March is Women’s History Month, the 31 days a year when we sheepishly admit that women run the world and everyone else would be lost without us.
Remember this critical fact every day after the month has ended and show you mean it by continuing to lift up the women in your life. Don’t wait until Mother’s Day to do something nice for– by then it will be too late, and all women will have abandoned their duties and left all the toddlers and men, and men who act like toddlers, to keep the train on the tracks.
Good luck.
Here are some very excellent ways you can work to lift up the women in your life and show some appreciation for all that we do year-round.
1. Pay up: There’s a new sheriff in town and her name is Aunt Becky and she means business. She is hereby instituting an 18% tax on every dollar spent or paid. Think it’s unfair? You know what’s actually unfair? Making 18 cents on the dollar less than every John, Dick and Harry just because you don’t have chest hair. How fair is that? Also shave your chest hair. It’s gross. Oh, and if you’re Hispanic, add another 4% to the tax; Native American women, add 10%; and Black women, who face the largest pay gap compared to their white, male counterparts, just take it all. Also, the tax is retroactive from 1964 when the Civil Rights Act should have right sized the pay gap. (Also, effective immediately, there is a universal ban on tuna fish sandwiches for lunch in all open workspaces. Maybe not gender-related, but it should stop.)
2. Lifetime or bust: One of the most meaningful ways you can show respect for the women in your life is to hand over the remote control. No questions asked. Learn to deal with the poorly plotted Lifetime movies, the predictable eyeroll romcoms, and the foreign films that run 3 hours and 49 minutes with no narrative arc (oh, but the cinematography).
Don’t like it? Deal with it, just like she has for decades, pretending to care about your sports game, gory action flicks or insanity-provoking cartoons with songs that wake her at 3 a.m. playing on a loop in her tired head. (She may really like sports, but maybe just not your team.)
If you simply can’t handle sitting through another remake of “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” then feel free to get up and do the laundry, mop the floors, make the beds, pay the bills and prune the hedges. Also, starting today, there’s a new law that you must ask for directions if you are lost, regardless of how much testosterone is coursing through one’s veins.
3. Food, glorious food: For every day following Women’s History Month henceforth, make her breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, drinks, dessert, snacks between the snacks, afternoon tea, after dinner drinks and a nightcap. Also, put yourself to bed. Come cheer her on at her team meetings in corporate and give her stars for sleeping through the night (bonus points if she sleeps straight through breakfast).
4. 5Children? Get to work. Feed and walk the dog you begged for but never take care of. Clean up your room, her room, the bathroom with a toothbrush, and scrub the fingerprints off the fridge, front door and windows. Wine her and dine her and if nothing else, for goodness’ sake, just let her drink a half a cup of Joe in the morning before it gets cold without asking where your other sock is or that school report that is exactly where you left it when you printed it out last night. Also, oysters and caviar, filet mignon and truffle risotto (we want the steak, not the puny salad) are all preferable to three bites of leftover fish sticks and soggy French fries.
5. Restorative justice: Every man who has ever cat-called a woman walking down the street or sidled up too close to her at a bar or club or proceeded when “no was the clear response;” to the men who have mansplained or manspread or made false assumptions about the woman as subordinate when she clearly outranks him, a certain fate will befall them. They will hereby be subjected to a life that involves being the designated coffee maker and office birthday calendar owner.
These men will have to endure at least once annually getting their chest smashed on a plate glass machine by a medical assistant donning kitty cat scrubs. They will have to get their orifices prodded once annually by well-intentioned doctors with too-cold hands and giant, metal tools and have to seek permission to have anything removed from their bodies, with an increasing number of burdens placed on them to do so. They will have to play for four hours a day with Barbie dolls, making up nonsensical scenarios and trying on different clothes only to take them off again. They will have to work twice as hard while they watch others with lesser credentials get promoted above them. #YouToo.
Kidding aside, Women’s History Month is a critical inflection point that begs the world to pause our business-as-usual approach and take note of the stark reality that women continue to face disparities across nearly all aspects of civic life. The truth is, we have an obligation to pay attention and work to right-size the inequities.
And while you’re at it, hand over the remote.