Anita's Share: Calling Out Misogyny

From Anita: This is a different kind of share. This slam poetry came up on my Facebook feed and I found it really powerful. It got me thinking about several things. The first is that I love its message and it is something I would like my nearly 16 year old son to see but I know it wouldn’t land the way I want it to if I shared it with him - that’s the reality of teenagers. The best way for it to have impact would be if he came across it, shared by peers, like this poet, on his own social media. He might even tell me about it as a find he’d made himself, and we could chat about it. This has happened occasionally with a few big issues in the last couple of years and I’ve welcomed the moments. But my son is a few weeks off turning 16 so is about to be bumped from social media in Australia. And while I accept that the statistics show that he has probably encountered misogynistic content there, and I would rather he hadn’t, he might also have stumbled across this, and listened to it in a way that he never would if it had been shared with him by his boring, earnest mum. So how do we plan to reach out young people once we’ve cut them off from their peers and they only have the boring adults to listen to? I would prefer my kids to grow up in a world where there was no social media, but it is here and it is their channel of engagement with the world already, and thinking about how I can communicate the message of this poem to my son makes me wonder what opportunities we are about to lose with this generation of digital natives as a result of the ban. And then, reflecting on the message of the poem itself, I am also struck by the immense challenge of trying to build and promote respectful and safe human interaction, in a world where jokes at the expense of others have been a crucial part of group solidarity for ever and where standing up against that continues to be a solitary act and probably marks you as boring and earnest, like a lecturing mum. I don’t have any answers, but I hope this poem continues to reach people and make them think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA8u7BbmzxI