32
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Happy International Women's Day!
From the Wiki:
International Women's Day (IWD) is celebrated on the 8th of March every year around the world.
(…)
(…) The day was then predominantly celebrated by the socialist movement and communist countries until it was adopted by the feminist movement in about 1967. The United Nations began celebrating the day in 1977.
It is a federal holiday in Russia, at least. (Since it's Sunday this year, the following Monday is made a holiday as well). Do you have any special plans for today?
By coincidence, I started reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal last night. It's a speculative historical sci-fi novel about a meteorite taking out Washington DC in 1952. The protagonist is a female Jewish World War II pilot from the United States who now works as a computer at NACA (what would be NASA in our world) when the meteorite hits. Her husband is a rocket scientist there as well. It shows what happens during the event and in the years after as they realize the problem is much larger than they originally anticipated. She shows a lot of the issues that women had to deal with in the bureaucracy of our government and the world in general at the time. I'm about 1/4 of the way in and really enjoying it. I wasn't familiar with the author, but I've found it very captivating so far.
I read that (and its sequels) last year too, excellent books!
On such days I usually make a post on Facebook mocking the “but in reality aren’t all days human days?” or whatever crowd. So that’s my plan for now. Waiting for inspiration.
I also want to point out the stellar work Richard Herring does every International Women's Day on twitter to "help" those blinkered souls (men of course) who complain about the lack of an International Men's Day often in the form of the question "When Is International Men's Day" - as if they're making a point about how absurd it is to have one without the other.
The difference, however, is that it's not really celebrated at all and not even acknowledged in most countries. God forbid you make a post about it to promote any problems men face on any SNS and the usual replies are "lol, men's day is like everyday" or get bullied as some extremist MRA. Pretty much social suicide.
You seem to wander in different social circles than I do. Sure, women's day is definitely more internationally celebrated and publicly mentioned more, and lots of people don't even know men's day is a thing, as evidenced by the link above by @bhrgunatha (mate I swear to the gods, couldn't you have picked an easier name to type out? :D), and when it comes around I usually only see it mentioned on the internet, never in real life.
Well, I'm not on any social media and most of my friends would not react that negatively. I am mostly talking about the examples I've seen of people trying to promote it on Instagram etc. Could be that those cases are the ones rising to the surface which makes it a bit biased.
But International Men's Day exists... It's at the start of November I think? Definitely not as widely celebrated as Women's Day, but tbh the only time I've ever seen it instrumentalized is either to sell something or for political parties to make a point. No one I know personally celebrates it.
I always find it funny that some people take the time to write a tweet and complain instead of just googling the problem, which would surely be faster or at least equally fast than writing angry tweets.
Of course it does, that's the point. He patiently replies to everyone he can find on twitter about when it is. He's created a fund with his live stream renaming it International "When Is International Men's Day" Day.
Maybe that's the programmer in me talking, but I feel like this could be automated...
It's the 23rd of February in Russia. Link to my previous comment about it.
You have a low bar for stellar work if spending your sunday replying "lol nov 19th" to randoms on twitter qualifies.
A twitter user like @Womensart1 is doing more productive, less self-congratulatory and more interesting work by posting art and quotes by women artists.