I would like to believe that there is no need for an International Women’s Day. Women rights are pretty much the same… mothers buy the pill for the daughters, we vote, we go for the same jobs than men and supposedly we are to earn the same salaries. Women write, women manage, women design, women build… There is equality when we pay for dinner on a date, and when we are standing on a bus. Now we say where the limit is, and we create respect for our beliefs and our decisions.
Really? Is it so?
Why then, in national and local governments, men outnumber the women’s quota? Why if girls are statistically the ones with better grades, the number goes down when it comes to high management positions?
Still television targets women on certain products… Like kitchen appliances, cleaning stuff, or beauty products. Our most intimate products are still uncomfortable and made to please someone else but us. But somehow, sexy in a woman is lace push up bras and g-strings… While in men, sexy is a powerful position and a good salary…. Something doesn’t match uh?
We find in novels and tv series that a rebel woman, independent and strong is at the end, “tamed as the shrew”… And that is the happy ending…
Surgeries are making huge amounts of money out of women trying to look perfect… Perfect (What a word!)… for whom?
We are still expected to be beautiful, pleasing, smiling, sweet, depending… a bit dumb if possible…
But that is not the real and only problem…
The real problem is that all of these are, at the end, decisions that women take! We are the ones playing those games, we accept them, we take the rules and say yes to all of that. We are the ones teaching that to our girls… and our boys.
There are countries and complete continents where females genitals are mutilated as a long term tradition, there are huge countries where dowry is illegal but still demanded for marriage and this is one of the reasons why gender is a cause for abortion and female newborn’s murders. There are still several countries in the World where aggression is expected and violation is tradition. There are still areas in the World where women don’t have one single day for them.
We are the ones to stand for all women in the World.
Us, women, have to know ourselves, respect ourselves and empower ourselves. We have been castrated, bullied and pushed out but we are the ones to say no. We are the ones to know that we can… We always can.
We can manage, we can decide, we can survive -with or without children- on our own. We’d like to have a mate, but we don’t “need” a man on our side.
In this area of the World we live better than millions of women on other areas, but we are the ones who can follow the unbeaten path and learn that we can be as free, as strong and as intelligent as we want to be.
We are the ones to take the decision… Because we can.
To remember that… is that we celebrate the International Day of Women.
(Camino Travel is distinguished to be one of the few companies in the Costa Rica travel industry where women decide, direct and manage and we are very proud about it!)
Written by Olga Sáenz for Camino Travel.
(The author is a single mother of five, who worked as a tour guide for twenty five years. Her children are already grown and fully independent. She knows a woman can survive on her own).
