Hi everyone and welcome to my first TWIL post! TWIL stands for “this week I learned” so in other words, welcome to my first of many weekly reflections!

This week we started a new project about women’s suffrage and one of the main things we highlighted in these first two days was the topic of slut-shaming. Now obviously I was aware of the word and knew it’s meaning but the way we were discussing it in class kind of surprised me. I’d only ever heard of it in a joking way like a friend calling her other friend a slut or someone calling themselves one. Because of this I was surprised in our first class when people referred to it as the S word and taking it so serious. It was only after watching a 1970s SNL episode where a man yells at a woman calling her a slut that I comprehended how powerful the word was. This reaction was clearly based off of my current perspective. In my opinion the word is a lot more normalized as less serious than it was many years ago. What I’m more used to is shady comments about a women rather than outright calling her a slut.

This is exactly the type of behaviour my class and I saw from Jane Thornthwaite (our local MLA) . A clip went viral recently of Jane Thornthwaite eluding to Bowinn Ma (another female MLA) being a slut and using her looks to get success. Ms Willemse showed us that tweet and screen recording in class and we were all shocked. I had already heard about it because I’m very interested in politics and like to talk about current events in the media with my family a lot. However it was shocking and upsetting to actually see the clip where a grown powerful woman acts so childish. I was always told by my mom that girly drama is the worst as a teenager and settles as an adult but that clip was straight out of Mean Girls. Bowinn Ma responded to this in a very mature way and instead of getting catty and fighting back against Jane used it to spread a message. She used this example to push for women in politics and show that the business and political worlds still deal with tons of misogyny.

 

This example like many others proves that girls still tear down other girls. The suffragette movement were learning about was women all over the world fighting men for in order for females to be taken seriously. The suffragettes had many successes and actually made some big strides towards equality. Sadly nowadays women will preach girls supporting girls and then tear each other down any chance they get. If feminists or females in general want to make anymore difference in our equality we have to give each other the respect first then we can fight back against society.