This week I wanted to use personal experience from a roller coaster of events to talk about Women: what’s right with us and what is terribly, terribly, wrong. Full disclosure: my week began with a bar fight at the restaurant my boyfriend works at when I met him for a quick drink after his shift. As we were leaving, we heard a commotion in the back of the restaurant. All of a sudden 15 men and women were hitting each other, destroying tables and chairs, and making their way in our direction. My boyfriend got punched in the face hard enough to suffer a concussion by a man in a bowtie while trying to break it up, and the other female servers/bartenders and I were called “ugly ass bitches” while we were calling 911. One woman even tried to hit me.
To say the least, it was disgraceful. I was in shock. I was terrified. I was disgusted. This is what is wrong with women? If we can’t respect each other, how can we expect anyone else to?
Earlier in the week I caught up with Lena Dunham’s GIRLS. Does anyone else hate to love this show? I see these girls back stabbing each other, fighting all the time, and a lot of narcissism from everyone. If this is a commentary on millennial females, I’m scared for the next generation. This last season, in the bathroom scene, Marnie and Hannah almost rectified all of the bad things they’ve done to each other when they realized that theirs is the actual love story. We need more of that. When the episode ended with Lucy Rose‘s Shiver, my hope for this latest season to stop sucking skyrocketed.
Lucy Rose is in the songstress scene that I’ve always been obsessed with. Gossling, Courtney Barnett, Norah Jones, Fiona Apple, Madonna, Carly Simon, Lady GaGa, Cat Power, Regina Spektor, and the lovely Tess Emma are all strong women with a musical gift. These are the women who we should be looking up to.
The last inversion on this roller coaster was on Friday seeing Sleater-Kinney with my sister. After being depressed about women and society for the majority of the week, seeing a Riot Grrrl group was perfect. Corin, Carrie, & Janet encompass feminism in such a fantastic way. In Corin’s words: “We want respect, we want equality, and we want love”.
As women in today’s society we’re faced with a lot of issues that shouldn’t be issues in the first place. Reproductive rights. Slut-shaming. Date-rape. Pay Gaps. Domestic violence.
Historically nothing ever changes unless a community bands together. Case in point: Civil Rights, Egypt’s Revolution, Community Gardens. If we can all be in one conversation about what color a dress is, then we can definitely start a conversation about feminism that doesn’t involve quips about Hermione Granger…
