28/02 – 10/03

Malaga, Spain

Youth Exchange

A friend asks you why you’re still being a feminist, what for? And you tell her you just found out. You tell her that you just woke up, that all your
life you’ve been fighting without knowing, that all your life you’ve had to be a feminist without even knowing what you were doing had a name.
You explain to your friend that you didn’t know that you were a feminist because what you’ve been doing your whole life, you called it respect.
And that, you’ve understood from a very early age that it’s something you have to "win" from people. That like in an athletic competition, the
one who runs faster, the strongest one , or the one who jumps higher, is the one who gets the prize. An award he deserved for his work, of
course, but not only a prize, but also the respect of all: respect as a prize.

Like this you learned that if you must fight to be respected, everyone else also must carry out their own fight so that they can reach you. They may earn your respect too. And that’s how it begins the struggle of power and ego. Why fight for someone’s respect when it should be something natural between everyone, the basis of life, a right for what we have to fight, but with which we should be born. It seems that the concept of respect has become something that only comes through admiration because you’ve done something that people consider important, because the whole world has seen it, because now you’re worthy of value, because now you’re powerful. The power.
My reading of the moment is a Greek tragedy and I can’t impeach myself of make a link between the Greek tragedies and power. For power or for ego. The power, this cursed word that makes the balance drop off in this, still huge fight, for gender equity.

And now you ask your friend a question: Have you ever wondered why most of the women you know put their affective relationships at the
center of their lives? That would be a rhetorical question. A question in a provocative and reflective way. And without delay, you should give
her an answer without hesitation: because society has taught women to feel and men to do, women to relate and men to achieve themselves.
How unfair is the weight that this education brings to the life and decisions of men and women? How unfair is this decision that we are given to
choose whether to have power or to obey? And how unjust is this relationship to power that is unreasonable, overrated and placed on the
pedestal of a single gender?

Maybe we should all tell our friends that everyone has the right to feel and to realize, and that the only power we all have is to respect. And now your friend asks you again, but the Greek tragedies, where are them placed in this whole story? And now, with no other way to
approach the subject, you close the smile that was already scarce by telling her about all this. You tell her that we still have to be feminists not only for ourselves, but also for all the women who lived and gave their lives as if it was a Greek tragedy.

Simply because they could not fight a man who tought he was empowered to mark the weight of his hand on her skin, or to mark her body with his own blood, until her death, because he loved  her. Simply because they couldn’t fight the ego of someone, that thought it was more
important that she didn’t abort, even if it meant giving her own life in the end. These and so many other tragedies, not just Greek tragedies, are still too current to put an end to the fight for equality and equity for all of us. More than equality we want equity. You men, you women, do not turn against us when we speak about feminism. Feminist is anyone who
wants each person to have access to the opportunities, rights and duties that should naturally be assigned to them. Feminism is about justice and the absolute respect that is owed to each one. It has to do with the right that each person has to give his or her own opinion on his or her own body, life, work and way of thinking, always respecting the opinion of others equally and impartially. Shouldn’t respect be the most
primitive and basic rule in the world?

Projects like this, Youth For Feminism, aim to awaken the awareness of each one, and only by being part of it we can experience and see how important is the work that the partner associations that were present in this project, and others like them, do.
This is my way of sharing with you and inviting you to expand your consciousness and your world by participating in projects like this, specially organized by partners like these, who were present in this project, in which I trust and know that in each project they put all their effort in a work for a more tolerant and inclusive community.

Thank you to Egeria Desarrollo Social, to AlTeatro and to all the associations and people who have gathered in this Youth For Feminism project, for sharing their personal experiences and the reality that surrounds them, and for together teaching and learning so much about, not only feminism, but also humanity. I believe that we are all now more alert to situations around us that may be violent or disrespectful. We are more ready and willing to take our small steps on a path against discrimination on gender equality, and simply people.

Thank you also to the Erasmus+ program for continuously providing new opportunities for each one to learn new perspectives of looking at the world, because the only way to move towards a more inclusive world, just and peaceful is to look around and understand that our reality is just a small seed in this great amalgam of colors that is the world.