I was talking to this twenty-something year old woman who said women’s rights are no longer an issue – ‘not like in the old days’ – because women 'can do what they like.’ I said what about women in countries where rape is not considered a crime or if it is they take years to prosecute the men involved because all deny it was rape and she ‘was asking for it?’ What about women who are stoned or who have acid thrown on them because they have been wrongly accused of adultery? What about women who want to hold down a job or get a better education but they are beaten or shot in an effort to stop them? What about when the ‘old’ wife who is thrown out of a village to fend for herself, with nothing, to make room for the ‘new’? What about child brides who are married to disgusting older men usually as a form of payment? What about so called crimes of ‘honour’ where a young woman is killed because she loves someone her male relatives are against? What about female genital mutilation where a young girl is forcibly held down and her clitoris cut out with a crude razor and then be roughly sewn up often with little or no vaginal opening left to her? What about we pull our heads out of the sand and realize all women, regardless of colour, status or nationality, should be allowed to live as they choose, think as they believe and act as their conscience dictates without a man ripping that right away from them?
What affects one woman affects us all. If you think it doesn’t then you don’t think.
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