A group of feminists and graphic artists have taken all the comments left on Yale Daily News articles about the incident and made an incredibly powerful poster that they put up around campus last week:
Reading the comments on this poster brought me to tears. The virulent words, hate and general disrespect for the Women's Center and by proxy, all women, makes me sick to my stomach. The supposed anonymity of the internet brings out the worst in people - or maybe the truth in people, but that they're too ashamed to say to someone's face.
To those people who don't think that sexism is pervasive through our culture, read the poster.
Here's a larger image in case you want to fully experience the poster.
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5 comments:
Wow. That's disgusting. Truly disgusting.
What a smart and, like you said, powerful poster/idea, though. Way to put sexism out there, make it harder for people to ignore.
It's amazing how creative and productive people can be in the face of problems like this. Way to go.
One of the comments on there - the "shut your mouth and know your role" - brought back a rather unexpected flashback of the boyfriend who used to abuse me.
He used to say that all the time. But, you know, he was "joking."
And I realize how much of the sexism that I used to take as a joke, as funny, is serious.
Having it all "In your face" like that is a lot more powerful than having a couple of pages of comments on an infinite canvas.
I hope it had the intended result.
I'm not sure if that was all sexism. Some of it seemed to be from women who were frustrated at the impression - whether justified or not - that the women at the women's centre were the only "real" feminists or that they represented all the women at Yale. There were some non seism related complaints in there.
Nony:
You think women don't play a role in sexism? The sad fact is, the comments from women on there are equally as instrumental in upholding the systemic sexism of modern society; and one of the chief ways in which that propagates itself is to persuade women to hate each other as competitors. It is this sense of competition and "you're making it harder for us to win a guy" that I get from those remarks.
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