Female Power

After watching today's movie in class I would like to share with you some features of the aboriginals that have caught my attention. Specially I would like to talk about their chauvinism. As I consider myself a Feminist, I am going to share some opinions about this with you.

I had always believed that only the American (and by american I mean REALLY all american, not only north american) ancient peoples were chauvinist, however, as I have sadly realized, this costume does not only belong to them, but it also belongs to many ancient peoples of humanity.


As we have seen on the movie "Whale Rider", the protagonist, Paikea is a girl who was born in a family of descendants from, "Paikea" who had been the last leader of her tribe. Unsurprisingly, he was a man.
This girl had a  twin brother who died a few minutes after his birth, and she is the most recent descendant from her ancestor. This situation brought many troubles for her grandfather, who rejected her because he was expecting a boy who would be their next leader and who would save his people from all the harm of our times.
In the movie we were able to appreciate that women's role in Maori's society was not very different; we witnessed many scenes in which Paikea was despised by her own grandfather only for being a girl, and we also saw him many times he underestimating and mistreating his wife.

We all know that american pre columbian women's role in society was also  related only to domestic work such as cleaning, cooking and nursing children. They had no right to give an opinion or being part of society in any other way, and being a "leader" was absolutely unthinkable for them.

Let's think about our own native people, the Mapuches. Does any of you know anything about a mapuche woman who has done something important for her people? All I know s that Caupolican had a loyal lover whose name was "Fresia" and Lautaro had a girlfriend named "Guacolda". As you can see they are part of our history only for being "someone's woman" and even their existence is uncertain for many historians.

I believe that, unfortunately, chauvinism is still part of our society. Despite many woman have fought for our  rights we are clearly in disadvantage with men, and apparently we will have to fight a lot for that.

I'll leave yo some videos for you to watch, one of them is about woman's fight for our sexual rights and the other one is a parody of a song you all probably know which is called "BLURRED LINES" that  is one of the most chauvinist songs of our times, however, this feminist parody is called "DEFINED LINES" 

I hope this post will make some of you aware of the society we live in. If you are girls yo should be fighting, if you are boys, you should at least be informed.