Blog 7 Dan Meeks

        In Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the story starts off with the story of a girl named Rath. In the story Rath goes to Thailand to try and find work. A job agent after they had been washing dishing for a couple months took them deep into Thailand where he turned them over to some gangsters. The girls then stayed in a tenth-floor high rise apartment where they were sent back and forth with guards from a karaoke lounge that operated as a brothel. There, the men told Rath and her friends that the men paid lots of money for them and they were going to have to pay the money back and then he would send them home. They weren't sure how they were going to pay the money back but that became clear very quickly when Rath was locked in a room with a customer who tried to force her to have sex with him. When she refused the man came in the room and beat her telling her that he'd kill her if she refused to have sex with the customer and refused to do what he told her to do. The girls then proceeded to work in the brothel for fifteen hours, seven days a week. The girls eventually escaped the man one night when they put a board across their balcony to the other and walked across. They knocked on the door of the neighboring apartment where the neighbor let them out the front door and they walked to the police station. Rath was arrested for illegal immigration which she was shocked at and thought they were taking her home. She had to serve a year in prison and then surprisingly a police officer took her and sold her to a trafficker who took her to another brothel. What this and Kristof says about sex trafficking and how it is more properly labeled as slavery is that it 100% is slavery. These girls were bought and sold with money for performing a job. They were forced to have sex with people and were not allowed to leave, had little food, had a dozen girls living in one apartment, and even though they were told that they would be sent home after they had paid the man back but clearly that wasn't the case. Sex trafficking is the slave trade and these girls would be more properly labeled as slaves not prostitutes or whatever label you want to give them.    

        Reflecting on last weeks' ppt, there's a lot of ways in which there is stereotyping in general and a lot towards women.One statement stood out to me as what could basically summarize the whole thing and this is it, These attitude may be so widely and deeply held within the community that they are almost invisible- except in their effects. This is what I believe sums up the issue with women and gendercide. The idea that women have been thought of as less a thousand years ago and still are today. Women are supposed to be "equal" in the U.S. but the higher you go up in careers the less women you see. Also there are many cultures where women have to accompanied by a man and pretty much the whole idea I get from the idea is that women are legally equal to men but culturally still are unequal to women in a mindset that most people don't even have to think about. Discrimination and stereotyping is there but it's almost overlooked and people still have the mind set from a thousand years ago about gender and gender role that we're taught at a very young age. So to fix this problem, Chimamanda brought this up too, we have to educate boys and girls at a young age to not slip into these invisible gender roles and then that's when change will occur.

    In the TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie she talks about her life and he experiences with feminism, the question that we were asked for this TED Talk was how does Chimamanda define the word feminism? The answer to this question is, " A feminist is a man or woman who says "yes there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better."" However, I found Chimamanda's TED Talk more interesting than just this question. At one point in her TED Talk she mentions that once she was in Lagos with one of her friends, Louis. They went out and when it came time to leave, Chamamanda opened up her purse and handed the man who had been helping them throughout the night a tip. The man then turned to her friend Louis and said "thank you, sir. " I thought this was strange and so did Louis in her story. The man automatically assumed even though Chimamanda is a successful author that the money had somehow come from Louis because he was a man. This also got me thinking about my own personal life and how when my family goes out to dinner. To start my mom makes all the money in my family and my dad is retired so almost all the time my mom is the one who actually pays our bill but my dad gets handed the bill most the time.