Reviews
Articles
Poems
1
Women in the workplace The move for change and have we really been moving.
The fight for equality in the workplace is something on the hearts and minds of all in this day and age. It is something that challenges our traditional beliefs and pushes the boundaries that have been placed on this social construct. There is no doubt that women are indeed treated below men in the workplace as proven by the United States Department of Labour. Throughout centuries of the workplace existing, it has been dominated solely by men. Although now the battle has begun for the right of women in this said medium, the social construct created is slowly and gentle beginning to break and drift away but this won’t happen without a fight. The position we are at today where women are beginning to be seen as equal is a place which was taken by hard work and won’t move forward without hard work. As Emma Watson said, ”We are struggling for a uniting word, but the good news is that we have a uniting movement.” This quote shows us that we are in a key time for gender equality as groups of people are finally uniting behind this movement. In the past years we as a society have began the battle but unfortunately it is not shown in the statistics. As seen, the global statistics in 1975, 52.4% of women participated in the workforce. This though has dropped from then until now, as in 2015 the participation rate decreased to 49.6%. This stumped me as the battle for equality and the fight to empower women has increased drastically since 1975. The shift though in the kind of jobs women occupied has changed. Higher order positions occupied such as positions where women have seats on boards has indeed increased. The increase is not by much though, leaving us with the difficult question of “where are we going wrong?”
Have we really been moving in the right direction? This question is one needing to be answered. The problem we face is that over a period of almost 20 years we have not fixed a problem heavily faced. We as people of all genders haven’t done our part in the fight for social freedom and need to stand up. We need to start asking the diďŹƒcult questions. There are certain things that we need to do to allow us to address this elephant in the room. Lets all begin the change, it begins small. Things such as the treating of women as equals is a small but such an important step we need to take. People need to both do the small things and participate in the large. Such as the beginning of the shift to decrease the income gap between men and women. The answer is as simple and as diďŹƒcult as that. We need to both
empower women without completely turning the situation around leaving society with a situation where we need to start empowering men. The balance is so important and something we need to take into consideration. Let us as a people then do our part from the basic treatment of women to the actual standing up for gender rights. The fight stops here so lets make sure we are part of it. The move for change has begun and we need to all participate.
Written by Paul Newton
Get Hard (Tieg O’sullivan)
Over the weekend I watched the latest Will Feral installment. As soon as I finished watching it I gathered my senses and began the planning stages of my review that you readers read quite religiously. To this day I have never written an inaccurate review to spare the feelings of the giants/dwarfs of the film making industry. This time will be no different. The hype of a movie is seldom matched by its viewing experience. However in some cases any anticipation at all is just a recipe for disappointment as well as leaving a whole R150 hole in your wallet. “Get Hard” is a Warner Bros production that stars Will Farrell as “James King” an extremely successful hedge fund manager who gets framed for fraud and sentenced to 10 years in a maximum security penitentiary (San Quintin). The story follows James as he tries to get prison ready by hiring the help of Darnell Lewis (Kevin Hart) as his prison coach under the false presumptions that Darnell went to jail (because he’s black…). I found this movie extremely boring and that it was comparable to a mixture of a matric final and average clan meeting. The overall storyline was uninteresting at best and painful at worst. The main plot was extremely offensive with the final punchline being that the black actor Kevin Hart never went to prison. HaHaHa. There were no strong female representation. The only real representation was Alison Brie. And Alison Brie’s character spent half her time on screen trying to “arouse” a response from the audience and the other half of her time spent was being a gold digging dumb girl. What a positive and forward thinking way to cast women and black people…
This movie had an impressive line up with the likes of Kevin Hart, Will Farrell, Alison Brie and Craig T. Nelson as well as a very generous budget. It had all this going for itself but it turns out you can’t make racism & sexism funny (who would have thought?). No one preformed horridly but there weren’t any standouts, as you’d expect from a slapstick half comedy. However we give honorable mention to Alison Brie and Kevin Hart for appearing as if they weren’t fazed by the obvious discrimination they had to deal with (in my mind this was the only “acting” that I saw on that screen).
In the end if you ignore all the flaws and discrimination this movie is just one poorly scripted poorly timed joke/racial slur after another. The scenes bleed into each other and by the end of the movie you feel like you just stayed to the end out of pity.
In conclusion This movie was 2 out of 5 Fire Flames. An unfunny unenjoyable experience that will leave you unsatisfied and robbed of your hard earned money.
One - on - One with Caster Semenya Caster Semenya represented South Africa at the 2016 Rio olympics in the 400m sprint where she proceeded to win Gold. This female athlete has been subjected to world-wide criticism and respect. We are having a one-on-one interview with Semeya after her arrival from the games. Calvin: Caster:
Calvin:
Welcome back Caster from an extremely successful games. Thank you Calvin, it’s an honour to be here an a privilege to chat to you today. A lot of training and discipline goes into preparing for the games, do you think it is more difficult for female athletes to achieve acknowledgment in the sport?
Caster:
Yes, without a doubt! As a female athlete we have to be more disciplined and focused on our goal, train harder and be mentally strong to deal with constant negative comments and publicity. In recent years however, the hype around female sportswomen have lessened.
Calvin:
In your opinion, are female athletes rewarded equally to that of male athletes at this level and do you feel you receive similar acknowledgement for your achievements?
Caster:
It will take a long time for female athletes to be on par with male remuneration but we are slowly getting there. Even though our achievements are acknowledged, women still don't get respect for the effort put in to achieve success. I have made it my mission to change the preconceived idea that women aren't equal to men and deserve the same acknowledgement for their efforts.
Calvin:
We thank you for taking time out your busy schedule to chat to us and wish you all the best for the future.
Please keep in mind that this is however a fictional piece and was NOT conducted with Caster Semenya personally.
Everyone Has Their Own Problems - An In Depth Look At Gender Inequalities You always hear about woman’s rights in the news and how women are continuously being oppressed by the tyrannical force that is society as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t and will never disagree with the fact that women are being oppressed or that they have to deal with unfair adversities. Additionally it excites me to know that these issues are so widely vocalized and are being actively fought against. However where are all the men in this conversation?
I’m not asking why are there no male woman’s rights activists, because contrary to popular belief there are a decent percentage of men who identify as active feminists. This is backed up by a recent poll taken in January of 2016 by the “Washington post”. It found that 10% of men to 17% of women conceder themselves as strong feminists, as well as 23% of men to 43% of women conceder themselves as being standard feminists. Obviously there is still a large gap between the participation of men and women in feminism, however the media would like you to believe that no men are feminists and that all men are against women’s rights. This number is obviously not ideal and in a perfect world there would be more participation from the male side. However it is comforting to know that men actually care about women and women’s rights. So what am I asking?
Where is the publicity for men and male rights? Again I’m not trying to take the publicity away from women and their rights. All I’m saying is there isn’t enough representation for males and the adversities they go through. At face value men seem to have it much easier sometimes due to oppression that is put on women. Men are considered to be lucky and that they experience little to no trauma from society. However this is just not true and unfortunately for men their struggles with adversities just will never be as vocalized or important because of the long negative history that women
went through. Another reason for men’s issues not being spoken about is that when you bring up men’s rights people always jump to the conclusion that you are misogynous or against feminism. This isn’t true and just because women have arguably more issues doesn’t make men’s issues any less important. With the intro out the way lets get into heart of the piece. Something you won’t hear about in school or read in a newspaper is something called “The gender paradox of suicidal behavior” which is the fact that the average suicide percentage of men is substantially higher than that of the women. In 2012 the UK had an almost 2:1 ratio of men to women suicides. The UK isn’t the only country that has this unfortunate statistic; in fact it is almost a unanimous trend across every country. This is worrying as it shows that men are living more depressing lives and resort to taking their own lives more often. This stat can be attributed to a multitude of factors but the most obvious would be are considered to be the following: How tough and stoic men have to be to maintain their manliness. Similarly men are taught to not vocalize the feelings they have, which could explain why women have more reported cases of non-fatal suicidal tendencies because in society men aren’t allowed to communicate their feelings, which would hinder men from reaching out for personal or professional help. Another discovery of men’s issues came from a research paper done in 2013 called, "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases" by a Prof. Sonja Starr. The case study found that on average men serve 63% longer sentences than women who are tried for the exact same crimes. Additionally it found that men who are convicted stand twice the chance for incarceration than women. This is yet another example of the unfair treatment of men. Because men are inherently assumed to be more violent and aggressive therefore they receive harsher prison sentences, as they are believed to be guiltier. This isn’t the only discrepancy that men face when it comes to the law system. A study on gender bias in custodial battles from around the same time found multiple interesting facts on the matter. According to the above case study, in child custody cases women are awarded custody of the child over men at a ratio of 83%:17%. Additionally it found the ratio of parents who received child support after winning, and this was at 57%:40% in favor of women. Further more the study also found that men who were awarded child support were awarded less than women on average. This is yet another non-vocalized issue that men live with. This issue can be attributed to society considering men to be the breadwinners and should therefore pay for and receive less child support as well as the fact that men are considered to be stoic and unloving toward their children and are therefore unfit for parenthood. In conclusion: Men and women both deal with their own set of issues, women due to societies emphasis on male dominance, men due to societies insistence that men are tough and emotion less. I believe that all issues gender faces should be vocalized and that everyone should do their best to speak out against unjust issues facing all genders because it creates a conversation that not even society can silence.
Downton Abbey Downton Abbey is a television series that is based on a pre and post war English family living in the countryside. The show explores the lives of a wealthy extravagant family and their staff.
It is directed by Julian Fellowes and has many notable actors including Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Smith and Michelle Dockery. The series takes place at the Highclere Castle in the English countryside. I think that the show shows gender roles in a fair and revolutionary manner. It is great to see women that stand their ground in television. The women take on some roles of men that were not common on the era. An example is when Anna (Joanne Froggatt) a maid, has to help get her husband to be out of prison. She acts fierce to get what she wants. Another example is that Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) takes on the task of becoming a manager of the estates property. The last example is Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith), or Granny as she is known as, does not have a husband and does not feel the need to have one. Her husband has passed but in that era it was expected to remarry and taboo for a woman to live alone.
If you are looking for a gripping feel good series, with beautiful scenery, Downton Abbey is a great choice. The show was rated one of the top series of 2013.
Poem from the Heart A World with a thousand Genders A dream without a meaning, A dream without a start A dream without a path A dream A life of loss A life of segregation A life of departure A life A gender of thousands A gender of unimportance A gender of pain A gender A fight for a life A fight for a dream A fight for a gender A fight
My life now without a meaning My dream now without a cause My fight now without a hope My gender now without me