The Value of Women
On October 5, 2023, I posted a message titled, “Muted Voices” about the difficulty women have in being heard about, well, pretty much anything. This is a phenomenon that is a global issue that affects all of us. I stated in “Muted Voices,” “There is a lot of frustration for women who work to be heard but instead are ignored, diminished, and dismissed.” It happens to all of us, no matter how strong, independent, or intelligent we are.
The value of women in the world is on my mind most of the time, but especially this week. Why? Because during a conversation at a networking group earlier this week, I mentioned my love for action/suspense movies and books, and how this was a shared interest with both my father and father-in-law. This led to me mentioning how I watched a movie with my father-in-law called “Showdown in Little Tokyo,” starring Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee. Like most action movies, outside the fight scenes it’s mostly comedy.
However, in this movie, there is a scene where Lundgren and Lee (who are cops of course) go to a restaurant as part of their investigation, where naked women are used as tables and men eat their food off of them. This is quite dehumanizing and my least favorite scene for a lot of reasons, but one reason that comes to mind is that some men see women objects, not people.
Later in the story, there is a line that Brandon Lee says when he thinks they are going to die: “We are going to make it through this, and then we are going to eat sushi off those naked chicks.” I shared this line out of context because I didn’t stop to think that most of the people in the group had not even heard of the movie, let alone seen it.
My quote hit like a brick being introduced to gravity. The looks of displeasure from the group were evident and I would not be surprised if some people were silently scolding me. There were a few glares and then someone thankfully changed the subject.
Let’s ask a few questions about this particular movie scene: Is this an appropriate activity for women to be part of? Should we be treated like furniture? Is this a demonstration of the lack of respect some men (and cultures) have for women? No. No. Yes.
But like many women I tend to look the other way on certain things that I don’t think I can control or affect. Using the movie example, I’ve gritted my teeth or closed my eyes, or even better fast forwarded, through many scenes where women are brutalized. No, I definitely do not support women being diminished or treated like chattel. Yet it is all around us in movies, books, and the news. It’s a global problem we face and it seems the battle is increasingly uphill. Sometimes I laugh at something so I don’t cry, and most of the time I don’t take offense because I would be exhausted by the sheer volume of offenses.
The value of women is a volatile topic for almost everyone. This is why one of the only people I discuss it with is my husband. We know that we have to navigate the world differently because he is a man and I am a woman. We receive different treatment and we see it. We talk about how it is so frustrating and discouraging in “this day and age,” as the saying goes, that we seem to be going backwards in some ways, especially when it comes to the treatment of women and relations between men and women overall.
Dear readers, some of you may think you have the answers to these questions about women and our place in the world. But I struggle to accept a world where some women think their only choice is to make a living off their body, and others stay in horrible situations because they feel there is no way out, that there are no choices.
The big question for me is: Why do we accept it? When will we commit to meaningful change for women’s roles in the world? When will we come together and find solutions for all women everywhere? Right now in the world, there are women being denied basic human rights and denied the right to self-determination. We know it is wrong, but we look the other way and say it is how things are in their culture or country. We also likely feel that there is little we can do about it. That may very well be the case.
But there’s another old saying: change a mind, change the world. If we change the way we think, who knows what we could do?
