The month-long celebration is intended to serve as a time for Americans to educate themselves on women’s history, become more informed on gender-based discrimination and reflect on what progress has been and still needs to be made.
It’s not an act of love if you make her, you make her do too much labor.
The song grieves the gender-based discrimination that afflicts every aspect of women’s lives, all the way down to the imbalance of work and effort placed on women in heterosexual romantic relationships.
Other women are using the sound to share stories, one of how the girls in their classes were discriminated against by teachers at school, another of how their bodies have been objectified since childhood.
Many women are using the soundbite to share stories of religious trauma.
They are expressing the ways in which they cannot escape both externalized and internalized gender biases as they carry out this work.
Men expect women to deliver sexual gratification to them whenever they please, and yet women are only desirable if they are virgins.
They are becoming mothers, putting their bodies through months of dramatic change followed by traumatic and sometimes dangerous births.
Consider the last time a man you know spent his day off catching up on laundry and grocery shopping.
And when women do explore their own goals and aspirations outside domesticity, they must perform so well that their skills and abilities outweigh the implicit and explicit biases of those in professional power over them.
The soundbite has been used for 15,900 posts, and the original video has more than 900,000 likes and more than 5 million views and has been shared more than 76,000 times.
Instead, I was frequently questioned by confused men who could not imagine the “pastor’s husband” being a role, and asked to clarify whether I would one day marry a man who also was practicing Christian ministry.
Why? He wanted to ensure that, if we were to get married in the future, his knowledge of Christianity surpassed his wife’s.
Not long into my undergraduate religious studies major, I learned the term “complementarianism” and realized these gender-based comments were not unique in the greater debates on women in Christian church life and theology.
Unintentionally, women learn to take on extra domestic roles that fathers, brothers and boyfriends do not think to do, and that mothers and the other women in our lives are modeling.
The women and men who support women’s rights, call themselves feminists and condemn sexism even fall subject to these assumed responsibilities which bear extra weight on us women.