I am sick of Women's Day!!

Yet another "Women's Day" has gone past and by the end of the day, I was just so sick of all the "Happy Women's Day" posts and WhatsApp messages. (I sometimes also feel the same after reading the Mother's Day posts.) I had totally ignored the newspapers yesterday as I did not want to go through all those articles about how great women are. "Oh, women are just so compassionate." "Women are the nurturers." "They are beautiful creatures of nature." "They are so intuitive." I just wanted to stay away from all these stereotypes just as much as I wanted to avoid looking (and getting angry over) all the advertisements of Women's Day offers, the spa and beauty packages, the jewelry gift ideas, and discounts. Despite that I still stumbled upon a saree shop giving discount equal to half the age of their women customer, and it irked me no end. All these messages, posts and advertisements are irritating to me.

One of the messages, which I received from multiple people yesterday went like this: "You're one half of the world and the reason for the other half." Excuse me? It's not like women reproduce on their own? Yes, they bear children. But that is because at least one of the two sexes has to bear the offspring after the two together reproduce. And nature / biology, granted that physiology to the female sex. That's it. Period.

I hate all these messages. They all are like, "Let's celebrate women because women are this and women are that." I myself just forwarded one simple "Happy Women's Day" message because the others which were going all gaga about how great we women are were just stupid. They were just so against the whole idea and the whole spirit of International Women's Day.

The whole idea of International Women's Day is about gender equality, not telling the world how special women are. We should be arguing that we are not very different from the other half of the population and hence we should be treated as their equals. What we actually do is the exact opposite. We tell them, "Oh, we are so different from you all. We are special. So, please give us special treatment." That's just plain revolting! We are not special. We are not extraordinary. We are just like you. Biologically, we and you have different functions and just like our jobs, we fulfill those functions. That doesn't make us different and that definitely doesn't make us special. We do not need this chivalry really. This day which had a lot of meaning initially has been reduced to a marketing gimmick.

P.S. (added as an afterthought) A friend of mine today wrote about "benevolent sexism". The way we celebrate Women's Day nowadays is a perfect example of "benevolent sexism". Please Google it and read about it. And please learn to differentiate. It is actually more harmful to the goal of feminism that hostile sexism is.

Please also read my previous linked post here.