Recently I read an article on Huffington Post (no surprise there) about how women need to ask for what they want more in their professional environments concerning salaries, job hours, etc. The author writes that women are often too nervous to actively negotiate such things, but she mentions that her friend and coach, who has instructed many women on the verge of leaving their jobs to ask their employers for what they want, has never had one client’s request turned down. She states that women perceive themselves as much more “pushy” than they really are and that men naturally engage in this ask-for-what-you-want behavior. Therefore, women should make it a natural thing, too.

I think this is a great reminder of women’s capacities to control their professional lives. I am in wholehearted agreement — yes, women, ask for what you want! However, something was bothering me as I was reading this article, and that something is the fact that the side of this coin opposite the one in which women get what they ask for is the one in which women are still labeled “bitches” and “aggressive” for engaging in this more assertive behavior.

A Forbes article discusses how successful females have consistently been perceived as intimidating, cold, unattractive, etc., and it discusses how studies show that when women engage in assertive behavior, they are seen as aggressive. When men assert themselves in their professional environments, they are labeled just that: assertive with a positive connotation. But when women act in the same way, there’s a good chance they’ll get this “aggressive” label thrown at them. No doubt this is because men still dominate much of the professional sphere, so there is still a mindset, conscious or unconscious, in our society that women who do what men have always done are somehow not normal, behaving in ways they shouldn’t.

These persistent negative labels constitute an important part of what still needs to change in the job sphere. While they may not be as materially damaging as the pay gap, they perpetuate an environment of animosity and disrespect toward female workers and managers, who are considered in terms of these labels rather than their individual characters and strengths. Aside from being unfair, this does not make for a harmonious work atmosphere, which I would think would be an important aspect of the work’s success.

The first article shows that there are clearly plenty of women getting what they want when they ask for it without negative effects. But this is not universal. At the same time, many women who take charge — women who are leaders, CEOs, managers or who just assert their right to ask for what they want in the workplace — are still being branded with these negative terms. The “women should just ask for what they want and they’ll get it” advice does not seem to be guaranteed-success advice just yet. I think that before we start throwing that advice around, we should acknowledge the negative biases that are still prevalent.

So how can we reconcile these poles? Personally, I think that we should certainly encourage women to assert themselves in their professional environments, to ask for what they want. This is, after all, a necessary aspect of changing the system; women must actively challenge their boundaries and be loud. However, I think that we should encourage women to do this with the reminder that it may not always turn out how they want it to. We must acknowledge the possible negative outcomes. Moreover, we must continue to bring awareness to this double standard (men as assertive, women as aggressive) that persists. I hope that as women gain more positions in male-dominated professional spheres, this tendency to throw negative labels at assertive women will die out.

When this year’s Oscar nominations arrived, I — like many others — was disgusted by the complete shut-out of actors of color and female writers and directors. Excluding the designated female actress categories, the nominees are literally all white men.

Haven’t we had enough of this white patriarchy thing by now?

While there is much to discuss on the race side of things, I will focus on gender here. Arguably the worst snub of a female in the Oscars race was Ava DuVernay; her film “Selma” was nominated for Best Picture, but she was not nominated for Best Director. Now, I’ve read many comments online about how she’s just not a great director, we should stop making this a race or gender thing, this is just about talent.

Well, I hate to burst this nice post-racial, post-gender-inequity fantasy bubble, but it really isn’t just about talent. Why? Because when an industry like film remains incredibly white and male-dominated and when there have always been fewer women and minorities nominated for the Oscars, Ava DuVernay’s snub becomes not simply an unfortunate case in an equal, year-to-year competition, but part of a larger, systemic inequality trend. A Washington Post article reports that the Academy is 76 percent male and its voters 77 percent. Only one woman (Kathryn Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker”) has ever won Best Director. So you tell me: Are women really that terrible at acting and directing? Or are all these men subconsciously favoring other men? The latter scenario seems much closer to the truth.

As for the film industry in general, a report on Indiewire details research findings by the New York Film Academy: Out of the top 500 films from 2007 to 2012, 30.8 percent of speaking characters were female and only 10.7 percent of movies included a completely half-and-half cast of women and men. Is it really 2015?

A recent piece on Huffington Post includes comments by Joss Whedon, director of Marvel’s “The Avengers,” concerning the near-complete lack of female leads in superhero movies. According to him, people in film claim that since certain female-led movies in the past weren’t successful, female-led superhero films just “don’t work.”

Whedon hopes that movies like “The Hunger Games” will help shift this culture, but unless they start churning out the female superhero leads, I’m sure this shift will take a while.

Another Huffington Post article discusses the pay gap aspect of film industry patriarchy. Actress Charlize Theron only discovered through the recent Sony hack that her paycheck was less than co-star Chris Hemsworth’s for “Snow White and the Huntsman.” The article points out that Theron’s agent must have had an idea of Hemsworth’s paycheck amount because that’s part of an agent’s job — they have the “inside scoop.” Because the Sony Hack also revealed lower paychecks for other actresses, there seems to be a trend in actresses’ agents not doing enough to negotiate equal pay for them.

So women who hire people to ensure pay equity for them can’t even get it? That’s depressing.

This article advises women to become their own agents, researching their jobs’ monetary worth and expecting to negotiate pay raises to meet men’s salaries. I agree, but it shouldn’t have to be this way. Women shouldn’t still be struggling in an industry where so many of them have so firmly proven themselves (although you could really say that about any industry). Just as women in the stadium can instill self-confidence in girls and inspire them to pursue any dream, women on screen have this same power. We must keep calling out the white men in the Academy and pressuring those in the industry to change so that, hopefully soon, they will start to realize this themselves.

Of the countless Super Bowl advertisements, one in particular made a deep impression on me. It included clips from an experiment conducted by Always, a feminine hygiene brand, in which people of different ages were asked to mime physical actions — run, throw, etc. — “like a girl.” The adults pretended to be weak and silly. But the young girls, unaware of the phrase’s connotation, portrayed vigor and determination.

This was eye-opening for me because I realized that I would have done the same thing the adults did. I have become desensitized to “like a girl” existing as an insult. But this phrase, in evoking the stereotype of females as physically weak, can be incredibly harmful to girls with waning self-confidence, which Always’s study proved tends to begin at puberty.

The young girls in the ad, however, give the phrase positive meaning. In order to maintain this attitude, we must produce more ads and other media conveying this meaning. I am realizing how powerful television ads, which I usually find annoying, are in promoting messages like this one, because they reach large audiences. While I recognize that the ultimate goal of advertising is profit, the favorable response to this Always ad seems to prove that positive and eye-opening messages catch our attention and make us inclined to support the brand, so I hope that more companies will use ads in this way.

Along with advertising, professional sports play a significant role in establishing gender norms because athletes also reach large audiences and are often featured in ads themselves. Thus, something that would surely help redefine the meaning of “like a girl” is greater promotion and coverage of professional women’s sports. There really aren’t any huge female counterparts to the huge men’s teams. The teams we refer to when referencing various cities’ professional sports are always men’s. The teams that are a big deal are always men’s. For goodness sakes, men’s football is so huge that we reschedule meetings so that everyone can watch the Super Bowl.

But why this disparity? Why is the WNBA so much less popular than the NBA? I’ve heard that the women just aren’t as fast-paced and exciting to watch. But whose fault is that? Should we shift some money and efforts from men’s basketball programs to women’s to try to remedy this? As a soccer fan, I can attest that women’s games are just as thrilling and competitive, so why is the men’s World Cup a bigger deal? And why must we add “Women’s” in front of every professional women’s sports league? Why can’t we add “Men’s” in front of men’s to equalize it? In not doing so, we’re perpetuating the idea that men’s teams are the main teams and women’s are those other, special ones.

A recent Boston Globe article suggests that one reason for this disparity between men’s and women’s teams is our culture of long-standing allegiances to traditional — and therefore men’s — teams. It also states that people still perceive women as less physically capable, which is why we need more exposure to female athletes — so that they can prove the opposite and inspire girls. Some women’s teams cited in the article are enhancing their viewerships by promoting themselves in their communities. I think this is an effective start to solving the exposure problem, but as stated on the Women’s Sports Foundation website, women’s sports still receive significantly less funding than men’s, so closing this funding gap is imperative in increasing promotion and exposure.

Sports and advertising can and should work in tandem in promoting the positive meaning of “like a girl.” I hope this starts to happen for the sake of the next generation of women so that they can maintain their confident attitude and not let their supposed physical inferiority degrade their self-esteem.

In my last column, I mentioned that after Anita Sarkeesian began calling out misogyny in the gaming industry, she was hit with intense online harassment that spiraled into death threats. Sarkeesian’s personal information was also compromised, leaving her in a terrifying situation:

Completely unknown harassers possessed the means to harm or even kill her, but since they were anonymous and distant from her, she had no idea how far they would actually go.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the hateful, illiterate comments that exist under every YouTube video, but Sarkeesian’s case brings to light how dangerous the free internet can really be. In an effort to find out how common serious online harassment actually was, I discovered a recent study (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/30/5-facts-about-online-harassment/) done by Pew Research Center which reports that 40 percent of Internet users experience harassment, and half of them don’t know the identities of their harassers.

Even more disturbing than this, but not very surprising, is the fact that internet harassment is a more serious issue for women. While women are slightly less likely to experience online harassment in general, they deal with more severe forms, like stalking and sexual harassment.

As an article (http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/) in Time explains that the harassment women experience is more likely to be rooted in gender, given their history of being discriminated against and abused for being female. It is more often less about “un-
pleasantries” than it is about men seeking to assert their own dominance and silence women for speaking out of their “place.”

So the Internet, then, is used to target not only outspoken people or all people equally, but members of historically victimized groups, adding another means for this victimization that may even be the hardest to escape given the constant presence of the Internet in most of our lives.

Another side to this issue is that online harassment is often used by intimate partners as a form of domestic violence. That same article in Time reports that intimate partners use fake names and accounts to harass former or current partners with stalking and threats of rape or death. In one study cited by the article, a majority of domestic violence victims were threatened or intimidated by their abusers through technology, which includes, of course, access to the Internet. I had been aware of cyberbullying between young people as a major problem, of course, but I had never stopped to think about online harassment being a means of domestic violence. This just adds another item to the list of how the Internet can be used to abuse people.

I guess most people would say that this is an unfortunate consequence of the right to free and open Internet. And yes, I agree that we all have the right to use the Internet. But in my opinion, this use needs to come with limitations. While I have no idea what this would look like practically, there have to be stricter rules for using online names and for interacting with others online. I get the whole freedom of the Internet ideal — I really do — but too often this freedom gets grossly abused and ends up contributing to ongoing oppression of certain bodies of people, like women. For the sake of anyone who is harassed online, we must do something to limit people’s abilities to abuse Internet power so that this abuse cannot get out of hand, as it too often does.

Illustration by Rust

A recent segment on Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC show highlighted an issue that I never before considered: the violent and dehumanizing portrayals of women in many video games and the culture of misogyny that pervades some parts of the online gaming sphere.

Harris-Perry shows scenes from popular video games depicting female characters solely as sexual objects or nameless victims. Anita Sarkeesian, whom Harris-Perry interviews, explains on her YouTube channel, “Feminist Frequency,” that these depictions serve to add elements of raciness or edginess. She also dissects other tropes, like the “damsel in distress,” which objectify women as helpless things dependent on male heroes and only serve to provide motivation for male protagonists.

When she began criticizing the portrayals of females in video games, Sarkeesian was hit with a barrage of online harassment — which evolved into death threats and bomb scares — by angry members of the online male gaming community. Sarkeesian connects her harassment to the misogynistic culture of extremist gaming sects. In her opinion, she is experiencing so much harsh backlash because some male gamers probably feel that women have no place in the gaming culture and that they must not let a woman dictate to them what “their” games should like.

This is probably true. I think we must keep in mind, though, that these are extremist members of the male gaming community and that these inclinations towards harassment and death threats do not reflect male gamers as a whole. Plenty of my male friends play violent video games and are great people. In fact, a study done by the Entertainment Software Association reports that 48 percent of gamers are female. Sarkeesian’s harassment, then, must be coming from a very small and extreme minority. This doesn’t diminish the problem or Sarkeesian’s situation, but I think we should be focusing more on the gaming industry’s role in perpetuating harmful portrayals of women than on the people playing the games.

Furthermore, the issue goes deeper than video games; it pervades all media, including film. I’ve seen countless movies with scenes and plots involving women, often nameless, being tossed around as sexual flings or dominated by male characters, or women whose lives revolve solely around certain males (Bella from “Twilight” and the Bond women come to mind). That being said, I believe that movies are a little more complicated; with many of them, this portrayal of women is depicted in order to illustrate the problem. The males performing violent acts and exploiting people are clearly the bad guys, and the women are characters with whom we are meant to sympathize. In those instances, movies are serving what is, in my opinion, one of their main purposes: shedding light on real life. But if we analyze this issue in video games, we must also analyze it in other media, particularly films.

An article on PBS discussing myths about video game culture states that while sexism exists in this sphere, mainly because males still dominate the industry itself, there are also games that portray women as “powerful and independent.” Such games, however, are apparently still in the minority. An article on the video game site vg24/7 points out the still widely-held belief in this industry that female protagonists don’t sell, stating that it will take an extremely financially successful game with a female protagonist to alter this mind set.

Because the gamers harassing Sarkeesian are extremists and not every game is degrading women, we must watch ourselves before slapping the misogynistic label on the entire male gaming community. Certainly we need to examine those dehumanizing depictions of women in video games and call for action against them, but we must do so with a fair, rather than inflammatory, voice.

Illustration by Cooper-Ellis

When I was growing up, the future I envisioned for myself always included two assumptions: first, that I would get married, and second, that I would have children.

I am sure that most girls and young women hold these same assumptions. Certainly, the traditional perceptions of women as wives and mothers are not the binding societal roles they once were, but the expectations they established linger today; these two roles are still considered ones that women usually fulfill. And often, when something becomes usual, it becomes expected.

At some point, I began to seriously consider these roles with respect to my own life. I realized that children did not really factor into my desires to forge my career and travel the world. This is not to say that women cannot do these things and have children at the same time. This is also not to say that I hate children. I simply recognized that I had only been assuming my eventual maternal role because this assumption had been socially ingrained in my psyche. As for marriage, I have no idea if I will find someone I love enough to marry, but I am gradually relinquishing the feeling that it is something I must do.

According to one CNN article, 47 percent of American women between ages 15 and 44 are childless. But while childless women are clearly becoming more common, they are not necessarily becoming more understood. This article discussed common misconceptions about such women and the pressure they experience to be mothers. Laurie White, 43 years old and childless, is constantly questioned about her lack of children. People perceive this lack as White’s “problem” and remind her that there are countless children who don’t have parents, implying that she should at least adopt if she wants to be a good person.

This gets to the misconception that childless women are selfish, which also relates to the perception that motherhood is woman’s biological duty; women are made with the capacity to bear children. Therefore it is their obligation to fulfill that capacity. In order to achieve female equality, we must eliminate such absolutes and recognize the right every woman has to make her own choices about her body. If a woman decides that having children is not for her, do we really want her to be forced to raise a child? Women have the right to determine what is best for themselves, even if that includes not having children.

Another article on The Huffington Post discusses one young woman, Bri Seeley, wanting to go a step further to permanent sterilization. Seeley had always been certain she never wanted children, and long-term consumption of the birth control pill started causing emotional and physical side effects. I understand the reasons behind sterilization: I do not want to continue taking my birth control pill every day for years on end, mainly because long-term dosage causes side effects, like in Seeley’s case. Also, the pill is not 100 percent guaranteed to prevent pregnancy, so if I am certain I don’t want children, I will want permanent birth control.

Undoubtedly, permanent sterilization is perceived by many as too radical; not only would a woman be refusing to utilize her child-bearing capacity, she would be eliminating that capacity altogether. Seeley was consistently refused permanent sterilization until she hit 30, largely because sterilized women under 30 are proven to be more likely to regret their decision. While I do believe in woman’s right to have this procedure, I also understand the minimum age guideline; I’m not sure I would trust myself at age 23 to make a decision that, after several more years of formative living, I would not question at age 30.

My point is, women have every right to decide to be childless or even sterilized. In order to make such women less stigmatized, we must question our assumptions about female expectations on an individual and a societal level. We must loosen our absolute perceptions of roles and recognize the right that all women have to make decisions about their own bodies and lives.

Illustration by Hernandez

Recently, I watched a news segment on MSNBC that discussed the problem of poor sanitation in girls’ bathrooms in many schools in India. The reporter visited one school in New Delhi, where the girls’ toilet facilities are rudimentary and filthy—consisting of holes in the ground, grimy floors, mosquitoes that breed diseases like malaria and dysfunctional hand washing stations due to issues with water supply and sewage. The World Health Organization estimates that these issues cause 1.8 billion school days around the world to be lost. That statistic shocked me; I had never thought about poor sewage being the reason children do not attend school. This is not a correlation discussed often enough.

The boys’ bathrooms are not much better, but boys can more easily relieve themselves in the open and, unlike girls who hit puberty, do not need to deal with menstrual hygiene. This gets to the gender aspect of the issue: it is, of course, unfair that sanitation must come harder for girls simply because of their physical makeup. But poor toilet sanitation also makes education harder for them; bathroom conditions like those described above discourage many girls from attending school. Amid the international movement to provide more girls with education, unclean bathrooms seem like a particularly unnecessary and sad deterrent.

We do not usually discuss water quality and poor sanitation as issues of gender, but this report made me realize that we need to change that. Women and girls are clearly disproportionately affected by these problems, so we cannot talk about water and sanitation issues without talking about their effects on females and the need to improve conditions for them.

Renovating girls’ school toilets seems to be a crucial place to start. The news report highlighted one New Delhi school that installed new sinks and toilets with hand-washing stations and a display of proper hand sanitation practices. Rainwater collectors replaced polluted or over-pumped groundwater, providing the girls with clean running water. The students adjusted well to the new system, eagerly washing their hands together and using the new bathrooms with ease.

Outside of India, other groups are taking action on this issue. According to an article  on WomenDeliver, a non-profit group in Bangladesh called BRAC has recently added management of menstrual hygiene to their Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene program, which provides education on hygiene and improved access to water and sanitation. A subset of this initiative, their Secondary School Sanitation Program has gotten over 4,000 secondary schools in Bangladesh to build separate toilets with proper water and waste facilities for girls. This organization clearly understands the correlation between sanitation, education, and females; they are setting an active example that other initiatives must follow.

It is unacceptable that poor toilet facilities can impede a girl’s education. While issues of sanitation and access to clean water cannot be separated from broader issues of poverty in the developing world, the examples set by the New Delhi school and BRAC’s programs prove that progress is possible. They provide hope that people are recognizing the relationship between water and sanitation and female students. But in order to extend these types of sanitation models and initiatives to more schools, we need to make a discussion of that relationship even more prominent when we talk about getting more girls worldwide into school. Extending girls’ educational opportunities is not just about improving the availability of traditional school supplies or schools themselves; it is about ensuring that something like an unclean bathroom does not prevent a girl from receiving an education.

Illustration by Tyle Schuh.

Recently I watched an interview that MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry conducted with Roxane Gay, author of a book entitled “Bad Feminist.” It struck me as an interesting concept, since I personally don’t believe in the idea of a “good feminist.”

Some of the “bad feminist” actions Gay mentions in her book include enjoying music that she “knows is terrible for women” and “[playing] dumb with repairmen because it’s just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.” I’m sure I do these types of things, but I have never questioned my identity as a feminist. I must have subconsciously come to the same conclusion that Gay did about that exhausting perch on the “moral high ground”: Sometimes, taking the easier route is what keeps us sane.

Ironically, it may also be what preserves our personal freedom; doing things that supposedly fly in the face of feminist principles often means making the choices we truly wish to make, which I consider an inherently feminist principle. This goes along with Gay’s ultimate point, which is that feminism is not confined to a universal list of dos and don’ts; it is what each individual makes it. I personally view the term broadly as expressing support and desire for gender equality. However, as Gay points out, we often consider the concept of feminism too rigidly, with many of us assuming it is only for radical women. In doing so, we fail to recognize the role the individual plays in his or her own definition.

In her recent United Nations speech, Emma Watson touched on feminism’s perception as radical by pointing out that it is often equated to “man-hating,” with many women choosing not to identify with the term. I get the sense from non-feminist-identifying women that they think it is better if everyone moves on and stops making women’s issues such a big deal. But part of the point that Gay and Harris-Perry made was that we have to keep talking about these issues and making them a big deal, because girls and women need us to. We must keep the conversation going so that we can reshape the image of feminism to fit everyone and to bring us all together in a unified force for equality.

Here at Whitman, student activist groups have done fairly well spurring conversations on racial and, most recently, economic inequality. The on-campus organization Feminists Advocating Change and Empowerment (FACE) has kept the gender equality conversation going, particularly by bringing amazing female speakers and artists to Whitman. It is important that these groups work together in the overarching cause for social justice, because all issues of inequality are connected; this brings us back to why feminism must have individualized definitions.

In her interview with Harris-Perry, Gay mentions that as a black woman, she always felt disillusioned with the feminist movement, which she saw as something for white women. Re-branding feminism as something malleable will eliminate rigid preconceptions, allowing us to synthesize the parts of ourselves that fit into multiple groups and movements and to acknowledge our connections among all issues of inequality. If all of us, not only feminists, acknowledge these connections and perform activism as a unified body, we will be an even stronger force for change. This mindset will help activists on campus and at large maintain conversations about and a collective passion for social issues and hopefully bring about change for everyone.