Dear Chimamanda Adichie,
I hope this finds you well. I recently watched your TEDxTalk “We should all be Feminists” for one of my classes and I could not agree more! I recognize that my view on this is limited as I am a man and as you brought up in your talk, we can be a little oblivious about the kinds of struggles women face.
While this talk was given in 2013, my classmates and I thought that many of the points you brought up, the experiences you relayed and the misconceptions you said people had are still being spread today. One point I found amusing in how ridiculous it was, was the story about how security in a hotel thought that just because you were walking in alone you must have been a sex worker. Recently my mother told me a similar story about when she used to go on business trips to Russia in the late 1980s and would be treated the same way, she even had other sex workers try to chase her away thinking she was butting into their territory. I just find that so many years apart, in a time when everyone thinks we are well passed these instances of casual, horrific sexism, it’s crazy how little progress individual thought seems to have been made. If anything, a loud minority seems to be pushing back, trying to revert women’s rights to what they were in decades past rather than push forward towards proper equality.
Despite my saying all of this, I do want to think the best of people and believe the majority is taking steps to be more mindful and making gender roles and identities more fluid. Your talk is credited as helping with this mindfulness and I want to believe societally we can make more steps towards the change you wished for back then.
Best,
Gabriel Oshman
