As the balmy sun nudges me from my winter slumber, I feel an almost euphoric delight to live in the Southern Capital, primed to enjoy the Spring on Steroids that is passing as I type.
But in March, Women’s History Month, I am forced to acknowledge that one of the most prescient reasons that I love living here is that, as a woman, I feel safe. Physically safe, to walk alone once the sun has set. Or in the daytime. This has not been my experience walking the world until my arrival in Middle Kingdom.
A smile. A nod. A wave. Non-verbal cues accentuate the meaning of verbal communications, and oftentimes can communicate that which gets caught in the language barrier. And I’m not talking about the foreign language barrier either, I’m talking about the distance between what we feel, and what we think, and what words we use to try to express this to another human being, who then reverses the process to end up with an approximation of the original neural impulse. Lost in translation, so to speak.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumous 1953 publication, “Philosophical Investigations”, tackles this inherent barrier between language and perception. His beetle in a box analogy explores language, internal experience and the relationship between them. Basically, in a hypothetical situation, imagine a group of people each have a box and inside the box is something they each call “a beetle”. Gross, right? But, each person may only look inside their own box and only talk about their own beetle. So how, asks Wittgenstein, can anyone ever know if the others actually have a beetle in their box? Or what is meant when they say beetle? Is it a bug, an insect, a cockroach? A beetle hitherto unknown to humankind? Neon green, perhaps? Purple?
As is the way with such thought experiments, the beetle represents inner states; feelings and sensations such as love, happiness, fear or pain.
These beetles inhabit the box that is our mind. And no one can know what is inside our box, nor vice-versa.
Subjectively, then, we cannot know if our experience of fear is the same, or even similar to that of anyone else. The same may be said of colour, when you say “blue”, what blue does that mean to you? Sky? Perriwinkle? Midnight? They broadly fit within the same category, but the intricacies of each tonality, according to Wittgenstein’s theory, can never be known exactly. Essentially, then, we share an understanding of what this concept means broadly, and language and gesture are the most advanced means that we have, as human beings, speakings and doings, of transmitting an idea of what’s in our own box to others.
As far as we know, language is the most comprehensive communication system on Earth, though who knows what bees might be saying with their waggle dances, or dolphins as they click and whistle their way through the waves. Gesture can clarify or enhance the nebulous uncertainty inherent in every attempt to translate thought into articulate communication. Consider the amplifying power of a hug, or a handshake, a high-five or a headbutt. Actions speak louder than words.
March 8 is International Women’s Day (IWD), as part of Women’s History Month. Both of these initiatives are gestures to acknowledge women’s contributions to, and erasure from history, culture and society, with an aim to redressing this erasure and misrepresentation.
The UN has been sponsoring IWD since 1975, saying, as per History.com, “To recognise the fact that securing peace and social progress and the full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms require the active participation, equality and development of women; and to acknowledge the contribution of women to the strengthening of international peace and security”.
So, there you have it. The beetles we women are seeking to secure and promote are signs to express ideas, those of full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The only problem is, these beetles have been resisting a common understanding since before UN sponsorship in 1975, since before the birth of IWD in 1911, since before Euripides got a bee in his bonnet about misogyny, xenophobia and complacent hypocrisy back in Athens in 431BCE.
These are not new beetles. They are as old as the first agricultural revolution when the concept of legacy came kicking and screaming into the world in the guise of property and possessions.
We have moved beyond bartering other humans and drowning disobedient daughters. Our gestures have evolved an understanding of terms such as equality, bias and prejudice. The theme for IWD 2023 is #EmbraceEquity, because “equal opportunities aren’t enough” (internationalwomensday.com). And if that seems unreasonable, then let’s think again about the equity beetle or the fairness beetle.
Giving everyone equal opportunities assumes, somehow, that the playing field is even, that men and women start from the same vantage points. A cursory look at the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #5, Gender Equality, is enough to see that this is not the case. Within the Goal are sub-goals, targets:
Target 5.1: End Discrimination Against Women and Girls
Target 5.2: End All Violence Against and Exploitation of Women and Girls
Target 5.3: Eliminate Forced Marriages and Genital Mutilation
But they are more than mere gestures. They are targets and there are 9 in all. Each speaks to a tragic truth that cannot be ignored if we are to build an equitable future. We have not yet achieved Gender Equality.
Paradoxically, the more we gain in terms of gender parity; closing the pay gap, securing bodily autonomy, property ownership; representation, even, the harder it becomes to resolve those very real inequities that still form barriers in the lives of girls and women’s every day.
Being told to smile, being called bossy, or bitchy, being mansplained. It’s not the same as being owned, or being sold. As with all things, the spectrum is vast and we must advocate and empower on a micro and macro level now more than ever; now that we are so close.
We can begin by making the gesture of listening; to each woman’s story from a place of humility. Being an ally begins by recognising that we may never understand exactly what her beetle looks like, that our own experience may simply not be enough to comprehend it fully. But rather than interpreting it in terms of your box or your beetle, meet the women and her experience where they are at, accepting both as true and loyal accounts of the different path we walk within a world where this SDG#5 and this day and this month are still a necessity.
It is an acknowledgment that the patriarchal understanding of the beetle is the dominant world view, and that other beetles and boxes may also exist, even if historically they have not been recorded, or valued or fully understood.
An ally is someone who is not a member of an underrepresented group but whose beetle is more commonly accepted as “the correct beetle” and can therefore advocate and take action to support that less represented group, without taking over their voice.
It’s not enough to be an ally in your mind, privately, passively. If language is social, then so too is allyship. It must be active, like a verb, not passive, like a noun. We must seek out the stories, listen to the descriptions of what other beetles look like, and trust that they are, in fact, equally valid and worthy of rights and freedoms. We must understand that language can only take us so far.
International Women’s day is a gesture, a nod and a smile, to the real struggle of women the world over on IWD and every day.
