Sexism persists during election season
With the election season in full effect, gender issues and questions of sexism are still at the forefront.
National Public Radio published the article on www.npr.org Tuesday, called “Candidates’ Racy Photos Raise Sexism, Privacy Issues,” focusing mainly on Krystal Ball, a Virginia Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Congress. Controversy and criticism have surrounded Ball, due to racy photos released of her from a Christmas party six years ago.
The article got me thinking about the roles America has set for women.
It frustrates me that in 2010, 90 years after women were granted suffrage, that women are still brought down by the gender roles assigned to them, and society’s expectation of their subordination.
As a gay male, I am familiar with secondary citizenship. I have less protection under the law and fewer privileges than my heterosexual friends.
Women are still secondary citizens too. Society has decided that they must be “appropriate” by playing subordinate roles to men, and enforces stricter double standards for women.
Of course, women are very successful within and outside of their traditional roles, but their work is still undervalued.
Society values men as workers, talkers and doers much more than it values women in these roles. Men are paid more for it too.
Last year’s gender pay gap, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, was an 80 percent women’s-to-men’s earnings. It is not the 62 percent gap in 1979, but it is an outstanding 20 percent pay that women in America are owed.
Times have not changed.
It offends me that I still hear guys in residence halls bragging about how many girls they have slept with, but deplore females who happen to show any signs of sexuality, bombarding them with derogatory names.
It offends me that women in power take more heat than any male in the same position. I remember female bus drivers and lunch workers in middle and high school being called cruel, obscene names whenever they exercised any authority. Males, on the other hand, were left unscathed.
Ball is reprimanded by the media for suggestive photos from years past, but Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown posing naked for Cosmopolitan’s centerfold is not as shocking?
It has been 90 years. I think it is time there be a discourse about the sexism and gender inequality that is still at large.
