Name: Blessy Fernandez
Community/State: Goulburn, New South Wales
School: Mulwaree High School
Age/Grade: 17 Years, Year 12
Bio: Click here
“Life is a roadtrip with twists and turns. How can we support one another to navigate the road to gender equality?”
A woman’s life is in fact a road trip, in which they’ve been locked into a car with a broken brake and dysfunctional gear-stick, the roads they travel filled with potholes and “No Through Road” signs, in which their attempts to achieve complete liberation and gender equality will cause their navigators to re-route, and direct them onto the path which is deemed socially correct. Both professionally and socially, there are numerous instances in life in which women are stopped at the red-light, whilst men drive through, in the adjacent lanes.
We live in a society in which “Sex Sells” is the businessman’s favourite mantra. And of course, being the targeted audience, we grossly consume the products and services offered by these businesses, normalising the sexploitation of women within media, consequently manipulating a woman’s self-identity to be linked directly to their sexual appeal. Perhaps, if you’ve sat down to look at the magazine covers of Lauren Jackson featured on “The Athens Dream” or Elysse Perry on “Stellar” and compared it to Ian Thorpe’s “Good Weekend” cover or Tim Cahill’s “Inside Sport” cover, you’d recognise the stark differences in society’s receptivity towards females and males, you’d see that businesses thrive off the sexual appeal of females, increasing their demands not by promoting professional success but instead through objectifying them. This is just one, amongst the many issues, including the gender pay-gap and taxation on female hygiene products, which women of modern day Australia are victims of.
It is essential for females to be pillars for each other, because only when we have empowered ourselves and each other, can we overthrow the dichotomous rules within society. There has been an increasing trend within social media, in which women ‘shout-out’ other women in appraisal for their professional or humanitarian efforts, and in which pages have been established solely for female empowerment, enabling women to grow to become psychologically and socially strong-minded, paving their own paths to success, whilst overcoming the oppressive ‘norms’ which they’ll inevitably stumble upon. Due to social media, slowly but surely, the sexploitation of females in their respective industries have been recognised and hopefully, remedied. By continually utilising social media as a platform for empowerment, legal and social remonstration, and as a collective voice exposing inequities constraining women, we are both, supporting each other whilst triggering a generational shift in gender paradigms for the future.