Women are people too

There is a time for everything, as some prophet once said. There is also a day for everything, as any quick Google search will tell you. (February 22 is International Hedgehog Day, in case you want to diarise this.)

In SA, national days, weeks and months for various issues have multiplied of late. The government's official website lists, to name but a few: International Day of Peace; International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer; World Stroke Week; Older Persons Week; and International Fraud Awareness Week.

Not a lot of fanfare attends most of these days, perhaps because they have not been declared public holidays. Women's Day, however, gets a lot of attention.

In SA, Women's Day is on August 9, to commemorate the 20,000 women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956 in protest against the extension of pass laws to women.

International Women's Day, which has its origins in socialist ideology, is "celebrated" on March 8 in other countries.

There is a reason for the quotation marks around "celebrated". Many have questioned whether a day dedicated to women is indeed a celebration of female fabulousness or whether it is merely another marker of our vulnerable otherness.

Some say that Women's Day does us more harm than good. People put on pedestals, as the stony-faced Cecil John Rhodes can attest, are liable to be torn down.

Raising women up as goddesses or idols will inevitably make some wish to break them down. No matter how awesome women might be, no-one should be awed by them, because "awe" originally meant "terror" and as tempting as it might be to imagine a world in which men were so terrified of women that they did them no harm, this is a counterintuitive notion.

Fear and fury are inextricably entwined: we fear that which we hate and we hate that which we fear.

Not that a day for women turns us into scary monsters, but it isn't necessarily healthy. Take, as a corollary, the idea of National Children's Day, which happens on the first Saturday of November, "to highlight progress being made towards the realisation and promotion of rights of children", according to SA's government website.

A day that reminds people about the rights of children is fine. A day that is deemed necessary to make women visible is infantilising

Children's Day does not need to be a public holiday because children do not need to take a day off from the work involved in being a child. Women's Day, on the other hand, is a ham-fisted attempt to give women a break, or their due, or something.

Here's the thing: once children become adults, they (or at least the males among them) are seen as autonomous beings deserving of the same dignity as any other adult. Therefore children outgrow Children's Day.

Women, however, remain women (or womxn, or whatever you want to call anyone who does not identify as "male"). Which makes Women's Day a bit insulting. It's like saying: "Ag shame, poor things, we really should acknowledge what a hard time they have of it."

There is, incidentally, an International Men's Day, which upholds the rights of men. Some countries, like Malta - where divorce became legal only in 2011 - take it quite seriously. Every year on November 19 parades of trumpeting testosterone imperil innocent pedestrians.

No need for Maltese-bashing, however. No country can claim to have reached a place of true gender equality. The mere fact of there being a day dedicated to women is testament to that failure.

There was a time when many children toddled around wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "Kids are people too". This was cute, obviously, but the important subtext was that as annoying as they might be, children are not possessions or playthings or in any way less important than adults. Their dignity as human beings should be respected.

A day that reminds people about the rights of children is fine. A day that is deemed necessary to make women visible is infantilising.

Women are people too. We do not want to be idols and goddesses any more than we want to be slaves and punchbags. We want simply to be human, and to be treated with the same kindness, dignity and respect that is due to every human.