Internet : A voice to feminist journalists

Internet definitely changed feminism. You don’t need to be Simone de Beauvoir or some kind of Jeanne d’Arc to be a feminist writer.
If before women were struggling to defend their rights, today the situation is completely different. It is way simpler to sit behind our screen to write and post our opinion on gender inequality. 

February 1971; Swiss women have the right to vote. Thanks to hundreds of women who fought for it finally a women has a voice. But that doesn’t mean inequality collapsed. Not at all. Women continued to fight for a lot of other things (abortion for example) in very different ways (riots, books, add…). Until internet appeared… Feminist had a new wide range of communication. Thankfully internet is a good guy, it doesn’t make any distinction. Let’s face it ; internet opened new doors for us. I thought it would be interesting to see those new communication tools, internet offered to feminist. What would feminism have looked like without internet? Surely not like this…
Websites as a voice for feminism:

Feminism is not about shouting “men are jerks, women are better”.
Mona Eltahawy, a feminist journalist, fears an autumn for women after the Arab Spring. She uses internet to post article on a foreign policy website to reveal the conditions of women in the Arab world. All right we already knew that women weren’t treated like this:

In her article “why do they hate us”, Mona Eltahawy denounces

“Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun”

No doubt that without internet her article would never have been published in an Arab country.
I can’t imagine this picture in the Egyptian libraries or walls:

On the same website we can also look at a map where we can discover the countries where it is less secure to be a women:

If it wasn’t on internet, this map wouldn’t have been published in a book or maybe in some of them. But as we can see there are no countries where women are considered physically secured.

But Mona Elhatawy article and those maps brought many feedbacks on social networks. As we can see here is how the articles have been commented:

A very encouraging result…

Blogs: Another voice to feminism

All right, you don’t work for a huge online newspaper. That is fine; internet permits you to have a…blog!
And there are so many blogs, so many feminist writing about their experiences or expressing their opinion that making a selection was really hard.

But I managed to rank those blogs by preference:

– Feministing: Yes feminist but also actual! It is like reading your newspaper in a feminine version. For example on the 14^th of November, America is talking about the “women triangle” that shook the CIA. Well feministing is going to give you the other version “a CIA director who cheated on his wife”. And not the other version, “the women who disturbed CIA”
Yes Feministing is definitely a blog to read in the morning while taking your breakfast.

– Echnide of the snake: what a weird name for a blog. The blogger started it in 2003 and it mainly reflects what happen every day in the women world. For example we discover an article about an Irish woman who died after being denied abortion.

– Viedemeuf:  “chick life” in English, is a blog written by every woman who witnessed a sexist event or something that surprised her in her life. Owned by the group “osez le feminsime” it gives the opportunity to citizens to rule the blog.  For example Helen, a blogger, says:

Today in Walt Disney’s bathroom I saw a man cleaning his baby; why are they baby equipment only in women’s bathroom?

This was just an extract among every other blogs you can find. Feminist journalism exists, but also anti-feminism journalism. But I am not going to give you any links…I am not going to do any advertisement for the enemy!

Videos : 3 minutes to say “yes to feminism”.

The good thing about a video it is that you can hear people talking, see them acting and get the message easily.
It might be easier to be funny through a video than a text… Not for everybody of course but a group of young people succeed at being very funny through their videos.
It came from a simple idea: what if we exchanged our roles? Let’s put a woman in the shoes of a man for 2 minutes, make her act like a man and see what it looks like. Well the result is pretty hilarious. Judge by yourself:

“Osez le feminism”, in English “dare feminism” are hundreds of feminist militants who come together to fight for women rights. Videos are just a small part of their work; they have a serious website, with serious event and serious people.

Pictures: A simple and quick voice to feminism

Ever wondered what a feminist looked like?

Or

I bet you want to have the same! Here is a website where you can buy it: The feminist T-shirt

Let’s take a look at another kind of pictures:
Some of them are worth a thousand words.

Sixteen women of Professor Rachel Seidman’s Women in the Public Sphere course at Duke University decided to put words and pictures together. On their blog Who needs feminism.
They post pictures of people from all over the world who explains why they need feminism for.
Children, man, woman, from all generations come all together to say why feminism is important.
Here are some pictures:

Social networking: the newest voice to feminism

Twitter, facebook ect… who didn’t hear about it? If you are not on twitter or facebook that is fine, but if you don’t know what the hell we are talking about, I am going to ask you “how are you reading this from Mars?!”.
And those tools are definitely excellent tools to spread a message.
The facebook group “Feminism” and”feminist frequency” organizes events, and tells us all about feminism and women in the world. “Liking” one of these pages allows all your facebook friends to know that you are feminist or like what the group does.

And we have feminist twists that we can follow! “Feminist” hulk is an amazing feminist twitter profile that I love to follow because it is hard not to laught!
Thanks to twitter feminism is now following you!

*We need feminism to do our duty as women, mothers, employees or simply for not being judged…we don’t need to be perfect (translation of the twitt)

If after all this you think that they are not enough messages and expression for feminism, I don’t know what to add to convince you. We can’t deny that internet changed the way we live. Everyone has a voice. The only thing you need is a computer and the wifi.
Dear internet, Mozilla, google, facebook, twitter ect… thank you for being awesome feminist friends!