This is a podcast for ordinary women, for all the women who don’t think they’re feminists. Who think, “I’m not a feminist, but something’s wrong… I don’t know what it is, but something is definitely wrong. I feel like I’m being cheated on somewhere. I mean, I’m not a feminist, of course, but I agree with feminists in some ways”.
Why is it that when my husband and I come home from a hard day’s work, I go into the kitchen and stand at the stove for 2nd shift, while my husband goes to the couch to wait while I make dinner? Then why do I start the 3rd shift with the kids? I check homework, I explain and help with homework, I do arts and crafts, I answer 1,000,000 questions, but “daddy needs to rest”. So the husband gets rid of these responsibilities or participates as little as possible. It’s like these are my built-in female skills: feeding, serving, listening, and pitying everyone. I don’t understand why this is happening, why am I doing all this? Why is it assumed that I was born with all these abilities?
If you are regularly plagued by similar questions and don’t understand why, this podcast may be relevant to you.
Or, alternatively, if you don’t think that you have to give birth, you are not sure that you want to get married, and everyone keeps blabbing to you about it. About “the clock is ticking”, about women’s destiny, about emptiness and loneliness with cats. And if that sounds weird to you. If it makes you cringe, it makes you tense. Then this podcast might be for you.
I will discuss why such a division exists, why such rules of the game discriminate against us, why life is so hard for women in patriarchy, what to do about it, how to recognize it and fight it, how to defend our rights and thereby improve our quality of life.
About me
My name is Olya, I am a provincial feminist from Belarus. I am a woman like you, absolutely like any mother, grandmother, neighbor, sister, friend. I was born in the soviet union. I am married, I have children, I recently had a granddaughter. I went through the socialisation of the female gender on my own, I was brought up in a strict patriarchal model with some minor amendments.
Overall, I heard that it is necessary to cook deliciously and clean very well, in order to keep the husband from running away. In general, it was a kind of parasitic phrase to add “or the husband will run away” or “ otherwise no one will marry you”. In other words, I was made to believe that it would be my direct responsibility to serve my husband and the whole family.
However, they added from their life experience that I should not rely on a husband, that I should get an education and a job that would allow me to support myself and my children. Somehow this did not cause any disagreement in the eyes of those who forced me with such generally double messages. On the one hand, it is important to get married successfully, to find a breadwinner husband who will provide “everything for the family”, “for whom it is like being behind a stone wall”, and to clean and cook so that the husband will provide for all this happy life and will not run away; on the other hand, it is necessary to get a good education and a job with which it will be possible to feed not only myself, but also my children, who of course should be born more than one.
I have been working on this issue for many years, but I am not an academic feminist, I am a grassroots activist. This means that I am like any other ordinary woman, an ordinary citizen, who knows all the difficulties of her group with which she works from her own experience, who has faced everything, practically everything.
I’m sure there should be a lot of material about feminism, a lot. It is good that there are blogs, podcasts, books, movies, videos that talk about it. I absolutely welcome all initiatives that reach out to a wide audience to tell women about their rights, about fighting back, about women being human. And this is a very revolutionary idea for the male world for some reason, that a woman is a human being, not a subhuman, not a commodity, not a device to serve a man, as she is in the formulation of patriarchy. The propaganda of so-called traditional values is everywhere, in kindergartens and schools, in the media, in the whole culture, in movies, in laws, everywhere. So it is good that feminist materials are appearing more and more.
I will add simple details about myself: my husband, of course, took me as his wife, patriarchally speaking, and even twice. In fact, after my first marriage, I drew conclusions and with my second husband we evolved together and built a partnership that I am quite happy with and that I consider possible, honest and suitable for any heterosexual feminist.
I also want to mention that I will always refer to my audience in the feminine gender and never in the masculine gender. I didn’t come up with this myself, some feminist bloggess do it, I think it’s a great idea and I’ve decided to adopt it in my podcast.
Why is it that when a woman hears an appeal in the masculine gender, we perceive it normally. Human, man, it is all of us, yes, the masculine gender means the common, in general we do not react to it in any way. But there is a situation when it happens that someone addressed a man in the feminine gender, that’s it, it’s immediately humiliating, at least super awkward. Well, we can go on with this topic, I think we’ll come back to it in other episodes.
The point is to show what it is like not to be noticed, not to be counted, not to be identified in any way, and not to have your presence counted. So I will only address the audience in the feminine gender. In general, the podcast is not intended for men, but if any of them happen to be listening, so I have explained that.
Perhaps you have some pressing questions that you can’t find answers to. So I hope you can send me your questions. I would love to get this kind of feedback so that I can record the next episodes with answers to specific requests from the audience that started listening to the podcast.
If you want to contact us but are afraid to use comments, you can send us an e-mail. After that it will be enough to delete your letter from the “Sent” folder.
Our e-mail address is: help@belarus.fm
