Hello and welcome to the Women’s issue, or rather the Women’s half of the Gender issue.
We have been waiting all year for the chance to indoctrinate you all with feminist propaganda, so we hope that you make the most of this chance and do your best to become good feminist drones. This is our chance to impress upon you the importance of the Women’s Officer and the Women’s Group, but before we do that, we’d like to extend a big thank you to all of you who made Women’s Fest last week so fabulous (this is us being optimistic, we’re writing this before Women’s Fest, but we’re sure it will be a success anyway).
(You know what’s weird? Why don’t those blue things in Avatar have nipples? They are biologically useful, after all. Not just useful for sex. This could actually become an article in its own right about the lack of nipples in the media, but we’re just gonna let you all fill in the blanks there. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.)
There have been a couple of murmurings about the importance of the Women’s Officer in this day and age, and we’d just like to stand up and say, yes, it is important we have a Women’s Officer. Like or not—we definitely don’t—women still face considerable discrimination in New Zealand, both in the workplace and, unfortunately, in places of education. We need a Women’s Officer to ensure that women aren’t forgotten and our needs aren’t dismissed here at Victoria. One of VUWSA’s key goals is ensuring equality for all Victoria students and strong representation is the best way to achieve that.
As for the Women’s Group, what’s to stop us? If there are enough women who want to get together and form a group, they have every right to, in the same way as anime geeks have every right to get together and squee about anime. The difference is that in the Women’s Group, we talk about things like equality, empowerment, and what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century. And sex. We talk about that too. So if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Isn’t it unfair that men don’t get men’s group?” be the change you want to see. Get out and make one, by all means. We’re not going to stop you—we’ll be too busy sitting round eating pizza and talking about sex. *
Lots of love,
Clare and Necia