It's a small thing, but it's given me the rage!

[kickassangel]

So - listening to Pandora this morning.

There's an advert for an International Women's Festival near me.

Oh good! I think.

The events for women to attend include : shopping for clothes; shopping for beauty products; shopping for food treats; more shopping; free hair/spa deals; a firefighters fashion show for us to salivate over.

Apart from the obvious point that this is just blatant commercialism and no attempt at all to provide a festival (entertainment? music? talks?), why would women want this, and only this, and WHY does any of this even begin to fit into being International? There's nothing at all, not even food-wise with an International aspect to it.

I'm not surprised, but for a brief second, as an International Woman (Hi, Trump, I'm an immigrant) I had been interested. I can go shopping any old day, I would like to hear talks about the issues faced by migrant women. Guess I'll have to set up my own festival then.

The irony ... there is a "Ladyfest" near me, and while one would think that "lady" is a bit more restrictive than "woman", the Ladyfest is actually about feminism - very lukewarm, liberal feminism, but at least there's feminism involved. And there's a party.

Guess I'll have to set up my own festival then.

Do it!

kickass That's astounding.

I'm also an International Woman but the provision of shopping for women is really not high on the list of things of things I want to find out about ...

It sounds like my idea of hell. I hate shopping. Are they trying to exploit the relatively high profile International Women's Day has now?

This is one for the Twittersphere. I bet there are loads of people going apeshit about how utterly narrow the focus of this 'festival' is. I would have thought 'Ladyfest' was definitely more about shopping and high heels, good to see they are subverting the stereotypes. I would see if you can find a few like-minded souls to put on a festival somewhat closer to the spirit of the name.

there are some big universities around her that do quite a lot of activities, I'll just find out what they have planned.

This is just so obviously nothing but an excuse to get women in to spend money, and nothing else.
It's quite normal around here to have 'Ladies' night' shopping events (e.g. Fri night before mothers' day) but this definitely has the title which implies otherwise. I stopped listening after a while but I'm sure the ad will come back on again for me to rage at.

Wow, that's a hell of an agenda for an "International Women's Festival". I'm not sure what an International Woman is, but for such International people they sure share a lot of similar interests.