This past Monday, the Internet celebrated International Women’s Day while also debating whether the woman who had bewitched Prince Harry was a good witch or an evil one.
Try as I might to keep away from the royal roadshow, I did come across a headline I couldn’t resist. Piers Morgan had stormed off the set of his morning talk show Good Morning Britain over racially charged things Meghan Markle told Oprah.
I took the bait and clicked. As I watched, what interested me wasn’t so much the racial argument between Morgan and Alex Beresford. That vital conversation will be explored in later posts. What I found intriguing were the many times they dismissed their female colleague Susanna Reid, who, try as she might, wasn’t able to effectively participate in the conversation.
Pretty interesting that two men talking about one woman’s behavior dissed a female colleague on International Women’s Day.
Piers Morgan left the show entirely the next day. But not because he dissed his female co-worker. It was because he pissed off enough people that the network said enough.
Plenty of men say they support women’s equality but act in ways that contradict their words. Why? Are they afraid of disappointing women? Is it just easier to say what they think women want to hear? Or do they really mean it, but then forget out of some primal urge to dominate?
It’s interesting that a Pew Research article states that while the majority of both men and women believe there is more work to be done on equality between the sexes, the gap widens as the poll dives deeper into the obstacles. It’s widest on the issue of power in the workplace. More women see the imbalance of power as more of a problem than do men. Hmmm…
In a Psychology Today article, Ben C. Fletcher writes that when we say one thing and do another there’s a disconnect between what he calls the experiencing self (what we do by habit) and the reflecting self (who we aspire to be). His answer is to do something different to align the two. That takes effort.
So, are men lazy? Or am I just man-bashing at this point?
To be fair, as a woman, I definitely suffer my share of disconnect between what I do and who I want to be. Just ask anyone who has heard about the novel I’m writing for the last decade or so.
The questions this blog poses aren’t going to be answered today. But I think it’s important that we keep asking them.
And in the bigger picture, we are lucky to even have a discussion about this when in large swaths of the world there are women suffering at the hands of men who don’t bother to examine Fletcher’s disconnect between the reflecting self and the experiencing self. They are perfectly aligned. And women are dying, if not physically, then emotionally.
Let’s keep asking the questions. Maybe we’ll have more to celebrate on future Women’s Days.
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