Thursday 26 April 2012

I love the internet- it is my vehicle of communication, accessing information, entertainment (Yohoho and a bottle of rum) and my own personal procrastination machine. What I’ve been seeing on the internet of late, though, is simply disappointing.  As much as I hate to quote Dubstep, the internet was developed to break our limits, not create them. Posts like these, however, are doing just that: setting limits on mankind.
This was posted on 9gag on Women's Day.
Somehow, I can foretell the multitude of comments that are going to accuse me of being devoid of a sense of humour. Yes, I know these posts aren’t intended to be taken entirely seriously, but they are worrying nevertheless. For centuries, forward thinking men and women have fought to bring humanity closer to gender equality. Unfortunately, all these comics do is show humanity’s stubborn and ignorant resolution to hold ourselves back. Old fashioned, orthodox values about ‘women belonging in the kitchen’ are not so surprising when they are held by people from older generations, who never had the opportunities to educate themselves about the necessity of women’s rights in a successful society. The dwellers of the internet, though, are people of my generation- people who, if they chose to, could accomplish much more than the casual, “humorous” subjugation and repression of women “as a joke”. The fact that these jokes seem to be omnipresent, and increasingly popular reveals how backward we- the generation of the future- have become. We are never going to accomplish our goals as the human race if an entire half of that race is constantly being supressed. Progress lies in compromise and cooperation, not a reversion to outdated and counterproductive principles. Rant over (for now).