Eh you (point at a female in the audience), what are you doing here?

Shouldnt you be in the kitchen making me a sandwich? Whenever my male friend makes such a joke, he thinks hes being oh so very funny and ironic. Well, in a post-gender society, perhaps it would be so, but we have not reached that stage in the fight for gender parity where feminism is redundant. In fact, we are far from it and we still face very ponderous issues to solve such as the prevalence of gender roles we are expected to play, the objectification of women, and the damaging ideals of beauty created by the mass media. Let me share a surprising fact single ladies actually earn more than their male counterparts UNTIL they get married. Thereafter, their income drops and the proverbial glass ceiling takes effect. Why? Their employers believe that getting married entails taking on familial responsibilities for women that would lead to less than satisfactory work from them. The inverse is true for men. They believe that men will work harder to provide for their families. Women are then expected to be the ones to drop everything at work to take care of domestic responsibilities and leave their careers. We can see this marked difference between gender roles for the men and women in Japan in particular, where it could be said that gender roles are more deeply entrenched. Japanese women on average spend 40 hours a week in the office, then do get this 30 hours of housework a week while their husbands only do 3 hours. Thats 10 times more housework for women. No wonder Japanese women are so reluctant to marry and give up her careers and commit themselves to a life of drudgery at the domestic hearth, and this is reflected in the fact that almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably half of those will always be It is true that we are seeing an increasing number of women who have managed to juggle career and family, and these women are trumpeted as models, beacons for the rest of womankind to follow. But the very fact that so much attention is paid to these superwomen already indicates to us that this is exceptional and we hold unfair expectations of women in juggling the many roles they play. So if we want to boost fertility rates (which is good), and to keep more women in the workforce after childbirth (which is also good), we should seek to have more equitable distribution of family responsibilities. This is where the cause of feminism is still relevant and necessary.

Next, the widespread objectification of women by the mass media is a truly shameful crime that is committed on a very large scale every day. One can see this when one drives down Orchard Road - large billboards flanking both sides down its entire length, in which women are placed in compromised positions in full view of everyone, even the youngest of children, who will be brought up thinking that this is normal for women. The portrayal of women as objects of desire that do not have emotions, and only have worth insofar as they are able to satisfy lust is detrimental to women everywhere. This has led to higher rates of rape and sexual abuse of women and engenders appalling attitudes such as audaciously evaluating women as hot or not in public (which is bad). In this way we promulgate a pernicious message that women are but tools who are incapable of thinking, thus you can do whatever you want with them and feminism is entirely justified if only for the fact that feminists are trying to counteract this. Lastly, every single day, we are bombarded with wholly unattainable ideals of beauty that denigrates women who cannot attain them. I just flipped open my copy of Today newspaper this morning, and counted 14 ads aimed at women for treatments to help them lose weight, or improve their skin, or even increase their bust size a whopping 14. This, my friends, in a newspaper of only 58 pages. We see gloomy photos of women before and their beautiful, radiant selves after whatever treatment theyre advertising, and read testimonials about how terrible these womens lives were before treatment and how radically transformed it was for the better after. We are made to believe that if we in any way, bear any semblance to the before states of these women in such advertisements, we are supposed to feel bad about ourselves that we are not attractive, that we are not worthy of attention and we have to patronise these companies to solve these problems and to make us feel better about ourselves. The pervasiveness of the use of Photoshop in the mass media is also harmful for then we have truly unattainable standards of beauty impossible proportions, skin airbrushed to perfection, preternaturally white teeth and we end up having what are essentially mannequins as the standard of beauty. This is truly destructive for young girls especially, who are struggling to find their place in the world, and are most receptive to these subliminal messages in the mass media. They just want to be

loved and they think that to be loved they have to look like the women they see on glossy magazine covers or on television. And we see the impact of this in how widespread anorexia nervosa and bulimia, two terrible, terrible illnesses, are in teenage girls today. The role of feminism then in this case is to draw attention to how comically unreachable our ideals are and I cannot stress enough how important this is for the sake of the young girls who have fallen prey to the damaging ideals of beauty in todays world. Before I end, Id just like to say this. You might think that making sexist jokes are funny, because they are ironic and we live in a post-gender world. But no, those jokes, they trivialise very real and serious issues that impact and affect many women around the world who are punished each day simply because they are a woman. Ask the girl in Afghanistan who has to stay home and look after her younger siblings while her brothers go off to school, not daring to ask to go too, for that would mean death threats for her, do you think those jokes are funny? Ask any woman who works in the modelling industry or any industry that objectifies women, who believes that she has lost her prerogative to feel or be heard, do you think those jokes are funny? Ask the high school student who holes herself in the toilet between lessons retching up her recess because she believes she has to reach the ideal standards of thinness propagated by the mass media to be of worth, do you think those jokes are funny? And when perhaps, in the future, we do live in a world where your gender does not matter and we have gender equality, maybe we all will be able pass such jokes. But till then, please do not. So people, lets all learn how to make our own sandwiches.