Hi, my name is Kathy and I’m a Pinterest-aholic. I love to pin recipes that make me hungry, workouts I’ll never do and, most of all, quotes. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but there’s nothing I love more than a good quote. One particularly motivating quote by Pablo Picasso has stayed with me: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
I think about this sentiment from time to time, mostly when I’m feeling uninspired and need a pick-me-up to get going, whether in writing or in life. But recently, I found myself stuck: Not even this quote could save me from wasting time on the Internet. Eventually, I came across a video my friend shared called “Boys age 7-11 were asked to slap a girl. Their reactions will amaze you.” I clicked.
The video shows about five or six little Italian boys being asked questions.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” They’re asked.
“A pizza maker,” one of them says.
“Why?”
“I like pizza,” he replies.
And then, the off screen narrator brings a girl into the equation. He asks the boys to say what they like best about her, to caress her. And then he asks them to hit her in the face.
“Slap her, hard!”
The boys look confused at first, some a little upset. One by one, they all tell the narrator no. They will not hit the girl who’s standing in front of them.
“As the saying goes: girls shouldn’t be hit, not even with a flower,” one of them says, causing my heart to melt into a large puddle of optimism for the future state of humanity.
But then, just twelve minutes later I found myself on Mic reading an article that also melted my heart — but this time, into a puddle of despair. The title of the article? “6 Women are Massacred Every Day in Mexico–So Why Does Nobody Seem to Care?”
This has to be wrong, I thought. Six women are murdered every SINGLE day? But it’s not.
“Femicide” is exactly like “genocide,” a term we all know well from our history classes. But femicide refers specifically to the rampant violence and killing of women, which is horrifyingly underreported or investigated. Al Jazeera reports “only 24% of the roughly 4,000 femicides reported in 2012 and 2013 were investigated. Of those, only 1.6% ended in sentencing.” The article ends with a thought-provoking question: “But will the world listen?”
Will we? Will we take three minutes of our screen time today to read the article and tell a friend about it? Will it get as many shares on Facebook as that adorable video about the little Italian boys did? Even though it should, it probably won’t.
But more than feeling confounded by way people only share feel-good videos rather than thought-provoking ones, I wondered about the content of each of these videos. Where does the disconnect come in? When exactly do boys switch from refusing to hit a girl to murdering six of them daily?
Of course, hardly all boys make this switch from non-violence to homocide. But the principle of the matter remains the same: why, in a world that is becoming increasingly tolerant and advanced (in my opinion), are women still treated worse than second class citizens?
I don’t know the answer and maybe I never really will. I believe that all women — and men, for that matter — should be treated with respect and dignity. I believe that societies where women are educated thrive in all ways. I believe that all children, boys and girls, need to be taught from day one to love each other, to respect their mothers, to never raise a hand to a living creature. And I believe that I am a feminist, defined by the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and made famous by Beyonce in her song Flawless.
So maybe the answer (at least in part) is to be a feminist. By all means, enjoy the video of the little Italian boys, but also remember the six Mexican women who lose their lives every day. Pray for them. Share the article on Facebook because it’s important.
After all, the only way to get rid of the dark is to shine a light on it — bright, ugly, and honest — warming those who feel its rays.
