International Women’s Day not frothy pinks

Wednesday is International Women’s Day. No need to panic: despite what some sharp-el-bowed marketers might want you to believe, this is not another reason to rush out and buy the woman/women in your life panicked petrol-station flowers.

After all, South Africa’s Women’s Day in August has already been commercially co-opted into a shabby ladies day requiring chocolates, salon vouchers, and WhatsApp messages with pink hearts.

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Commemorating women’s struggles

It infuriates me because it’s so toxic, taking a serious occasion created to commemorate women’s unique struggles – and the role they played in fighting patriarchal apartheid – and then reinventing it as something pink and frothy, something insubstantial.

It’s gas-lighting.

And it’s served up with the expectation of gratitude. Frankly there aren’t enough hours in the day to explain to every innocent who says ‘Happy Women’s Day” to me that it’s actually a reason for great unhappiness, for protest – not for a manicure.

So I’ll say it here instead: International Women’s Day on 8 March, like South Africa’s Women’s Day on 9 August, is about highlighting the issues women face, and the distance gender equality still has to go.

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And, boy, do we have far to go…

For instance, last Tuesday in Iran, 35 schoolgirls were admitted to hospital after a suspected poisoning. This was the latest in a spate of similar attacks, the fourth in one city alone in the last week.

Since November, hundreds of girls have been poisoned at schools across five provinces in an attempt to shut down their education.

This follows months of protests against enforced headscarf wearing, because in Iran women break the law by not covering their heads in public.

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But that’s an Arabic thing, you say. Then consider autonomy in the west: in several ‘liberal” countries, women are now banned from choosing to wear headscarves; reproductive rights are being rolled back across the world, notably in the US; even online, 44% of AI systems demonstrate a gender bias.

Consider domestic violence, rape, femicide, education, health-care, sex trafficking, the gender pay gap, online trolling – my God(dess), there is so much work to be done!

International Women’s Day is about driving this work forward. Women need your activism – not another last-minute bouquet.

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