In response to blogger Matt Forney’s now-viral blog post:

Dear Matt Forney,

I know everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and I am not going to try to change yours. However, I am going to try to dismantle some of your arguments in the hope that you will reconsider your feelings towards female self-esteem.

In our society, 97% of working women are in jobs that pay more to men for the same task according to a poll by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of 534 occupations listed, only 7 were women paid the same or more as men for a task. While you say in your blog post that most women have done nothing to deserve self-esteem, I say that these statistics illustrate that women have to put in an extra amount of effort to earn the same benefits that men get just for being alive. Even when women are extremely powerful, such as Hilary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, the media feels compelled to critique their appearances instead of their policy. President Obama recently stated to a reporter that Kamala Harris is “the by far the best-looking Attorney General in the country.” While she is conventionally beautiful, a professional setting has no place for these personal comments. Whereas it seems that you believe that any compliment is a positive one, as a woman, being complimented on appearance in an environment where because of my sex I must work twice as hard to keep up just feels like unwarranted objectification.

Later in your post you say that confident women are incapable of seeing men as human beings, and yet by viewing women as objects whose whole lives must circle around men, you deprive them of fundamental human desires – the top two tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You believe that women should not derive achievement from a college degree or job, and cite bodybuilding as something to which men get respect because of hard work. It seems to me that women should justly be respected for hard work in whichever field of study that they choose, and I don’t see how body modification has anything to do with personal merit.

Furthermore, while you comment on the resurfacing of the retro-sixties aesthetic, you fail to recognize that that is all it is: an aesthetic. A beehive hairdo is in no way akin to an unspoken desire to revert back to having limited political freedoms than it is a cry for a return to segregation, which was also a popular idea of the sixties. And while you continue to state that musicians who cultivate this aesthetic are all simply singing about men in their lives, I would like to remind you that nearly an equal amount of songs have been written by men about women – expressing feelings of love to either sex is an integral part of music and also the human experience.

Lastly, throughout the post you refer to confident feminists who must rely on prescription drugs in order to survive. According to an article on sciencedaily.com, while 75% of people who commit suicide are men, 1 in 4 women will be diagnosed with depression in their lives. As a seventeen year old girl myself, it is not hard to see why. In our digital age of constant scrutiny, girls starting at an increasingly young age are expected to be constantly sexualized and are then chastised for following this dogma. However, this statistic exemplifies the fact that while a quarter of women struggle with depression, these women are smart enough to seek help for recovery and strong enough to overcome the mental illness.

In the United States, 50% of the population is female. If every one of these women grow up in healthy environments that encourage self-esteem and high achievement, that could mean 158.3 million more people working to make the whole planet a better place, instead of one man’s planet. If this isn’t a case for female self-esteem, I feel sad that you fail to see the bigger picture.

Sincerely,

Ali