60% advertising. Many of the fashion magazines ramp it up to 80-90% advertising if you add the captions that tell you the price and make of the things the models are wearing.

So let’s quickly do the numbers and see how far-reaching these images can be – Each magazine has about 800,000 subscribers (this is a very low number). There are 7 ads in each of our hypothetical magazines (the pictures above), that means these images were imprinted on 800,000 people. in a year, these people have each been imprinted with 84 images….that means 800,000 people have been accustomed and trained that images of violence against women are merely advertising and entertainment.

Now add this 800,000 to 10 different magazines for a total of 8,000,000 people! That is a country. That is a large cross-section of our Untied States. The sad part is that this is a low number.

BUT….

With what we know of brain imprinting we know that these images were imprinted on the subconscious and then created into a thought and opinion. A woman will see this as a representative of herself and her self-worth. A man will see this as a Representative of women in general and is actively learning how to treat “her” through these images. When we see 1 million images a day and 1/2 of them depict violence against women and gender inequality – we have a very heavy imprinting on our brain to think 1 view and idea of women.

When we put all of the ads together we see only 1 thing:

Woman are to be treated in violent ways.

Women are happy to be treated in violent ways….creating the idea of accepted sexual assault. This website explains this idea wonderfully.

Men are superior to women.

When 1 gender is seen to be superior to another gender, the superior gender will react in violence towards that lesser gender. This has been seen in racism, ageism, and sexism!

Add another aspect to this: Remember what I said above: “A woman will see this as a representative of herself and her self-worth.” Not only are men seeing that women should be treated with violence and that they as men are superior, but women are being taught they deserve this violence and they are less than a man. When a group of people are taught to see themselves as less than another group – the downtrodden group accepts the violence that is put on them as deserved and “normal”.

By allowing our brains to consume these images and by allowing these images to exist, we are promoting and imprinting on our brains – inequality towards women and violence towards women.

opt 4 writing letters to every advertising agency and magazine to end this violent campaign against women.

Opt 4 eliminating this kind of consumption from our society.

Opt 4 ending the consumption of disrespectful print media.

 

Men…stand up!

 

Man. The word conjures up ideas of what we see manhood as. Interestingly enough – we all have a different definition for what it is. If you google it with pictures, you’ll see a lot of unshaven faces, muscles, tuxedos and suits, and of course violence. These seems to be the pictures that many of us have seen as the depiction of manhood.

However, the cold hard truth of statistics is this:

95% of all violent crimes are because of men.

85-90% of all domestic violence cases are a man hurting a woman.

90% of all of the world’s decision makers are men (The patriarchy of power)

 

Is this you?  Is this me?  Is this what a man is?

The answer is undoubtedly NO…and if you’re a man or know a man they need to get the message loud and clear. We need to redefine what manhood, men, a man –  is.  But many don’t want to stand alone. Don’t want to be that one man among the many….but that is what you are when you speak against men’s violence and for gender equality and for nonviolence and peace. There are other men…there are a lot of other men…standing up….taking a stand for what’s right. Join these men!

Below is a list of sites of groups of men doing everything they can to stop Domestic Violence, Violence against women, and violent men – all working toward equality and changing what the definition of manhood is. If they don’t have a chapter in your local area…I call on you to make it happen and create a new definition of what it is to be a man in your community.

Taking a stand against violence and promoting nonviolence.

men stopping violence

Stopping domestic violence against women children and men

Men stand up against violence

A call to men

Men against violence against women

Men against violence

Men against sexual violence

Men Against Violence Blog

North dakota men against violence

Oregon men against dv

Article about University of Massachusetts  men against violence

NOMAS

 

Men – there is great work being done in your community right now to change the face of what a man is. Go out and do something about the problem.

Did I forget an organziation that you know of?

What else can men do to prevent violence against women?

World wide effort to end Violence Against Women

There are over 100 posts on this blog…stressing healthy relationships, working towards preventing dating violence, and celebrating nonviolent relationships.

But this isn’t just a “this blog” thing. This isn’t just a me thing. This isn’t just a 1 state thing. this isn’t just an American thing. This is a world-wide effort to end all violence against women.

endvawnow.org is striving and working towards ending all violence against women world-wide. This is a United Nations website to end all violence toward female gendered person world-wide, all continents, all countries, all provinces, all cities, all towns, all people!

End Violence Against Women Now was created by the United Nations, a group of 193 countries who have decided that we need more peace and nonviolence in our world. This is the vast majority of the world who wants to end violence towards the women of the world.

Remember, women make up 54% of our world, that’s more than men by 4% – end when you’re talking billions that 4% is a huge number.

Remember, if it wasn’t for a woman – you wouldn’t be here.

Remember, the woman who is treated bad today will unconsciously teach their children the same and if those children see this bad treatment…they themselves will do it also.

We must end this violence against women NOW!

What are you doing to do this?

Say no to violence!

Just say no….

We’ve heard this before. Just say no to drugs. Just say no to sex. Just say no to pregnancy.

Is it this easy?

Is it this easy to go against the peer pressure of sex and drugs?  Well, we’d love to think so but this is a very hard thing to do.

However, a new site is asking that you: just say no to violence against women. Is this any easier?

Yes!  Yes it is because violence is not just something that affects them, they, or those people. Violence is around us every second of every minute of our lives. Violence against women…doubly so. However, the violence against women is even more insidious than the other “just say no” campaigns. Violence against women is  in the advertisements in magazines, in the Tv shows we watch from age 2-95. Violence against women is  in the movies we watch and the youtube videos that span the net. Violence against women in our homes, our neighborhoods, and even in our own families. This violence is something we see on an everyday basis.

So can we just say no?  Ask your mother, your sister, your grandmother, your aunt, your niece, your girl cousins, your girlfriend, or even the lady that lives down the street. Yes – we can just say no to stopping the violence toward 57% of the population of the world.

http://www.saynotoviolence.org/

This website gives you the opportunity to start a “just say no to violence against women” campaign or start your own “just say no to violence against women” campaign. Either way, we are all working on preventing this epidemic.

We need to just say no to all violence, but especially to the violence toward the people that make other people.