Lessons from Cristina Yang

She's got her priorities straight

Television will never be the same. Cristina Yang, the sassy and smart surgeon from Grey’s Anatomy has left after 10 seasons.

I’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy for as long as I can remember. I remember being upset that I had to go to my fourth grade open house, because I was missing the crucial episode where one of the characters was moving from Seattle to Los Angles. It’s been something I’ve watched with my mom for almost a decade.

I’ve learned life lessons from the show: whenever there was a teen pregnancy, my mom would also comment to me about the importance of protection and being smart. She even went thorough a phase when she wanted me to be a medical researcher because of the show. I, unfortunately for her, had other ideas.

What I’ve gained most from Grey’s and Cristina is that it’s ok to be the best. She is a woman who isn’t afraid to prove that she works harder and practices more than any other surgeon her age, male or female. She demands excellence from everyone around her, instead of kowtowing to everyone else. 

Who needs a white dress?

I touched on the topic of marriage earlier in this blog, but Cristina puts it all to shame. She was married, once, but it happened on her terms and she didn’t both wearing a white dress, saying it was racist and sexist. When her husband wanted kids, she refused to agree because she didn’t want to have to sacrifice her award winning medical career. She knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to go out and get it. That type of role model was important for me as I’ve gone through high school and countlessly chosen academics or extracurricular activities over trying to be a social butterfly that I’m not.

Most importantly, Cristina taught me how to be a friend. That sometimes it’s ok to bond with someone based not on what you both like, but on the ‘dark and twisty’-ness that you both have been through. Friendships aren’t just gossiping and sharing hair/makeup trips at a nail parlor/hair salon. Cristina’s friendship with Meredith involved the two of them putting each other first, over their significant others, even when it involved kicking the significant other out of bed. There was no ‘hierarchy’ of boyfriend/girlfriend over friends that can sometimes evolve with modern relationship.

I appreciate that Shonda Rhimes, the creator/writer of Greys’s didn’t choose to end Cristina’s life when Sandra Oh, the actress who played Cristina, decided she was through, as Rhimes has done with so many other characters. I can continue to believe that Cristina is off doing wonderful things in Switzerland, still free of the ties that she refused to let bind her, living her feminist icon cardio god life.

Cia♀,

Charlie 

Challenge #15: Activism

Female activists fighting for suffrage in the early 1900s

Recently, I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about high school as I approach my ‘last’ everything. Two days ago, I had my last Monday of high school. Today is my last peer group, where I lead/help a group of 9 freshmen with another senior. Tomorrow will be my last debate banquet, where I’ll be giving a speech because of my role as President of the Policy debate team. I’m going to share the message I’m giving in my speech, because it reflects both what I want my legacy to be at South, my high school, and what I want the debate team to engage in going forward.

My favorite parts of South have been being an activist. I’ve been involved with a group, Stand for Peace, which helps raise money and awareness for refugee and human rights issues. My favorite day of the year is always the last Friday of Stand for Peace week in mid-April. I spent the day presenting to social studies classes about different issues – this year it was human trafficking in Southeast Asia, last year it was issues in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. The reactions are always fascinating: some people are shocked, some people are touched and make the effort to make a large donation or ask us presenters questions after we present.

Then there are the negative reactions, that make me want to keep fighting – girls and boys

Stand for Peace board during
Stand for Peace week 2014

who, on International Women’s Day, when we have petitions to sign ardently declare that “I’m not a feminist, feminists are the worst”. Their uninformed opinions make me want to sit them down and explain what exactly being a feminist means, or the pain that people in Africa go, or whatever they don’t understand and automatically are thinking it doesn’t matter.

I think activism is underrated. People don’t think that they can achieve anything, when, in fact they can. Senior Academy Action Projects, an end of the year service project have proven that 25 people can make a real stab at solving real life project like malaria, invasive species and disability awareness. I think it’s important for people to find what they believe in and advocate for it. Especially within the debate community: we’re trained to be persuasive and be educated on a range of projects, which can translate into meaningful change if applied in the right way instead of now, where it tends to just be ‘oh, because of my debate skills I can write this 10 page research paper the night before’.

I’m so excited next year to be in Washington DC, where protests happen every day. I’ll have so many resources to continue fighting for what I believe in – female equality and universal human rights. But I also want people to replace me and my classmates and continue the strong traditions of making a difference that Stand for Peace and Academy have established. 

Cia♀,

Charlie 

Challenge #14: Prom

I didn’t get asked to prom.

All around me, teenage girls are gasping: it’s the ultimate horror and sign of social failure. Prom is the supposed ‘end goal’ of high school. Here on the North Shore of Chicago it’s not only a dance, it’s a weekend – the dance only the beginning. After comes sleepovers, treks to family or rented lake houses where kids can hang out with their friends and get away with things they usually can’t back home. Dresses can be bought for upwards of $400, and there’s even a Facebook group to post your dress, because god forbid two girls wear the same one.

Before this 4-day extravaganza comes the ‘prom-posals’ and the ‘priets’ (prom-diets, basically the most teenage-girly word to ever be invented). These proposals have become unnecessarily complex, leading to unwanted pressure for the asker and often disappointment from the askee if the date doesn’t come through. An example: my best friend was asked through a full-length fireworks display that ended up on Good Morning America. 

Is it all really worth it?

I won’t deny that I’ve spent a solid amount of time frustrated at my situation – but it stems more at what prom has become than not being asked. I should be able to go to prom, single, with my friends, but my school has done everything possible to discourage that and it isn’t fair. In order to go, you have to sign up with a group of 10, meaning you have to be in a couple or you don’t get a table.

We’ve built up this event to an unattainable standard that it shouldn’t be. I remember as a young girl, reading the Princess Diaries books how the title character, Mia, would dream about her prom and losing her virginity to her boyfriend on prom night – a common teenage theme. As I think about it now, at 18, that sounds ridiculous,  but I fear for all these girls who have been so elaborately asked who might now feel the pressure to do something they might not be comfortable with.

Prom also has the ability to tear friendships apart. ‘Prama’, or prom-drama has been running rampant for the last six weeks at my school. I hear horror stories of groups shutting their friends out because ‘there isn’t enough room at the lake house’ or they don’t like one of the dates. I thought being asked would be stressful – apparently, that’s just the beginning.

This Friday, I won’t be leaving school early for my spray tan/hair appointment/nail appointment/makeup appointment only to spend a half hour crying that it isn’t ‘perfect’ enough. I won’t take an hour’s worth of pictures and then climb into a limo for ‘the best night of my life’. I don’t have the money and I don’t have the patience. I’ll spend my weekend writing my end-of-semester papers and thinking of what I’ll be able to buy to wear throughout my 4 years of college with the money I saved on a dress that will only be worn one night. 

Cia♀, 

Charlie 

Challenge #13: College & Rape Culture

Students at Dickinson College protest the administration's
 approach to sexual assault. 

It's April 30th. That means, in one day, seniors across America will be making their final commitments to which college or university they'll attend next year. I personally made my decision yesterday, coming down to the wire like always. I was blessed with a variety of strong, academically talented schools to choose from, which meant that I made my decision based more on the atmosphere of each campus. I weighed the social life of kids on campus and happiness levels and extracurricular of the people there.

I never really considered my own safety - that was a job left to my mom, who relentlessly pushed me against the University of Chicago, because she was worried about the neighborhood.

That safety isn't just limited to the surrounding area of a school. Now, it's permeating into the colleges themselves with staggering statistics of rape and sexual assault being unveiled, especially on top-tier campuses. My mom casually mentioned to me, after a parent panel at Georgetown University during an admitted students’ weekend, that sexual assault had been brought up. I asked her what had been said, and she responded that the officials had said it was pretty normal for a college campus – not great, but not terrible. That ‘normal’ statistic for Georgetown is as high as one in four women experience sexual assaults on campus, according to the National College Health Assessment. To me, as that’s where I’ve decided to attend, that number is a scary prospect and especially the fact that it’s considered normal.

The issue has been put into the spotlight recently, as April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month and because of a letter written in the Harvard Crimson about her experience with Harvard after a sexual assault. I read it when it was first published, and was disgusted. Granted, Harvard has rejected me so it never factored into any decisions I made but it definitely worried me for what I could face when I stepped onto whatever campus I chose. Similar universities have come under fire, such as Tufts and Dartmouth.

However, hope is not lost. Campuses are taking steps to tighten security and increase the repercussions students face if they are the perpetrator of a sexual assault. At Georgetown, I will be part of the first class to participate in a sexual assault education workshop during orientation. I wouldn’t say I’m excited for it, but I think it will be incredibly beneficial and eye-opening, and will hopefully save young women and men from the traumatizing experience.

On a national level, one of my favorite feminist blogs and the inspiration for this post, Feministing, has reported that the federal government will take more steps to further implement Title IX, a law that prohibits sexual discrimination in education. The reforms will include naming schools who are under investigation publically to help with evidence collection and other measures to increase transparency.

I’m excited to see all of my friends and classmates decide their futures, and I hope that their futures will become safer as these policies are all implemented.

Cia♀,

Charlie

Women and the Environment

Painting of a Mother Nature figure

Women and the environment have gone hand in hand for most of human civilization. Early societies often personified nature as a woman in religious traditions like the Greek Gaia, who gave birth to the Earth and the universe, and that still continues today with modern Mother Nature. Women are commonly associated with manipulating the environment and its resources for survival, like getting water and planting gardens to feed the family. They make up 51% of agriculture workers worldwide, according to the United Nations Population Fund, and that varies from 50% in Latin America to 80% in sub-Saharan Africa, meaning they have a large impact. There’s even a body of literature about it – ecofeminism!

This means that women are the ones most easily affected by environmental destruction and other environmental issues like climate change. As the world has developed, women have had to do more and more to stay afloat – walk farther for water, because local rivers have dried up or been polluted, or struggle to replant a crop on land that’s suffering from soil erosion or pesticide overuse. For example, female flower workers in Colombia are exposed to 120+ chemicals per day, many of which are illegal in first world countries, and in India women spend 4-5 hours per day looking for firewood which, before the effect of deforestation, they would only have to look every 4-5 days.

The connection between women and the environment has been recognized by the UN through various meetings of the UN Environment Programme focused on the role of women. The meetings have concluded that women are essential to sustain the environment but that women worldwide lack access to the resources necessary. Women are suffering the effects of contaminated water and food, and passing it onto further generations through breastfeeding and other natural causes without any knowledge of what to do about it.

 

Wangari Maathai

There are some strong cases where women have been the main advocates for environmental sustainability and have created real change. The Green Belt movement in Kenya started in 1977 with the planting of 7 trees. The organizer was a woman, Wangari Maathai, who would go onto win the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts and over 51 million trees have been planted since to slow the deforestation and soil erosion in Kenya while also providing economic opportunity for women. Other examples include the Nine Seeds Movement in India, which was start by women and advocates for organic agriculture and the development of seed banks.

Through increased agricultural education of practices like crop rotation women can continue to have a great effect on sustaining the environment in a way that is healthy for both the Earth and the growing population. Women have been undervalued in environmental efforts and can have a huge impact if given the opportunities. The OECD has proven that women consume less than men and care more about the future of the environment, and organizations should be doing more to nurture that care for the future.

Cia♀,

Charlie 

Challenge #12: Bossy

Recently, Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and author of the controversial book Lean In launched a new campaign: ‘Ban Bossy’. The campaign is sponsored by Girl Scouts and has the backing of countless famous and empowering women – Beyonce, Jane Lynch, Condoleeza Rice and Jennifer Gardner, to name a few. So, all of the hype surrounding it and the quality of those spokespeople indicated ‘Ban Bossy’ must be a good thing, right?

Wrong – ever since the campaign began, there have been countless articles written about how unproductive the goal is. The onesI found helpful to writing this blog were Feministing’s opinion, the New Yorker, and NYMag. The writers all made one common argument: this is strawman feminism. Strawman arguments are fallacy’s that involve attacking something superficial about a problem – not the real source. Attacking the surface, not the substance, won’t help any young girls anywhere.

Is it true that some girls have probably felt lesser and unenthusiastic about leadership after they’ve been called bossy? Yes. But I’m sure a girl exhibits the traditional ‘bossy’ characteristics, such as self-assertiveness, leadership skills, and a quest to always be right, has been or will be called significantly worse words, including a certain other ‘b’ word. Those qualities that make her ‘bossy’ should also give her a thick enough skin to not let the name get her down. At its fundamental level, the campaign is correct – bossy is a potential obstacle girls face to obtaining success.

One of the Ban Bossy campaign's slogans

But, there are so many other, structural problems than a ‘word’ that inhibit success. Even one of the campaign’s own graphic knows it’s true. Yes, it’s probably true that girls are called on less – but is banning the word ‘bossy’ the answer? It’s not. 

The money and star power going into this campaign could be used to achieve significantly greater success by targeting a deeper problem with younger girls success – how about, to remedy the classroom problem, LeanIn funds gender-based teacher training? Provide scholarships to girls who can’t afford to go to college or other higher-learning opportunities? Sponsor internships for girls at Facebook, or with all of the other spokespeople? Target universities with high male/female ratios? Change the stigma against working mothers, or women who chose careers over kids (see previous blog)? How about Sandberg finds a better option for the word bossy, or attempts to reclaim it? 

Old school feminists argue that the solution is never to ban, like Ann Friedman of NY Mag, “It’s so frustrating to watch Lean In try to expand girls’ options by restricting the way we talk about them. It’s counterintuitive, and it makes feminists look like thought police rather than the expansive forward-thinkers we really are.” Banning anything, be it alcohol, drugs, or words, has never been successful – women need to take words like ‘slut’ and ‘bossy’ as their own, and work to give a positive connotation.

Empowering young girls, and ensuring they make it up the ladder of whatever career path is a tough, multifaceted challenge. Attacking something as artificial as a word, and ignoring all the reasons behind why we feel the need to criticize younger girls for ‘bossy’ actions, will not create the substantial, much-needed change girls and younger women need in the long run.

Cia♀,

Charlie 

I'm bossy, and I'm proud of it. 

Profile: The Women of Hamlet

Hamlet, while accurate from an Elizabethan social category standpoint, is not acceptable from a modern feminist perspective, specifically in how the male females treat the female characters. The two main female roles, Ophelia and Gertrude, are given ambiguous roles and interpretations, Ophelia especially. There is much debate about whether either of them, or both of them, can be considered ‘feminist’. However, how the males in the play – Hamlet, Claudius, Laertes and Polonius – act towards them is unmistakable.   

Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, and significant other of Hamlet, is controlled by all of them men in her life. Her few instances of free choice are to choose which male to listen to (when they all lecture her) and her choice to go mad and drown herself. Both Polonius and Laertes do the very Elizabethan action of dissuading her from all interactions with the outside world. She’s forbidden to be with Hamlet, unless she’s being used as a ploy in one of Claudius and Polonius’s plots. She can’t express herself, or her love, especially sexually (“From this time, be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence” – Polonius, 1.2.121). When she attempts to, or at least attempts to say no, she’s told to go to a either a brothel or a convent by her supposed boyfriend (Get thee to a nunnery 3.1.114) – in either place she’d be trapped with no freedom of expression. Ophelia, who we assume has never had a mother/lost her mother early on, struggles with her identity, and her men don’t make it any easier.

Gertrude struggles with similar control issues and in many instances with her son, who she should attempt to exhibit some control over. She is mocked by Hamlet for remarrying so quickly, and never gives him any sort of explanation why (that we know of) in his highly quoted “Frailty, thy name is woman,” rant. She also lets him tell her she’s too old to have emotion and feel love, and just like Ophelia, have her sex life controlled. I, for one, know my mother would never put up with such disrespect from my brother had he actd like Hamlet.

In addition to her son’s mistreatment, her new husband, Claudius isn’t much better. He acts very dismissive of her, until his half-hearted attempt to stop her from drinking poison, even though she has been his key to the throne. She dies alone, after cheering on her son.

Both Ophelia and Gertrude experience tragic deaths, both because of Hamlet who they loved dearly. Ophelia was driven mad and to suicide by Hamlet’s madness and his mad act of killing her father, while Gertrude was poisoned by Hamlet’s success. Hamlet might have accomplished his goal of avenging his father, but he destroyed the rest of his family along the way.

Cia♀, 

Charlie 

For additional, more qualified, feminist criticism of Hamlet, look here and here