When Laura Bates created the Everyday Sexism project – an online space where women could call out everything from the casual sexism they experienced in their day-to-day lives to more extreme instances of violence against women – she didn’t know whether anyone else would be listening.
But 60,000 entries to the website, a book and a presentation to the United Nations later – people are definitely listening.
“It was so exciting to be asked [to speak at the UN],” Laura says. “And the fact that they wanted to hear specifically about Everyday Sexism, after two years of fighting tooth and nail to get people to acknowledge that this problem even existed… It was amazing.”
And what’s the problem, as Laura sees it? How women are represented as second-class citizens in the media, the normalisation of degrading and demeaning attitudes towards women, and how pervasive those attitudes are.
Laura, however, says that things are changing.
“There’s been a complete surge of interest in this area. In media coverage, but also in activism and people standing up,” she says. “I think it’s international and can be seen everywhere from the New Delhi protests against gang-rape in India to protests in Sri Lanka around the same time.”
“We’ve seen it in the Maldives, people protesting against the sentence of 100 lashes for a 15-year-old who was raped, we’ve seen it in Cairo with people standing up against the assault they’ve been facing there while protesting in the streets. We’ve seen it in the US with students protesting against the Steubenville coverage seeming to imply sympathy for the perpetrator, and in Australia with the outrage around the treatment of Julia Gillard and Destroy the Joint.”