What happened at the W-20 summit ?

W-20 summit 2Earlier today, the W-20 Women’s summit kicked off in Berlin with a panel- discussion titled „Inspiring women: Scaling Up Women’s Entrepreneurship”. There were some interesting names on the panel, our Dutch queen Maxima among others. I was looking forward to hearing what she had to say and how she stood her ground beside iconic powerhouses such as Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde.

Sadly, media has reported on only one thing: Ivanka Trump. The one person I couldn’t care less about. She was apparently booed and hissed at by the audience when she tried to convince them her pops was a promoter of women’s rights. I can’t even roll my eyes hard enough.

Why was she even there?

W-20 summit

All though I am quite certain the other members of the panel must have spoken as well and that what they had to say must’ve been pretty empowering or at least relevant, I can’t tell you for sure. All I know is that Maxima was the first speaker and that she described herself as a “feminist”, what in her vision meant “wanting equal rights” as well as freedom of choice. This drew applause from the audience, with Merkel saying, “Then I am one.”

Well shucks girls, I sure wish it wouldn’t be necessary to start the discussion at such a basic level but more so, I wish media had chosen more interesting snippets to quote…

I’m hoping the discussion will be online in full at some point so I can give it a go myself and see if I can collect some more interesting quotes.

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Keep it real!

It seems I am going to be complaing about “inspirational” quotes again… The proper response to this might be to delete my FB account, but I just can’t help myself. Annoyance is good fuel for writing as well so it’s not all bad…

The category I am going to hate on today are the quotes that attempt to be empowering and do this by questioning the “realness” of other men and women. Some examples:

real girlsIt might just be the fact that English isn’t my mother tongue, cause I don’t know what half of this stuff even means!  The adjective “real” in this context can mean anything varying from “brave” to “honest” and from “sophisticated” to “independent”. And what’s more, it feels like it’s not even really meant as a declaration of “realness” as much as it is a diss to someone they consider to be the opposite of real… which is what…. a man? not human (zombie?)? an un-woman… really no clue…


…and one last thing, somewhat unrelated: WHY is it so hard to remember that womAn is the singular form?! Nobody talks about “a men” but when it comes to the female version it gets confusing for some reason….. Maybe because we often travel in packs and are not seen as individuals until later on in life? 

Anyhow…. back to the real topic of today… because there is also a category about “real” men (yes, this is the plural form), that needs to be addressed. These quotes are actually usually quite boring, imo, as they are mostly just a creative attempt by some women to vent about their exes or just another way of dealing with being turned down, because you see, he just wasn’t “real” enough to deal with her… You ready for this?

COME ON, ladies…… This just makes me feel ashamed of my gender…. Give the guys a break already… How can the dudes ever live up to this shit? If the guys you are dating keep turning out to be shitty specimens, maybe there’s something you are doing that is making them behave this way!

And I haven’t even discussed the “what-he-says-and-means-vs-what-she-says-and-means”-quotes that go around……… You know the ones…… Man, they annoy the heck out of me…

man vs woman says 2  man vs woman says 1

This last category might need a whole blog of its own, to be honest. And I must confess I’m actually a lousy woman in this discussion because I totally agree with a lot of the complaints guys have about us, as far as our indirect communication goes, our weird expectations and fickleness. I am totally that way sometimes (but I do apologize later (sometimes))!

How DO we coexist? I guess it’s all about finding the balance, right?

man woman yin yang