Including You!

Unpacking

This section is about each of us making deliberate and conscious choices to be less of the problem and more of the solution. In order to help us reframe our way of thinking, we would do best to map our attitudes and beliefs around sexuality, gender, roles in different environments and situations.

Girls are boxed in as children. Children recieve messages about the roles of females and their duties to society. Girls learn that Parents and Elders are prime authority over their life trajectory. It is disrespectful to disagree or second guess them.

As girls age and mature, they are taught to be more veiled. They are hushed about being public about your menstruation or body maturation. The primary focus is maintain virginity. The purity of a girl into womanhood is a highlight of female sexuality.

In the back ground you have the authority of the house deciding who is a good suitor for the young ladies. On the other side there is an injustice with the legal system. The law is not set up to be enforced against underage marriage. There are very few roadblocks to prevent child marriage.

A child learns that only heterosexual relationships are healthy. Any LGBTQIA ideas are immoral. Immoral messages feed shame based messages around gender and sexuality.

Girls learn they are entering womanhood when they marry. Economic systems  they are taught that marriage provides social and economic protections. Part of the 'trade' of her protective provisions she must enter pure and be willing to provide for the home. Girls are taught they are natural caregivers and homemakers.

The economic system is rewarding to men while reducing and punishing to women. It is not just that they have to work harder to earn more wage but they also must volunteer free caregiving daily to the household and it is just an expectation from society. Men's work is valued more than women.

There is a loss in education and lose of opportunities for girls and women in society when they are subjected to this cycle of misogyny. They fall prey to child bribes. This teaches them further to raise their children with similar tones, causing the entire cycle to continue.

We began to break stereotypes as a society about women in the workplace, but clearly there is a lot of people unwilling to unpack their own part of this cycle.

Men are encouraging the upper hand over oppressing the sexual freedom of women. Women are manipulated and indoctrinated blindly because they learn to listen to authority. The overall message is that it is a Man's world, but we have a 51/49 female to male population balance meaning it really is a Woman's world.

In order for women and non-binary people to feel empowered it is imparative to identify examples of problematic yet commonly reoccurring practices in our society.

What might homophobia look like?

•‘Joking’ that something (an action, an item, a person) perceived to be negative in some way is ‘gay’ (e.g. ‘that’s so gay’).
•Someone complementing another person of the same gender and then assuring them that ‘don’t worry, I’m not gay’, implying that that would be negative/bad.
•Assuming that someone is in a heterosexual relationship (e.g. asking a woman ‘so do you have a boyfriend/husband?’) is an example of a heteronormative stereotype. 
•‘Oh, you don’t look like you’re gay/a lesbian/bi/queer’ – this is based on damaging stereotypes about LGBTQA+ people, and wrongly implies you can ‘tell’ someone’s sexual orientation by their appearance.  
•Suggesting LGBTQA+ people are sexually ‘deviant’ or dangerous based on or because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

What might transphobia look like?

•Misgendering someone deliberately or repeatedly (i.e. using the wrong name and/or pronouns to describe a person, referring to them using the wrong gender). For example, referring to a trans man as ‘she’, or refusing to use ‘they/them’ to refer to a non-binary person who has specified they use those pronouns.