We are women, not superheroes.

Past Wednesday was 8 March, International Women’s Day. We will experience again the patriarchy trying to divide us, making us choose in a struggle that belongs to us all. Everything turns out to be a controversy. The origin of International Women’s Day? Controversy! Whether we should use the word “feminism” if we intend to achieve equality? Controversy! Angry voices that label everyone they do not agree with as “feminazi”. These debates make us forget our actual goal: reclaim equality and the rights of all women. Women, we are really good at this: finding positive things we have in common and establish sorority as a common ground against patriarchal norms and expectations. We want to achieve empowerment. Let’s take advantage of this ability!

Apoyo Positivo wants to say that IT IS ENOUGH! Even though we have seen progress, gender inequality is still a reality. We may find many examples in other countries, but we do not need to travel far to realize that we have yet a lot to achieve. We prefer to say equity instead of equality, because we are not the same, but we are supposed to have the same rights.

It is easy to show how this inequality works if we think about our everyday life:

  • Women who earn 24% less money than men for the same work.
  • Women who have a leadership position forced to constantly justify that they deserve to be there.
  • Women who are exposed to harmful ideas of beauty and expectations about our physical appearance.
  • Women who are judged for our sexual decisions if we do not behave accordingly to what society expects of us.
  • Women who are thought to be property of other people due to the myth of romantic love.
  • Women who are victims of gender violence. 16 women who have already been killed during the first two months of 2017 and men who get away with murder.
  • Women who have sexual orientations and gender identities, but we do not feel we belong because men carry the banner for these struggles.

We could add much more examples to the list. There is still a lot to achieve.

We want to come all together. Come all together and say that IT IS ENOUGH.

We do not want a Women’s Day to say that we are superheroes. We do not want “being a woman” to mean “being beautiful, clever, successful, the best mother, the person that takes care of everyone, the person that does all the housework and also has free time”. We want to celebrate International Women’s Day because we are WOMEN, real women. We are different women with different characteristics. We want to be respected for who we are and learn to respect and love ourselves.

We want to support #Womenstrike for this reason. There are 40 countries behind this initiative, inspired in similar situations: women united fighting for their rights. Iceland, 1975: more than 25 000 women rallied the streets and stopped all activity, thus paralyzing the whole country. Recently, Polish women went on strike to fight against the Abortion Law; this law was not passed in the Parliament a week later. Women, we know how to do it. We know how to bring our voices together to reclaim everything that we need to live in a fair society.

#Womenstrike #Nosotrasparamos