Statement of project

One of the biggest reasons I chose this class is because I want to understand more of what people living in a patriarchal society are missing. Patriarchal society treats oppressed women and other marginalized people unfairly. Patriarchal society teaches people to compromise, warn this is how things have always been, they tell you don’t struggle with the rule.

I chose this topic because I have heard more than once that Asian women face various abuses and violence from their relatives and society. I often feel anxious whenever I think of many women in the world experiencing mental and physical violence from their families. When the family becomes a place where they want to escape, the criminal justice system and social assistance become their only life-saving straw. The new divorce cooling-off period has put more women in need of safety and hope into a predicament. I wanted to do something, so I drew the image with pencil to tell more women that they are not alone. The black straw tube net-like on the background of the drawing represents everyone who wants to squeeze something from women. It may be a husband full of toxic masculinity, it may be a boss who wants to ask you to do the most work with the least salary, it may be a father who never has any expectations on you and only hope that your marriage will bring him money. The unfairness towards women must stop.

In 2020, China introduced a new 30-day cooling-off period for divorce. I think it is a decision beneficial only by men in a patriarchal society in order to more easily oppress women. Soon after the launch of the new policy, I keep seeing the same news on Weibo (a similar social software similar to Twitter) that women could not bear the constraints of the delayed divorce and decided to jump off the building, or take their young children with them to commit suicide. Every month, desperate women occur in different regions of China, who end their lives because they cannot escape their marriage in time. And this, as the government hopes, dead women can no longer increase the country’s divorce rate. The reduction of the divorce rate naturally reassures the general public that marriage is still an ideal life state or the illusion of the ultimate pursuit of life.

Tracing back to the beginning, why do people rush into marriage? In China, many women marry strangers because of arranged marriages. People want to get married because marriage is the best way to humanity’s strongest desire for connection and belonging. Arranged marriages enable people to entrust their lives to each other without much understanding or communication with their future partners. I think this is one of the reasons for the increase in the divorce rate in China.

Does marriage mean to a woman proof of happiness or a guarantee for the rest of her life? I think for women born in poor areas, marriage is a market transaction, a transaction with a clear price tag. As a woman grows up, women often face more challenges. Society expects women of every age to have a specific look and figure, it often brings out the anxiety. When females are getting educated, some families would prevent them rather than supporting them because a girl is marrying sooner or later. At work, many women would reach the unequal salary ceiling. Now, the right to divorce has become difficult to enforce. With the cultivation of toxic masculinity, men have become more compliant with the gifts that society has prepared for them before they born, while females have to work many times harder to get the same treatment.