{"id":2465,"date":"2021-06-11T12:36:31","date_gmt":"2021-06-11T10:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svjmedia.nl\/internationaljournalism\/?p=2465"},"modified":"2021-06-11T12:38:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-11T10:38:37","slug":"what-is-happening-to-the-struggle-for-dutch-womens-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svjmedia.nl\/internationaljournalism\/2465\/what-is-happening-to-the-struggle-for-dutch-womens-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"What is happening to the struggle for Dutch women’s rights?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Feminist progress comes to a media and social standstill in The Netherlands<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThere hasn\u2019t been a day when I haven\u2019t been harassed by tall, blonde, blue-eyed men,\u201d says a Rotterdam resident. Street harassment<\/strong> is one of the consequences of a sexist society<\/strong> that women suffer on a daily basis, and stalkers do not have any certain appearance. According to the StandUP programme, this type of violence has increased rapidly after the beginning of the pandemic. Unfortunately, the Dutch streets are not spared from it.<\/p>\n According to the Cambridge Dictionary, \u201cfeminism<\/strong>\u201d means \u201cthe belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men, and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state.\u201d However, media and political pressure has succeeded in linking the feminist struggle with a non-existent \u2018misandry\u2019 in this claim, and in historically liberal European countries it has been much more noticeably. As YouGov has already shown in various surveys, the percentage of people who identify themselves as \u201cfeminists\u201d is much lower than the percentage of people who support \u201cequality between men and women,\u201d the two terms being synonymous<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Since the beginning of the 21st<\/sup> century, the far right<\/strong> has re-emerged across Europe, bringing with it xenophobic anti-immigration policies, but also sexist and highly populist discourses, reaching even the youngest part of the population. And the Netherlands has been no exception in this fact.<\/p>\n The extreme right has conquered a large part of the Dutch Parliament<\/strong>, and also of the political debate. The Party for Freedom (PVV) and the Forum for Democracy (FvD) do not include any demand for women\u2019s rights in their programme, according to the international organisation Actionaid, and seek the elimination of mechanisms that facilitate equal opportunities for women<\/strong> in public and private affairs, such as quotas, victimising women for their use. At the same time as many scandals have surrounded these parties over sexist remarks, they deny terms such as \u201cfeminism,\u201d or even \u201cviolence against women,\u201d and fail to invest in resources that offer protection for women, as the Freedom Party did by voting against the Istanbul Convention.<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, the representation of women in these political groups is very low, which has led to a sharp decline in the number of women MPs in the Dutch parliament: 39% of women MPs in 2008 fell to 31% in 2020. And this has been a determining factor in the Netherlands\u2019 drop in the 2020 Global Gender Gap Ranking<\/strong>, from 9th <\/sup>place in 2008 to 38th <\/sup>place in 2020. In addition, the structural sexism of the far-right<\/strong> political power is bringing many other obstacles to Dutch society, which are not measured in the report, but which could set women back in their struggle for parity, such as the limitations in the Dutch abortion law.<\/p>\n Woman entering the town hall in Utrecht. Mar\u00eda Ferradas Calzada<\/p><\/div>\n Although all this may seem serious, as Sasha Vos \u2014an expert in Liberal Arts and Gender Studies\u2014 explains, the main objective of the rest of the political parties is to avoid being sexist<\/strong>, not to fight for new advances for women, nor to punish the proposals of the extreme right. \u201cThis issue is not on their agenda,\u201d she says. The Netherlands has a historical image of a tolerant country<\/strong>, due to its liberal origins, and this has made it uncritical of current issues. \u201cSexist episodes are seen as individual cases in the media, not as a systematic social problem,\u201d says Vos. At this point, society ignores the structural results of the patriarchal system<\/strong>, and there is no general malaise in the population, not even in a segment of it.<\/p>\n The solution to all this backlash should be an insurgent media, charged with igniting the minds of society. But there is no media debate in the Netherlands about the fight for women’s rights, according to journalist Alberto Arnaldo. \u201cEven in the most progressive media, where I have worked, they try to be very neutral, avoiding the word \u2018feminism\u2019<\/strong> because a portion of the audience might understand \u2018resenting the male gender\u2019 or \u2018misandry.\u2019 It’s a very dirty word here. But they also avoid the term \u2018sexism,\u2019 because it confirms a huge structural issue<\/strong>,\u201d Vos announces. However, if the media do not call these real facts by their name and point them out as structural problems, society is unable to become aware of them and, as a result, try to solve them. \u201cThis makes it easier to pretend that something is not happening.\u201d<\/p>\n What is more, analysis of the press by the Dutch magazine LINDA shows that the public prefers to read tabloids, and views of serious articles decrease radically. And the same goes for activism: the involvement is not massive<\/strong> as can be seen in countries like Spain during the 8 March demonstration \u2014its capital, Madrid, has seen protests of more than 350,000 people, according to the Spanish Government\u2014, and in the Netherlands it is hardly noticeable<\/strong>. \u201cWomen\u2019s rights protests are organised at universities and involve at most fifty people, unlike climate change demonstrations. That’s hardly anything,\u201d says Vos.<\/p>\n On many occasions, civil society has been the initiator of certain media debates, demanding that the media cover their social needs, representing its voice. However, Dutch society seems numb to the struggle for women\u2019s rights, and now, the turn of the Dutch media could be a big boost for feminism in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Feminist progress comes to a media and social standstill in The Netherlands \u201cThere hasn\u2019t been a day when I haven\u2019t been harassed by tall, blonde, blue-eyed men,\u201d says a Rotterdam resident. Street harassment is one of the consequences of a sexist society that women suffer on a daily basis, and stalkers do not have any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1432,"featured_media":2467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[224,144,223,219,222,221,220],"class_list":["post-2465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-acls","tag-dutch-media","tag-feminism","tag-gender-journalism","tag-sexism","tag-social-journalism","tag-thenetherlands","tag-womens-rights","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n