Inspired by Nicholas Kristoff and Cheryl WaDunn’s novel, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide became a two-part documentary that came out in 2012. The film includes six actresses/activist, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Olivia Wilde, America Ferrera, Gabrielle Union, and Diane Lane, who travel to six different countries, Somaliland, Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Cambodia, and India to highlight the oppression of women and girls. With the help from Nicholas Kristoff, they get the opportunity to meet extraordinary women who dedicate their lives to help women and girls within their countries.
The overall theme of the documentary is women and girls oppression. However, in the specific story from Cambodia that was analyzed,
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However, she manages to rescue six girls from that brothel. Each of the ten small bedrooms in the brothel contains two nasty, worn, and stained mattresses on the floor and bloody tissue paper in the trashcans. Each door has a lock on the outside that explains why the girls could not run away from their clients. In this one scene, there are anomalies being seen left and right. The first are the pictures of the little girls on the inside of the bedroom doors. When thinking of images that help men get roused, pictures of little girls do not come to mind. Second, a woman is the co-owner of the brothel. How can any woman allow men to exploit innocent girls, knowing that they would not want their own child being in that predicament? And third, the part of the scene where the woman is taking in while the male owner is negotiating with police for his freedom. Nothing sums up this scene except for the binary characteristics of being afraid and being scared at the same time, that Somaly embodies during the …show more content…
On the way, the question was asked how does Somaly assimilate the girls. She repeats the word kids four times to emphasize how important her mission for the victims to be kids again. When they arrive, they are welcomed by waving Cambodian girls in their white shirts blue skirt school uniform with smiles on their faces and flip flops on their feet. Images of playful girls running around shows that Somaly Mam did achieve her goal to bringing life back into the girls. There is a shift halfway through the scene where Somaly goes back to talking about her experiences. Trying to distance herself from the man who deceived her as a child, she repeatedly refers to him as he. She bluntly says that she knew nothing about sex before she was forced to have it. That is an anomaly because it is traditionally thought of that the people who are sexually active have heard or been taught about sex at least once. She then goes on to express six times that when she told the brothel owners and clients “I don’t want it,” they would beat and rape her more. Switching back different scenes of the children, the binary of tears and smiles was
In Erzulie’s Skirt, the reader sees two disoriented women awaking to the harsh reality that they have been tricked and imprisoned after their voyage. They are then locked in a concrete room with nothing but their clothing and two beds, forced to work as prostitutes for the personal gain of a racist woman named Delia. In the brothel, Micaela and Miriam are made to allow men to enact their sexual desire and unnatural fetishes, and if they dare to resist or refuse, they are beaten nearly to death. In the most obvious way, this position mirrors the treatment ...
Sexism is very real, even in the least patriarchal societies of the world. From a western hemisphere point of view, the lives of women and young girls that are described in Nawal el Saadawi’s “In Camera” and Hanan al-Shaykh’s “The Women’s Swimming Pool” is almost unbelievable. Although these stories do not tell the whole story of women’s lives in these areas, it gives readers a general idea of how politics, social opportunities, and male privilege is overbearing in their way of life. While “In Camera” is has a more dark, and mature theme than “The Women’s Swimming Pool,” it is obvious that both relate in the way that their protagonists both suffer from the unnecessary and unexpected burden of being born a female.
In the modern age, “one of the biggest impediments to anti-trafficking efforts is a lack of understanding of the issue“(Jesionka). People need to work together just like they did to end slavery, when everyone sees this as wrong there is nothing that can stop the demise of sex trafficking. In many communities “[people] can turn on the TV now and see pimps glamorized in TV shows, music videos, and movies”(Frundt). In the communities, people see the aspects of sexual trafficking as glamorous and they don’t realise that it is a type of slavery and the girls are miserable. If communities can work together to eliminate this issue, this modern slavery can be eliminated altogether because people won’t allow it to continue in their communities.
In the documentary, “What Stands in the Way of Women Being Equal to Men,” gender inequality is analyzed within four different countries through the narratives of four young girls. Each of these countries, Iceland, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and Lesotho vary in their level of gender inequality, yet all maintain unjust social constructs. While Iceland does demonstrate less social tendencies towards gender inequality, feminism is not accepted and women are burdened with social expectations that men are exempt from. In Jordan, girls are assigned certain activities and restricted from participating in others that boys are free to do whenever they please. Girls and women in the United Kingdom are oversexualized through pornography and are expected
During the 19th century, in eastern America, men were the heads of families and controllers of the work place, while women had little power, especially over their roles; particularly upper class women due to the lack of necessity for them to work outside the home. “Men perpetrated an ideological prison that subjected and silenced women”(Welter, Barbara). Their only responsibilities were to be modest, proper women who took care of themselves and did not stray from the purpose of motherhood. They were to remain in the home scene and leave the public work to the men; trapped in their own households, they were expected to smile, accept, and relish such a life. Barbra Walter also agrees that women were imprisoned in their homes, and were merely good for maintaining the family, “a servant tending to the needs of the family”(Welter). Many women's emotions, as well as minds, ran amiss from this life assignment and caused them to stray from the social norms set up by tradition. The narrator in Charlotte Gilman's story, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a victim of such emotional disobedience and rebelliousness. As well as the rebellious women in the poem The Woman in the Ordinary, by Marge Piercy.
In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (an American social activist and one of the leading figures of the early women’s rights movement) stated that “man is infinitely women’s inferior in every moral virtue.” Feminism (defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as: “the theory of political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”)
She begins talking about her childhood and who raised her until she was three years old. The woman who raised her was Thrupkaew’s “auntie”, a distant relative of the family. The speaker remembers “the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around [her] like a curtain when she bent to pick [her] up” (Thrupkaew). She remembers her soft Thai accent, the way she would cling to her auntie even if she just needed to go to the bathroom. But she also remembers that her auntie would be “beaten and slapped by another member of my family. [She] remembers screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as [she] did every single time it happened, for things as minor as…being a little late” (Thrupkaew). She couldn’t bear to see her beloved family member in so much pain, so she fought with the only tool she had: her voice. Instead of ceasing, her auntie was just beaten behind closed doors. It’s so heart-breaking for experiencing this as a little girl, her innocence stolen at such a young age. For those who have close family, how would it make you feel if someone you loved was beaten right in front of you? By sharing her story, Thrupkaew uses emotion to convey her feelings about human
Women in history were subjected to an oppressed role, which men were in control. Many of these women created groups to talk about these problems such as the Seneca Falls. Women fought for equality, but some were happy with the status quo, and some simply became the change.
Laura Bassett, a reporter from the Huffington Post, explains that in today’s society women are paid 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns, resulting in women being paid an average of $37,800 a year compared to men who are paid an average of $49,400 per year in 2012 (Women Still Earned 77 Cents On Men's Dollar In 2012: Report). Also, when a man and a woman apply for the same job, the man will almost always be chosen. This has resulted in the amount of full-time working males increasing by 1 million within a years time, and the number for full-time working women remained nearly the same. To this day, females are not treated equally to males even though almost a century has gone by from 1920 when women gained their deserved suffrage rights and other rights of equivalent importance. Both men and women are standing up to spread the awareness of the meager changes to women’s rights throughout the years. One way to raise awareness is to write a book, and many books have been made about the lack of equality rights for women. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, the main character Lily witnesses several equality rights between men and woman in the way that females are treated by males, which has become a major social issue in today’s society.
The Cambodian Genocide has the historical context of the Vietnam War and the country’s own civil war. During the Vietnam War, leading up to the conflicts that would contribute to the genocide, Cambodia was used as a U.S. battleground for the Vietnam War. Cambodia would become a battle ground for American troops fighting in Vietnam for four years; the war would kill up to 750,00 Cambodians through U.S. efforts to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. This devastation would take its toll on the Cambodian peoples’ morale and would later help to contribute that conflicts that caused the Cambodian genocide. In the 1970’s the Khmer rouge guerilla movement would form. The leader of the Khmer rouge, Pol Pot was educated in France and believed in Maoist Communism. These communist ideas would become important foundations for the ideas of the genocide, and which groups would be persecuted. The genocide it’s self, would be based on Pol Pot’s ideas to bring Cambodia back to an agrarian society, starting at the year zero. His main goal was to achieve this, romanticized idea of old Cambodia, based on the ancient Cambodian ruins, with all citizens having agrarian farming lives, and being equal to each other. Due to him wanting society to be equal, and agrarian based, the victims would be those that were educated, intellectuals, professionals, and minority ethnic g...
After this short but powerful preface, the documentary continues with two shocking interviews made by David Lowe to two under-educated women who are the heads of their families; Ms. Dobey, wh...
...action with others… especially men. This supplies final substantiation of the authors' argument, that women continue to be oppressed by their male-dominated societies. It is a bold undertaking for women to ally and promote a world movement to abandon sexist traditions. Although I have never lived in a third world or non-Westernized country, I have studied the conditions women suffer as "inferior" to men. In National Geographic and various courses I have taken, these terrible conditions are depicted in full color. Gender inequality is a terrible trait of our global society, and unfortunately, a trait that might not be ready to change. In America we see gender bias towards women in voters' unwillingness to elect more females into high office, and while this is not nearly as severe as the rest of the world, it indicates the lingering practice of gender inequality.
The actions of individuals, the way people dress, the colors people like and what people do are all based on an individual’s gender, and display a notion of inequality between both genders. From birth, both genders are divided and treated differently. Gender inequality continues to be a sociological issue as it has been a concern all around the world for centuries. Gender inequality is the unequal treatment or views of people based on whether they are female or male. This form of injustice arises from the perception of gender roles that are enforced into society as gender norms. These particular norms, expectations and discernment against genders and their assigned stereotypes negatively impact society as a whole, causing inequality and struggles
...d make them more educated about the situation to hopefully prevent more trafficking from occurring. Deputy General Commissioners met in Phnom Penh to be trained on the investigation of sexual exploitation and gain knowledge about human trafficking in September later that year. Later in October Cambodia National Police Gender group with Protection Pillar put together a workshops for officers that focused on the violence against women. Officers were expected to go to a 3 day workshop to be educated. Ms. Kanha Chan speaks about what she thinks of the workshop.
During the 20th century women in third world countries had very limited to no rights at all. They could not speak their minds; They were unable to work outside their home; They had to remain completely covered from head to toe and they were denied the right to be educated. Women were forced to obey outrageous laws that kept them silent for many years without having any say or any way of defending their rights. As the years have passed, there have been many works of literature showing the experiences that women have suffered. The role of women in third world countries is questionable as evidenced by the way women are portrayed in A Thousand Splendid Suns.