Sasha Grey (a
former porn star) is starred in an ad to draw attention to the fact that the
only place where women make more money than men is in the porn industry. The
goal of the entire campaign is to make girls aware that the study choices they
make today determines their pay in the future. This however isn’t clear
in the clip.
Their
objective is to stimulate highschool girls more to choose for studies that are
dominated by men, like engineering, and that boys should be more stimulated to
join the care sector. And I have to admit that as a kid I was good at math and
sciences and I would read books about animals and science all the time, but
somehow I did end up studying Psychology. And it’s a choice I made, but I can’t
really say that anyone ever really tried to convince me otherwise. I do am
stubborn like hell, so most people that know me should know that changing my
mind is as easy as turning water to wine, maybe that's why nobody ever tried.
Here are
some things that do make me think that it wasn’t entirely just my choice.
As a kid I
once told my grandmother that you shouldn’t get to good grades, because else
other kids don’t like you. I do think this is the same for men as well.
At
highschool I’ve heard a guy that was in my class in primary school bragging
about how he nearly always was the first to finish his test at primary school.
It stunned me, because I would always wait until someone else would give his
test to the teacher. When I would finish my test early, the teacher would tell
me to go back to my place and check my answers, which I hated, so after a while
I would just wait until someone else (usually him) gave his test to the teacher.
I’ve spent
my senior years at 2 different colleges. One of them used to be a boy’s school
and the last one was a girl’s school. So in the first one there still were more
boys than girls and at the latter it was the inverse. At both schools they
would give advice on what college degree was right for you. At the former boy’s
school they would emphasize how much money you could make with each degree, how
secure you would be of finding a job and they would rank all different
engineering subjects based on difficulty and students were stimulated to choose
the most difficult study that was within their capacities. At the girl’s school they wouldn’t
talk about money or job security, they would help you to find what interests you
the most. When I told them I wanted to go to the university to become a psychologist
(master level), they’ve told me that you do would need to study there a lot and
that it might be better to study for psychology assistant (bachelor level). I
do think they’ve told this to everybody. They would also emphasize that you
need to make sure it’s something you like doing, because you would need to do
it for the rest of your life.
Women are
barely stimulated to choose a well paid job, but men aren’t stimulated at all to
do a job they enjoy. They are stimulated to do a full time job that gives them
a nice paycheck every month. And this is what I like about the campaign. It’s also
focused on giving men more opportunities to be more involved in the family life
and to give people more opportunities to combine work and life. Working fulltime
and overtime in a job you don’t enjoy and not being able to spend time with
your children is not a privilege. Even though women are still under pressure to
confirm to their traditional roles, men are under an even higher pressure. As
long as a man that says he would rather spend more time with his children is
called gay, a wussy or a paedophile you can’t talk about equality.
Look up how
you can recognize a paedophile, apart from the obvious ‘they get aroused by
children’, you also find things like ‘they regularly attend children’s events
in the community’; ‘They volunteer in youth organizations’; ‘They seek jobs
where children are easily accessible’ and so on. This seriously discourages men to do anything with children. If you go to the playground with your kid and moms warn their kids to stay away from you, you're not going to do that twice.
Note: When I would google ‘how to recognize a paedophile’, I saw that google suggested me ‘how to recognize a virgin’ and than I’ve found this: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/HowTo:Spot_a_Virgin In one word: ugh. It’s not really that hard though. Ask her birthday. If she’s born between the 22nd of August and the 22nd of September, she’s a virgin for sure.
The website of the campaign: http://www.equalpayday.be
The website of the organization behind it: http://www.zij-kant.be/ (not in English)
