我们拥有的还不到一半的天空
直到读了《天空的另一半》这本书，我才意识到今天在某些地区女性的处境有多么艰难。
这本书由多个关于女孩的故事组成，其中大多数来自非洲。由于她们的性别，她们经历了难以想象的非人的侮辱。这本书是用一种正式的新闻工作者的语气写的，并没有参杂很多的情感，好像作者在讲虚构的故事。我从未如此希望这些故事是假的，但确凿的证据告诉我，那些可怕的事情是真实的。
根据对男女年龄差异的分析，目前全球约有1亿“失踪女性”。每年，至少有200万妇女因性别歧视而失踪。(Kristof and WuDunn 7)
为什么会这样呢? 性别歧视似乎不会对人造成直接地伤害，但实际上却并非如此。女性的大量消失是由于全球范围内性别歧视的累积造成的。在印度，母亲为女孩接种疫苗的可能性比男孩小; 在中国，一位农民曾兴奋地叫道，因为有了超声波，他再也不用生女儿了; 在阿富汗,一个人只给生病的儿子买了药但不是不给生病的妻子(Kristof and WuDunn 7,8)。女孩由于性别歧视造成的“死亡”总量在过去的五十年里甚至比男性士兵在20世纪的死亡数量要多。性别歧视实际上可以变成一场性别屠杀(Kristof and WuDunn 8)。
这只是这本书的第一章。这本书提供的冰冷残酷的数据，讲述的性别歧视在社会中根深蒂固的程度，以及性别歧视所造成的伤害，都让我非常震惊。性别不平等在今天仍然是个大问题。我在相对和平的社会中看到的只是整个事件的一小部分。在世界上的某个地方，妇女可能会受到虐待，就像她们不是人一样。妇女没有拥有一半的人口，没有占有一半的权力，更不用说占据一半的天空(Kristof and WuDunn 8)。
We Do not Have Half the Sky
I would neverrealize how hard women’s condition today could be until I read this book—Half the Sky.
The bookconsists of multiple stories about girls, most of whom from Africa and had experienced unimaginabel inhuman insults because of their gender. It is written in a very formal and detached tone, as if the writer was telling fictional stories.I’ve never been so wished that those stories are fake, but the hard evidence warned me that those terrible things were real.
Based on the analysisof the age difference between men and women, it showed that today there arearound 100 million “missing women” today globally. And each year, there were at least 2 million women disappeared due to gender discrimination. (Kristof andWuDunn 7)
How could this happen? It seemed like gender discrimination did not harm people physically, but it actually did, terribly. And this great amount of disappearance of womenwas due to the accumulation of gender discrimination globally in the wholeaspect.
In India, the possibility for the mother to take girls for vaccination is smaller than that of taking boys; in China, a farmer exclaimed excitingly that he would never have to have daughters because of the application of utrasonic waves; in Afghanistan,a man bought medicine only for the sick son but not for the sick wife (Kristof andWuDunn 7, 8). The total amount of girls who were “killed” beacuase ofdiscrimintation in the past fifty years was even larger than the amount of dead male soldiers in the twentieth century. Gender discrimination can actually turned into a gender massacre (Kristof and WuDunn 8).
This is only thefirst chapter of the book. I was so astonished by the cold and brutal dataprovided by this book, as well as how deep that gender discrimination had rooted in the society and how much damage it had caused. Gender inequality was still a problem today. What I saw in my relatively more peaceful society was only a small part of the whole image. Some where in the world, women could be treated as badly as if they were not human beings. Women did not have half the population, did not own half the power, and not to mention half the sky (Kristofand WuDunn 8).
Works Cited:
Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn. Half the Sky. 浙江人民出版社, 2014.
