tayeb zayed
World Women’s Day is a date on which we are forced to stop for a day to pay forced homage to a sex that is only talked about excessively. In reality, this date is neither a pause, nor a moment of meditation on the woman, nor even less a reconnaissance station addressed to the woman, but a stab in the sides of the man whose we want to make a pack animal. Women have never received so much media coverage as they have in recent years: World Women’s Day, women’s freedom, women’s rights, women’s emancipation, violence against women, women’s equality… Television makes it its hobbyhorse: the woman at breakfast, the woman at noon, the woman in the evening…, as if we only have better or worse in life. As if the whole country has nothing higher or lower than women…
Those who trade in women do not do so for the beautiful eyes of women but to invent false problems between the two sexes and pervert that of women, considered until a certain date as a weaker sex, in the ameliorative sense.
We are talking about women’s rights, but which woman? Does the woman from the countryside have the same rights as her fellow citizen from the city? The right to water in the tap, the right to electricity in the light switch, the right to the fridge in the kitchen, the right to the washing machine…like many of its sister city dwellers. That of the ”maw9af” (gathering of women waiting for work in a specific corner of the city): this vexed, dishonoured, despised, reviled woman waits all day long on the sidewalks for someone to come and ask for her services. She is good at everything. She can be cut and worked at will: household drudgery with the servility of domestic work, the drudgery of field work where she is exposed to vexation, exploitation, harassment…
We are talking about the emancipation of women. However, no female emancipation, it seems to me, can be achieved without an income-generating activity: a woman without resources cannot claim any emancipation that supposes a material well-being allowing her to free herself from household chores. daily tasks which will be carried out by machines or other women whose services she has hired. This will allow her to save time and effort that she will use for the care of her being on the one hand and the organization of her leisure activities as well as possible.
We are talking about the equality of women. A woman can only awkwardly claim equality with a man. The woman is ”a chested rib”, it is said, which is true in the noble sense of the analogy. The rib is only rib because it has this torso shape. Straighten it and it will lose the flexibility necessary to protect the internal organs to which it serves as a bumper. A sickle is sickle only because it has this shape. Try straightening it into a knife, saw or sword. Straight, the sickle is neither a knife, nor a saw, nor a sword. It is sickle in the reaper’s hand because it has this shape and it can only scythe because it has this shape. Woman is woman only because she has this nature.
We talk about violence against women. Are men safe from the daily violence of which they are victims at work, at home, in the street? There is no more humiliating violence than moral violence: the fear of losing one’s job, the fear of not being able to make ends meet in order to best meet the needs of the family, the fear of not honoring one’s bank due dates. , the fear of not succeeding in making a stable life with a house, a car… Man is daily exposed to the vagaries of everyday life. Both man and woman are victims of the rapacity of a greedy and voracious consumer society.
Conclusion: The more we talk about a thing, the more it becomes banal or ends up annoying and arousing ire. The more chewing gum you chew, the more it loses its taste and becomes bland, just good enough to spit.
The International Women’s Day in the midst of all this uproar raised about women strangely resembles this minute of silence that we observe following a national disaster. Then nothing. Everyone goes about their business while waiting for the next year with another day and another minute of silence.
Tayeb Zayed