Sick of (Overused) Empowering Word
03:58:00
Have I told you that my life is like a "season"? Like every time it has the theme, with its own ambiance and aura. So last night, I just can't sleep. I'm really annoyed of my own thoughts because of the series of incident that happened & I witnessed.
It started with the incident of my community that I really cherished. They had opportunity to work with business person and at the end of the day it turned out the business person was not really appreciating of the craft of my community. How could a person who tell everyone that they are empowering women turned out they are just exploiting and even not paying for the hard work of the craft itself? It blew my mind away. The second is what I witnessed from the Twitter fiasco between one of controversial influencer in Indonesia called out by creative person about her attitude of violating copyright by using another creative or artists' picture in her posts. It became a real catastrophe when the creative person captured the chat between them where the influencer bullying & oppressing her by threatening to bring out lawyer, suing etc. What's truly sickening was the influencer rejected and not admitting about her threatening attitude. While at the recent time she's like advocating the act of "empowering" women and not compared one woman to another. What the...
The third is when I saw this post from Michelle Elman (@scarrednotscared). She is talking about how women should be more confident about her wage. Women should be confident of her qualities and not underestimating her value. Women deserved to be paid equally or even more for her hard works.
The saddest thing about the first & second story above were all the parties are women. Do women got twisted understanding of "empowering" meaning? You can not "plead that you've empowered women" just by giving them (underpaid) money. You must treat them equally, just and fair. If you can't pay them as good as it should be, just be an honest business person by saying it upfront, make a nice & clear agreement and not using term "empowering" in your marketing package, ads & social media. Duh.
Perhaps we overused the term of empowering itself. It sounds sexy, sophisticated and selling. But the real meaning seems abstract & not really absorbed to be brought into daily behavior. How about make it simple? Just be kind, be honest, just, fair, positive and supportive to each other. I believe none misunderstood these set of characters, right? I believe if you could implement those integrity, then you've already did "empowering" and it would bring confident of people that you supported. By treating people well you humanize them, you bring out the best of them. You let them grow, you let them learn and by that you make them know their real values. And they won't underestimate their-selves like Michelle's statistic.
Be kind. Be just & fair. Be honest. Be positive & be supportive. I beg you, please.
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