Leer en Español
The Idiocy of the Week award from El American has been won hands down by UN Women, the United Nations entity “for gender equality and women’s empowerment.” In a tweet last November 2, they complained that 11% of journalists killed were women, and called for an end to the killing of women journalists.
At first glance, on a superficial, almost epidermal level, if you look at it sideways, there seems to be nothing wrong with the message. But as soon as we look at it and ask ourselves some questions, we might conclude that UN Women’s feminism made it lose its mind.
UN Women: unanswered questions
Citing UNESCO figures, they are alarmed that the number of women journalists murdered has risen in one year from 6% to 11%. Apparently, a 5% increase is cause for alarm, but does the 89% increase in the number of male journalists killed not matter?
If instead of increasing the percentage of murdered women journalists had decreased, would UN Women have made a tweet congratulating itself for the decrease?
How is it possible to conclude from these figures that women are the most affected and deserve a specific campaign?
Does UN Women believe that this campaign will touch the hearts of the killers of journalists and make them think twice before killing female reporters?
Could it be that in their obsession with gender equality, what they are complaining about is that men and women are not being killed at exactly 50/50? Or are we rather in a situation where if the figure were 100% male journalists killed, UN Women would not say anything about it?
Why not talk about absolute numbers rather than percentages? Moreover, why distinguish between male and female journalists; is one gender more valuable than the other?
Come to think of it, why doesn’t the stat reflect the rest of the seventy-odd genders available? If UN Women boasts so much about gender equality, why does it resort to such an unbearably binary and non-inclusive statistic?
Is UN Women daring to define what a woman is? Somebody warn Matt Walsh, maybe UN Women has the answer to the “What is a Woman?” question and the poor guy is overworking himself for the fun of it.
If we are going to use statistics, let’s use them well. If the number of female journalists in the world is equal to or even slightly higher than the number of male journalists, wouldn’t these percentages be showing that there is an even deeper underrepresentation of murdered women than this small figure of 6% already provides?
If UN Women advocates female empowerment, isn’t this complaint discouraging female journalists and asking them not to take as many risks as men?
Or do you believe that jobs such as war reporters should be exclusive to men, or that women in this profession need special protection because they are of the “weaker sex”?
Or could it be that UN Women just wants to play with statistics to spout its disgusting misandric gender ideology, but doesn’t want us to think too deeply about the real implications of the data it offers?
I think either I have gone crazy or the only logical response to this tweet is that nowadays nothing is considered a problem until it affects a minority that can be manipulated for ideological purposes, or that is susceptible to form a body that can easily rake in money, ideally public money.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm