What kind of year was 2014?
It was a tough year to be female.
This year...Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 400 Nigerian schoolgirls during two separate sieges. Most of the students kidnapped during the first incident were set to write their final high school graduation exams that day. The girls, aged 16 to 18, have since been sold into marriage for about $12 each.
This year ... ISIS distributed pamphlets outlining its rules for enslaving and raping women and girls.
This year ... Amnesty International released a report detailing how scores of girls -- some as young as 10 years old -- have committed suicide after being raped and tortured by ISIS members in Syria and Iraq.
This year ... marked 25 years since a lone gunman stormed into an engineering class at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, ordered all the men out of the room and then shot nine female students. In just 20 minutes he gunned down 24 women throughout the school, killing 14 of them. A suicide note in his pocket listed 19 prominent women he planned to murder, blaming "the feminists, who have always ruined my life."
This year ... Jeff O'Neil of Vancouver's CFOX Radio suggested on-air that a host at another station should ask Justin Trudeau which female political figures he would like to "f---, marry or kill." It took CFOX almost 10 hours to issue an apology. The station rejected calls to fire O'Neil, saying he would be taken off the air temporarily instead.
This year ... Zahra Abdille and her two sons were murdered by her husband in Toronto, even though she had seemingly done all the 'right' things that abused women are supposed to do: she earned a master's degree while raising her kids; she found a job as a public health nurse; she moved to a women's shelter with her children for three weeks. But she also made too much money to qualify for either long-term housing assistance or legal aid to fight for sole custody of her kids.
This year ... Apple and Facebook each offered to pay female employees $20,000 towards the cost of freezing their eggs. Neither company increased the length of paid maternity leave allowed for their female workers in the U.S.: 17 weeks at Facebook and 14 to 18 weeks (four before birth, 14 after) at Apple. If the two companies put the $20,000 towards extending paid maternity leave instead, it would allow new moms at Apple and Facebook to stay home with their babies for almost two more months with full pay.
This year ... a group of male dentistry students at Dalhousie University formed a special group on Facebook. They posted comments about raping unconscious women and polled group members on which female classmates they would like to "hate f---."
This year ... the above phrase entered many people's vocabulary for the first time. That's because a former CBC employee accused radio host Jian Ghomeshi of saying he wanted to "hate f---" her after a work meeting. About a dozen women told similar stories about Ghomeshi, alleging that he choked, punched, slapped, sexually harassed or sexually assaulted them. Toronto Police charged Ghomeshi with four counts of sexual assault and one count of what the Criminal Code of Canada calls overcome resistance, choking.
This year ... after the Ghomeshi allegations, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported went viral around the world.
This year ... several women also came forward to tell their stories of allegedly being drugged and raped by Bill Cosby. Large-scale outrage erupted over the allegations -- but only after another male comedian mentioned them onstage. Cosby's career and image remained untainted up until this year, even though the first abuse allegation was made 12 years earlier and a civil suit involving 14 women was filed back in 2005 (and settled by Cosby out of court in 2006).
This year ... we watched grainy footage showing football star Ray Rice sucker punch his fiancée Janay, knock her out cold and then drag her unconscious body out of an elevator.
This year ... female celebrities made headlines for their bodies instead of their talent. In desperate attempts to remain tweetworthy, Rihanna showed up basically naked at the Council of Fashion Designers of America gala, Kim Kardashian posed full frontally nude for Paper magazine and Madonna, 56, posed full frontally nude for Interview magazine. Although Jennifer Lawrence was horrified when private nude photos of her were stolen and posted online ("a sex crime," she said, which "sexually exploited and violated" her and other hacked female celebrities), the privacy breach made her one of the top Google searches of 2014.
Most of the time I consider myself lucky to be a woman living today rather than one born generations earlier. I marvel at how much easier I have it than my mother and all the women before her. And I am lucky; I have the ability to make choices -- about my education, life partner, reproductive rights and career -- that none of them ever had.
Looking back at the year we had, though, wasn't it still way too tough -- too dangerous, even -- to be a woman or a girl in 2014?
By Christine Wong
This was originally published on The Purple Fig
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