A bit sad as March 8 is transforming into one of the 364 days per year that is not a Women's Day.
A lot of NGOs and pseudo activists have been posting their words for "Women's Day" today. But March 8 is not Mother's Day or Femininity Day. It is a day to acknowledge if we have the same rights and treatment than the other part of humanity. Men. And this is a time to screen our rights, as written in the law, and the opportunities we are given as women, half of humanity, the creative and life-giving part.
Today is a sad day for me because it has always been an important day but there is not much to celebrate this year. March 8 was the day I successfully passed the test to get into my second master, at Sciences po, or IEP de Paris, aka the school of most of French Presidents. The history test was about "Women in 20th century French politics". I got 18 out of 20. I was chosen to enter.
This university when I arrived, in September 2002, had 0,5 percent of its student coming from working class parents. If you add to that the fact that I'm a "female" and "daughter of immigrants", I might have been the only one that year...
It is a lonely path.
Since 2000, I've walked on men's shoes. I wrote a dissertation about Frantz Kafka and Milan Kundera, I've become the only female student in my class in a place of male power, I've written about other male writers, conflicts and post-conflicts, then had male bosses and covered elections in which women candidates were considered flawed and were ridiculed, from 2007 in France to 2017 in America.
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Do men realise how hard it is? To always be the sidekick at best? To always see their opinion come first, their help be determining because our voice alone isn't considered big enough?
I know I'm an accomplished journalist and a good writer. But getting trusted is still a challenge when you carry with you female values though. Kindness, understanding, compassion.
Because these values are still treated as weaknesses by most men in a position of power. If you're kind, you're not strong. If you're understanding, you're weak.
Men have the ability to transform any discussion into a power struggle and most of the time choose to do so!
But why, oh why, sirs, do you feel so threatened by dialogue? By exchanging your views? Why do you need all women working with you to be the note takers and to send them back to their small office just to be sure that they won't say out loud that a good idea came from them and not from you?
Why do you always need to see us lose to feel you're winning?
This imbalance is killing life, it's killing joy, it's killing creativity.
I hope you're happy alone on your thrones without us. Like the Donald Trumps, you want to leave us behind or humiliate us to feel you're winning. And, as always, you'll complain a while later that you have no one to celebrate your greatness with, late at night, or at that award-winning ceremony.
Because you choose to!
The need to dominate others to feel in power, the need to be above the women you're working with and living with to feel strong is a need based on fear and self-hatred.
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When you're ready to shed fear, hatred, struggle, lack of communication, you can call me back.
When you feel secured by cooperation, communication, respect, dialogue, truth, trust, mutual success, you can have this back. Joy, happiness, generosity, balance, completeness. You can. It is still there. It will always be there. Choose love.
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