This past Tuesday was the 100th anniversary of
International Women’s Day. What may be misconstrued to the unaware as a holiday
celebrating the sexiness of Brazilian, Dutch and other foreign women is
actually a day dedicated to women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, hold
public office and end discrimination.
As a result, I got to thinking about what it means to be a woman in America
compared to elsewhere.

I first was very thankful for my blessings. I can attend
college, write publicly for a newspaper and apply for jobs without
discrimination. That’s pretty great. I think women my age and younger in the
United States tend to forget and neglect these simple rights they may not
otherwise have.

That’s what really got me thinking. While American women
have been trampling around with their breasts flopping all over the place complaining about how they don’t get treated equally, women in the Middle East
have been fighting for more basic things, like legal protection against widespread
violence and sexual abuse.

Stemming from the protests in Egypt is an opportunity for
female representation in an otherwise highly gender discriminatory country. “With
the dust of the uprising still unsettled, women’s rights activists are well
aware that, over the coming weeks, they will have to seize the moment and fight
the battle for representation one institution at a time,” writes Basma Atassi of Al Jazeera. “Their success or failure may set the course for how the women’s
rights scene will look like over the next decade.” 

That, to me, is amazing. That’s what International Women’s
Day is about. Women, just like anyone else, should have a voice in society.

A lot of women in America, however, misuse and abuse
feminism. What was initially defined as a movement to establish equal
political, economic and social rights and opportunities now has the associated
definition of hating men and fighting for crosswalk figures to have skirts and
ponytails.

Take for instance, how Scott Adams recently wrote about
men’s rights and was ripped apart by some women who took his commentary to a
completely over-the-top level, to the point that he had to delete the post in
hopes of retreating all the cat claws on him.
I, for one, very much enjoyed his post. One of the best lines in it was that
fairness is an illusion – that it is unobtainable in the real world. Let’s be
honest here: When you are stuck in a room with a man and a woman and you have a
jar to open and a button to sew back, it’s pretty obvious to whom you will come
to with each of these problems. And I think that is okay.

What’s not okay is for women to continue to draw attention
to miniscule things that aren’t really worth exhausting nerves over (“Why
wasn’t I chosen to open that jar? Is it because I’m a female? I should be
given an equal opportunity to open that jar and all jars for that matter,
despite my not having as much strength and a complete disinterest in opening
jars.”). What’s also not okay is to force men into tiptoeing around issues and
taking what Adams calls the path of least resistance.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of women power – but
not when it results in the subduement of others, i.e. men. In 1994, there were
supposedly approximately 70 percent unclaimed scholarships for women in engineering –
why didn’t those go to men? One of the ballsiest articles I have read discusses
how opportunities should be merit driven and how women shouldn’t be given an
advantage just because they are women. This is probably hard for women to swallow in America because they are so
used to getting the easy ride, but I think if we want to live in as equal a
society as we can, women should have to work just as hard as men to get to the
same places.

I think society is still trying to assimilate to the
possibility of power, leadership and strength coming in the form of a
skirtsuit. If women want to keep the momentum going, they need to stop drawing
attention to themselves in the wrong ways. Don’t be that woman who complains
how her husband doesn’t do a fair share in the kitchen when you’re never the
one to mow the lawn or change the lightbulbs.

Victoria Yakovleva ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in chemical engineering.