Recently, there’s been a bit of hype of Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram on what it means to be a feminist in today’s world.  You might have seen the sea of anti-feminist posts of young women holding placards with arguments against the movement.  Basically, these women were petitioning on the online platform against contemporary feminism, voicing that it’s now redundant, we don’t need it and we don’t want it.

This jumped out at me in such a dramatic way.  I thought to myself… who are these girls and where are their brains at?    I was enraged at some of the allegations they were putting out about feminism, in particular, how we don’t need it, and how it’s all about putting men down.  No!  Feminism is about cultural, social, political and economic freedom amongst all people, women and men.  Despite some of these women’s allegations, it’s NOT ABOUT HATING ON MEN.  It’s like some of us can’t see that movements such as feminism were not established to put women higher than men, they were invented to fight for greater freedoms for minorities and excluded groups in society.

If you haven’t here’s an example of some of the posts that were going around.

First of all, fish have nothing to do with feminism. Humans, no matter gender, ethnicity, culture, socio-economic background or religion DESERVE EQUALITY.

FEMINISM = EQUALITY for all. So, to say that we don’t need equality is just plain ignorant. Without the feminism movement, women wouldn’t be equal to men. And vice versa.

Feminism is not about making women victims. It’s about empowering women to challenge pre-existing societal expectations of them which oppress their freedoms, whether social, economic, religious or cultural. It’s not about painting ourselves as victims, but it’s about recognising when someone has some part of their humanity taken away and acting on this.

Sure, in the Western world, we as women live freely and it may appear that we don’t need the movement anymore. But, let’s not forget that without feminism, you wouldn’t be able to voice opinions such as the one you voicing now.  Without the suffragettes, women would not have the vote and so would not be politically  equal to men.  I mean, by 1885 men of all classes were allowed to vote, while women didn’t get this chance until some 33 years later!  Sure, we have voting freedoms now, but once upon a time we had to fight for these rights which we simply take advantage of now.

Feminism is about equality and having a voice. And, if I’m not mistaken that’s what this anti-feminism campaign was doing.  Without feminism, women couldn’t speak freely and publically about these sorts of opinions… let alone any societal opinion.

As Kitty puts, I’m really not sure what vaginas have to do with feminism… Perhaps this belongs elsewhere. But, I still think it’s funny that some people believe feminism is about hating on men. It’s NOT! It’s about fighting for equality amongst all humans. It’s about standing up for the person being wronged, whether male or female.

Now, let’s not forget, contemporary women wouldn’t be where we are today without our foremothers who achieved freedoms such as being able to vote, being able to have a career, fairness in the home, workplace and in society.  I feel as though these women who are against feminism simply don’t realise the repercussions this could have.  Sure, as free women in the Western world, we don’t need to jump up and down to get attention, but feminism is still incredibly important in establishing freedom, fairness, and equality for all.

This video I saw on The Project I found very timely and quite humourous.  Kitty’s got the picture.  So did this one young woman in a satirical parody on the silly anti-feminist campaign. I hope you do too.

http://youtu.be/8iADPHWoJb0

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/heres-how-one-feminist-responded-to-women-who-say-they-dont

Week 3’s symposium really got me thinking:  How much privacy do we really have on the World Wide Web, as bloggers and as commentators, contributors and viewers of internet content?

The recent legal dispute over Michelle Phan’s use of music on her widely popular blog got me slightly worried.  I had heard a bit about it, but it wasn’t until Adrian really drilled us on keeping our blogs alive, that I thought that I should address what we can and can’t do.

Basically, all the info around the legalities of contributing content to the net via blogs and webpages can be found at the following links:

Creative Commons and Licencing Basic Info Video”

Australian Copyright Council

What is Creative Commons?

Essentially, having a blog is fantastic as you can document just about every moment of your day in just about real time. But, it’s EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to make sure you’re following the rules. Any images, videos, music clips, and really anything that IS NOT YOURS you shouldn’t upload without giving full credit or asking. For music particularly, it’s a sensitive one. As Michelle Phan has shown us all. Things that are sourced on YouTube tend to be ok for now, as they are already up in the public domain. This DOES NOT MEAN that YouTube owns these media and this content, it just means that we can usually safely REFERENCE IT. For someone like me who is relatively new to blogs, I tend to just steer clear. I have plenty of my own stories to tell.

With this week’s reading ‘The Age of the Essay’ by Paul Graham explores the power of essays and trying our ideas out in prose to thoroughly work out our thought processes… I thought I’d give it a go.

Recently, with the strong media focus on planes, guns, bombs and terrorism… I got to thinking, is there really more danger in the world now, or am I simply more aware of it?

I could’ve sworn two years ago that I had close to no fears. Sure, the normal things like spiders, sharks and snakes… and sometimes the dark would scare me. But, I never thought too much about planes falling out of the sky, or terrorist groups plotting and carrying out global-scale horror.

So, as I lie awake in bed with these thoughts running through my head, I imagine myself caught up in one of these incidents. I have recently applied for an exchange program, and despite studying and travelling abroad being at the top of my bucket list, I can’t help but get stuck wondering about the global atrocities occurring today. I get mixed up in my dreams about whether I even want to travel anymore. I imagine myself in a plane being thrown around the sky, jolting up and down and my body banging against the chair. I look around at the other faces around me. Fear is all I can see in every direction.

Two years ago I travelled around Spain on about seven different planes. And, yet then I never thought about terrorism, dodgy airlines or worried about travelling to far and distant places. This made me reflect: Is the current world really more dangerous and busy than it was when I was growing up, or is it the fact that I am now more aware that I have these fears?

I could have sworn that there is more going on globally with civil and global wars than there was fifteen or twenty years ago. But, after bringing this topic up around many different friends, I figured, maybe it is my close-knit relationship with my phone, Facebook and Internet, that I now am aware of what is going on in the world.

Studying within in the media industry, I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps news reports and those who supply and write them propagate fear in society.

Take a look at the Vietnam war for example. Just one month ago, I returned from a few weeks in Vietnam. We started in the capital in the North, Ha Noi, whose culture base is still very much rooted in Eastern tradition. We then travelled South through beautiful places such as the Ninh Binh province, Halong Bay, Hoi An and finally Ho Chi Minh. In Ho Chi Minh, we visited the War Museum which has documents, testaments and photographs from during the Vietnam War.

There we saw the events which dramatically changed the perception of ‘war’ throughout the world. War was never publicised or televised until the Vietnam war. And, until then, people in society viewed war as a heroic event, one which people would simply attend. This concept changed as people witnessed the events second hand from behind the cameras of journalists, photographers and soldiers.

So after much thinking, I’ve realised that the world is what it is, and that publishing and recording events simply makes it more real to us. And, when we either seek or come across this strong, constantly reiterated concept available to us through the Media, we can develop fears associated with this content. In fact, not we can, but we do.

I’ve been called a lot of things.  When I was little, adults would look down at me, the nervous, pint-sized ‘ginger’… as they would titter.  The fiery mess of auburn ringlets clumsily planted upon my head, calling out to the world ‘I’m here’ often gave the impression I was a million times as bold and self-assured as my three-year old self actually was. Upon being discovered, I would shift my shy but curious eyes to the ground, accidently allowing the curls which hung over my forehead to bounce around like miniature springs, once again drawing unwanted attention – well, at least I hid my freckles that way.

It wasn’t just the giggling sixteen-sixties, conventional mothers with their blonde bob-cut daughters dressed in Mary-janes and frilly polka-dot dresses constantly walking just two steps in front of me each day who helped draw a dark and omitting line between their seemingly perfect, straight, rosy world and I. It was certainly obvious to me early on that I was different from the looks of awe from tourists who begged for a photo with the ‘red’ three year old who stood timidly, arms clawing her mother’s leg, preparing herself for the familiar, unsettling flash of panic which shot out of those black boxes people held out within an inch of their prey – never mind the Australian wildlife surrounding them or the koalas patiently perched in that eucalyptus tree over there!

The one thing that constantly challenged the strength of my back-bone, my tenacity and my innocent, childish and completely non-judgemental view of the world, were the epithets given to my appearance, ‘oi ranga, oi!’  A nick-name introduced to our wonderfully technological, however, sometimes computer-hearted society by a television show that created a cruel name to attach to yet another minority in society.  The famous, hilarious one-liners which hissed off countless lips for just months before they went viral… or rather… the rest of the world caught on that ‘ranga’ was a completely appropriate and politically correct term for a person with red hair.  After all, who told off antagonists of Prime Minister Julia Gillard for calling her a ‘ranga’ and indirectly likening her to an orang-utan?  Despite living in a place which professed ‘all-cultures-in-one’, growing up I somehow permanently felt a quarrelling in my heart between the responsible colloquy of my family with the senseless, offensive chatter of my school peers, politicians and strangers.

My mother would always tell me how lucky I was; that I was incredibly different – that people were just jealous of my hair colour.
‘Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you, darling’.  A mockery of hypocrisy, as she had been blessed with normal blonde hair and so had not experienced such ridicule as I had.  After years of copping the brunt of every derogatory name in the book, and then the internet, I came to accept things the way they were.  I realised as I grew up the power of difference.  The fact that I could be noticed amongst the sea of murky blonde and brown, despite my relentless attempts to blend into it naturally.  It was only every now and then that I would be reminded that I shared the same hair colour as the devil, and that I was not only different, but, not accepted by the community that I had been born into.  A community that stood still and flagrantly silent when one of their own would be casually bullied by others for not conforming to a normality dictated by the boring; called ‘ugly’ or mocked by the aphorism of being the school ‘camp-fire’ whilst people gathered to warm up from cold Melbourne winters.

But, who was the real hypocrite here?  Was I building a court-case for public ostracism based on a few not-so-well-thought-out and childish comments and name-calling?  Maybe it was because I was always used to being different that I always felt compelled to draw attention to that.  I was convinced I was
growing up Red in Beige – that I had to die my hair in order to hide who I truly was for a month at maximum until the re-growth shot aggressively through my scalp reminding me I could never escape the fiery, titian card I had been dealt.  But, really, I was just growing up red.  It didn’t matter what or who surrounded me.  The fact was that I had red hair and after realising that no matter what I did it was with me for life, I accepted it.  Furthermore, once I stopped rebelling against myself, I realised that having red hair can have its benefits – I was now rebelling against the world, and I didn’t blend in, but, nor was I supposed to.