Posted on by Stephanie's Corner

I Still Don’t Support The Women’s March

Last year I laid out as to why I did not support the Women’s March and this year my position still has not changed. ( Click here for last year’s article)

A march of angry women in every city won’t change anything.

The Women’s March a year ago aimed to start a movement of women who would continue their activism long after they had packed up their silly little hats and went home.
The #WomensMarch took place in January 2017, but the #MeToo started in October 2017.
For all women who will claim it’s a part of the March, it’s not.
If those “brave” women came out the night of the March, it would have made it dynamic. But they failed to correlate one and the other.

The March last year were all women who were reeling from Hillary Clinton’s loss to President Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Some black women felt betrayed that 53% of white women voted for Trump, while 94% of black women voted for Clinton, yet some underrepresented women felt their issues such as racism, discrimination, police brutality, LGBTQ inclusion, and immigration, were relegated in favor of issues that matter most to straight, white, middle-class women. (Source: The New York Times.)

Many groups felt that they were not welcomed in the March. One of women groups who felt silenced in the march were those who are anti-abortion. The Women’s March partnered with groups like Planned Parenthood, and refused to partner with anti-abortion organizations.
The head of the Women’s March was quoted as saying, “We’re not looking for folks to fall in line with the Women’s March agenda,” she said. “We understand that every organization and every individual will approach their strategy for how they engage in the movement in their own way. “

The Women’s March is “an attempt” at unity, but it failed last year and has again this year. All these protests do is separate us even more, they don’t bond us together.
The Constitution recognizes a number of inalienable human rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and the right to a fair trial by jury. Next year why don’t they all buy airline tickets to Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, and any other Muslim country to fight for their sisters rights over there?

FACT: If it hadn’t been for the Republican Congress of 1920 that voted for it. The Democrats would’ve taken longer for you to have that right! The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, of course, gave women the right to vote. It was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on Aug. 18, 1920. Go and tell that to all your liberal friends, I dare you.

My self-worth is not tied to what society says I should wear, how I should speak, who I can date, and what I do for a living. I’m a strong, independent adult, capable of taking care of myself. As a woman living in 2018, I am not oppressed, neither is any other woman today living in the USA. What right has President Trump taken from women? The answer: none

In the age where actual action is the only way to make change, every person that has held a picket sign in 2017 and now, still hasn’t caught on to that. Picketing and protesting is the old way things were done. By actually standing up and being the one to make a change is the only way in 2018 anything can change.

Instead of taking that job that dictates how much money you will earn based on gender, stand up and demand equality.

Instead of feeling the need to sleep with the boss to make it to the top, work hard to earn it.

Instead of “crying wolf” and looking for pity, stand up and be that example.

That is how change occurs.  Not by posting quotes on social media, marching or putting on a self-pity show.

Change is never easy. Adults have a hard time with it- kids are easier to adapt at it. But if you want to evolve, you need to actually take that step towards it, not backwards steps.

Celebrities can be put on their pedestals to give the most profound speeches. But again, that does nothing because they aren’t taking action, physical step by step action. They are just listening to hear themselves talk. It looks good for their publicity.

The bottom line is this: You can talk the talk all you want. But when you don’t walk the talk all it is in the end is just a lot of noise.

Posted on by Stephanie's Corner

Sex, Lies, and Abuse: How the #MeToo Won’t Change Anything

If you ever read my review on “Fifty Shades of Grey,” then you know where I will be going with this article. If you never did read it, let me paraphrase it here for you: “Christian Grey has sadistic sex that leaves Anastasia sometimes bleeding and too bruised to move. The fact that Fifty Shades has taken eroticism violence against women and re-branded it as romance, is something of complete irony. Love is not abuse, and abuse is not love. Just because our society today have erased the shame of hooking up and joke openly about adult entertainment, doesn’t mean that we should fall for what Christian Grey truly is: an abuser. What the movie “Fifty Shades” wants women to believe is that women can fix violent, controlling men by being obedient and loving. That in a nutshell is false. It’s not okay for a man to use sex to control, manipulate and introduce pain to a woman. Christian Grey believes the physical pain a man would inflict on a woman is not as bad as the pain of losing him. Not cool. Not cool at all.”

I can tell you that Fifty Shades of Grey grossed $166.2 million in North America and $404.8 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $571 million, against a budget of $40 million! And most of the women who went to see this movie, bought merchandise and the book, NEVER complained about sexual harassment, sexual abuse or sexual assault. They were also part of this #MeToo movement, which is hypocrisy at it’s finest.

The #MeToo movement has gone from bad to worse. It doesn’t help women at all. Instead it takes the core part of what true feminism is; equality in the workplace, and make it even harder for women. What man in his right mind is going to now want to hire a woman, let alone be left alone with a woman in his office? And what is worse is the fact that some women are taking advantage of the situation by using their sexual relationships they have had in the past with men they worked with, relationships that were consented. Not to mention that sleeping with a boss or co-worker, didn’t get them to where they wanted in the workplace or that the relationship ended badly, they now turn around and say that they were sexually assaulted. Some have also been proven to have falsified evidence to say that they were abused forty years ago.

That’s another thing. If you are abused, you don’t wait forty years and then turn around and say, “Oh, I was afraid for my career at the time, or that I didn’t think people would believe me.” And I am supposed to believe you now? The woman’s health and mental state should ALWAYS come before career. And in that forty years that you wait, you let the guy develop a pattern of behavior. Besides the fact that people do change over that amount of time as well. I can personally tell you that I am not the same woman I was twenty years ago. I can only imagine how these men must feel who are being accused of this, forty years later. I don’t care if it was five years ago, either. Time to come out and say something is the moment it happens, not when the “best opportunity” for the woman to come forward.

That is wrong on so many levels.

Also, has it ever occurred to some people, that willingly sleeping with a boss or co-worker is not assault? The only time it is assault is if you are blackmailed to do so. Then it’s classified as rape. When it is not consented sex, and the man continues to do so, that is considered rape. Rape is, never okay. I repeat, rape is never okay. Now we as society are still dealing with rape, as being one of the highest percentage of crimes year after year, but the media doesn’t talk about it. You hear stories on the news, but there is never a discussion on any talk show of how to curb this crime. Rape kits are also to blame for why most guys “get away with it”

Last week in my of my hockey groups, this guy posted a picture of a woman in the front row behind the bench, wearing a low cut white shirt, along with her coat, opened, and a hat on. You can bet that there were sexist comments, as you would think there would be, on a post like that. The bottom line of why I bring it up is simply this:

This girl wore that shirt on purpose. It’s obvious. But the funny thing is, she’ll wear that shirt, be noticed for all the wrong reasons, and then turn around and sue guys for sexual harassment. (I’m making a point, not saying that this girl in the photo will do that.) That’s what’s wrong with it. Not the fact that she set guys up to even look at her. She totally knew the deal. The sad part is she used her body for that attention instead of her mind. When women stop falling for the “Let’s dress a certain way to be noticed,” crap, then maybe a woman can be appreciated for her brains, not her boobs.

On WFAN’s Facebook page, which is totally being bombarded with negative posts about it’s new afternoon show. I saw a few very sexists comments that talked about how women do’t know how to talk about sports. That women have no place in that category. See; double standard is still alive. Men think they know “everything” and that women are “dumb, stupid, out of touch, or belong elsewhere.”  Maybe when men’s perceptions of women change, women will change. After all, both sexes tend to do things to please the other instead of doing things that please themselves.  We try so hard to make everyone else around us happy, that we forget that the most important person’s happiness is our own.

If that is the one lesson that we all can learn from #MeToo, then I hope most learn it. Remember, respect is earned, not a given.  You need to respect yourself first and foremost if you ever want someone else to reciprocate that respect.  I hope in 2018, the media makes a woman famous for expanding her mind, not her breasts.