End-of-High-School Crisis

Looking back on the last twelve years of my life, I'm realising just how much I've grown as a person. I was reminded of this blog yesterday with an email telling me a hacker had posted and, while deleting that post, I came across one of my very early ones. My fifth post, back in 2009, was titled Blonde Jokes. The content, if you don't care enough to actually follow the link, is exactly what you'd expect: a couple jokes highlighting the stereotypical ditzy persona of a blonde woman. Obviously twelve-year-old me thought they were funny enough to share with the internet, but eighteen-year-old me finds them degrading and offensive, not to mention one of the many reasons blonde women, or even women in general, continue to be berated for their gender and the colour of their hair.

So what happened in the last six years? First of all, I'm beginning to notice all the misogyny that is so prevalent in our society. It's everywhere: the internet, the grocery store, school, literally everywhere. There is no escaping the offhand jokes and the blunt insults that are the cornerstones of the anti-feminist movement. Secondly, I had my hair dyed blonde for about a year and a half. Within that time, I would get comments about my "blonde stupidity" almost daily from coworkers, other students, and strangers despite not being a natural blonde. One particular encounter still sticks with me: I was at work and one of the bar servers came up to the front desk to put a sweatshirt in the lost and found. He began looking at the other items in the box and pulled out other jackets and sweatshirts that were in there, which were all women's clothing. He made a comment about drunk women always leaving their jackets behind and I told him I do that quite a bit as well. He amended his statement to say drunk and blonde women always leave their jackets behind, I reminded him that I am not a natural blonde, and he once again amended his statement to say women.
This kind of thing is not a rare occurrence; casual misogyny is constantly in all of our lives. One of the biggest things that has changed about me in the past years is my tolerance for inequality of any kind. We should all be doing more to change the way society views gender, race, sexuality, etc, because deep down we are all human.