Since the Super Bowl, I’ve been a little obsessed with Beyoncé. I know I’m not alone in this, as it’s basically the only thing the Internet can talk about. What’s not to love? Queen Bey is beautiful, talented, and apparently perfect; I can’t stop listening to her songs.
The thing is, I’ve actually been listening to her songs, and there’s something very wrong. Don’t get me wrong-they’re super catchy and perfect for dancing. My mother even works out to them. Anything that can transcend the generational barrier is bound to be fantastic, but there’s still something a little bit off about one song in particular that takes the sheen off of my obsession a little bit.
“Run the World (Girls)” is just a blatant falsehood. Right off the bat, the name alone is incredibly frustrating. Girls? Don’t belittle. I am a woman. And what world do girls run? Maybe Beyoncé is privy to some super secret meeting I don’t know about, but to my knowledge in every single country in the world—including the U.S.—women are considered a minority group.
Let’s face facts: this has been true for millennia. Sure, in the U.S. we outnumber men in population size and in the number of us in higher education, but that only means that we’re relegated to a “special issues” group. I’m sorry, but it’s not a special issue if most of the population has to deal with it. You’d fail a logic class if you tried to argue that way. It’s just an issue.
There’s this incredibly damaging perception that now that women have been able to vote in the U.S. for almost a hundred years, now that we can become doctors and lawyers and world-famous pop stars, now that we can even fight on the front lines for our country, that we’ve reached equality and we should all pack up our soap boxes and go home. That is just stupid.
If we were equal, the world wouldn’t be captivated by the despicable culture of rape halfway across the world in India, or even here in Ohio. If we were equal, there wouldn’t be a problem passing the Violence Against Women Act through Congress and the cabinet wouldn’t almost entirely be old men. If we were equal, I wouldn’t have to write this column.
As a society, we can’t just silently accept that a few well-publicized gains in recent years mean that we’re done fighting for equality. I hate to break it to you, but we’re not. It is going to take a long time for that to be true, despite what Beyoncé apparently thinks.
If you want to measure things in terms of anecdotal evidence or the like, we still haven’t had a female president, although I have my fingers crossed for Hils in 2016. If you want to measure things in the tangible facts, then let’s take a quick look at sexual assault statistics, or maybe domestic abuse figures, or even women’s paychecks. The pattern that emerges is a disgraceful differentiation between men and women, and that only reveals women are quite evidently not yet equal to their male counterparts.
I’m not taking issue with the sentiment that Beyoncé tries to get across. Trying to empower women using music or characters on TV, or however possible, is a step in the right direction. As an anthem trying to portray a woman in a position of power, I actually quite like the song. As a catchy tune that tries to create a generation of women who strive towards equality, it’s not half bad. But as an attempt to say that we’ve finally reached that position of equality, it’s completely incorrect.
Compared to the last decade, century, or millennium, women have never been more powerful. I don’t deny that, I revel in it. Something’s gone right, and I’d like to think that as a global society we had something to do with that. But we’re not done fighting for equality, we’re not done striving for women’s issues to become issues for everyone, and we’re not done hoping that the world as a whole will come to accept that women are just as good as men.
I’m not going to be any less obsessed with Beyoncé because of this one song, but all of the false sense of security and complacency with the state of women’s rights? It needs to go in a box to the left.
