Together we stand
francesca spedalieri
© photo by francesca spedalieri ph.
When I was a little child I thought that to be a strong girl means to face little boys that were teasing me. To hold my head up and counterattack.
When I was a little older I thought that to be a strong girl means to resist at mockeries and to not let me down for mean words. Maybe I’d also thought that I had to act like them to be stronger.
Now that I’m almost 30 years old I realise that all of my past convictions were wrong, and obviously naive. They came from constant comparison with some values that society identify as men’s values: you must not cry, you must not appear weak, you must be strong, you must not seek for help.
Our society is filled with prejudices towards women and they are eradicated in ourselves. Women are still paid less than men for the same job, in institutions or in places of power women still play a marginal role. Just to mention a couple of examples. To be a strong woman, for a lot of people, means to be a career woman, independent, don’t be submissive, be rational.
Women have been fight for generation for their rights, and they still have to fight on daily basis especially in business.
Photography industry is no exception to this.
As reported by Female In Focus in 2019 “On an international scale, 70% to 80% of photography students are women, but only 13% to 15% of them go on to achieve the status of a professional photographer.” An average photographers’ salary in US in for 50k for men and 28k for female. Women have always been underrepresented through art history. In ‘80s less than 5% of the artists in Met Museum (Metropolitan Museum of New York) were women, meanwhile 80% of the nude bodies depicted were women. Guerrilla Girls, a feminist art collective, posed at that time a question on billboard: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?”. In 2012 the situation remained almost unchanged.
Truth is that men usually don’t have this kind of issues in business, but our society is still full of prejudices also towards them. To be strong for a man, almost in its literal meaning, is an oblige they were taught since they were little. Men must be rational, they can’t express their emotions, they must always look for girls, they must be bodybuilders. They have to fulfil a great amount of expectations, even if they want to find a woman (or so they think!). Surely they have always had advantages in business, politics, decisional roles, but they are suffering too.
This kinds of prejudices hurts everybody. Men and women live their life caged inside their convictions and in society’s prejudices and can’t be really free to be themselves.
To be a strong man or woman to me, is to be ourselves. It means not to be influenced, to be able to get emotional, to be able to ask for help, to live our unique sexuality, to live our life and to respect others. Gender equality is not a only a women’s matter, but everybody’s. We have to take a mutual change in order to really move forward together.
Truth is that my reasoning about justice and prejudices, it’s itself full of injustices and preconceptions.
World is not solely made of man or women but of human being. To be biologically born man or women should not be a way to make you fall inside a given category and should not determine who you are in advance. Each one of us is unique and should be free to live life in its own way. Each one of us experience some form of discrimination regarding our physical appearance, our sexuality, our disability. To really be free, we must look at others first of all as human beings.
This battle is not just for gender equality, but against prejudices themselves.
francesca spedalieri
J. Editor
Photographer
I’m a photographer currently based in Milan. My photographic investigation focuses on places and territories inhabited by men, how they are constantly shaped by the people who lives in them.
With the project “Where the river flows” about the pollution in Valle del Sacco, I was awarded with the special jury mention in the section portfolio Umbria photo prize at Umbria World Fest in 2017. The project was exhibited at MUVE Museum in San Giuliano di Roma in 2018.
In 2018 I was included in the book “100 stories of creativity” edited by Regione Lazio.
I’m currently working in a communication agency in Milan, and I work as a freelance photographer in Milan.
Email: francescaspedalieri1@gmail.com
Instragram: francescaspedalieri