Stories will Balance the World | Histórias a Equilibrar o Mundo | Aurélie Salvaire | TEDxPorto
Translator: Inés Mena Saravia Reviewer: Tanya Cushman I'm a fake feminist. I come here all neat and pretty on stage, with my high heels on and my warm smile, to preach the good gospel of gender equity as a tool of liberation for both men and women. But let's be honest, I might just be cashing in on a very juicy and buzz trend. I might still be falling for emotionally unavailable men. I might, as well, still treat my colleagues or coworkers with the same capitalist, competitive gene that is so entrenched in all of us. I might just be a fraud. Or not. Being a feminist in 2017 is walking a very thin line. On one side, you have the trolls and cyberbullies sending you hate messages on social media. And on the other side, your peers, your friends, your family who are questioning this: Why are you so passionate about this topic? And there are so many times that I ask myself how legitimate I am, really. Am I speaking truth? Or am I cynically or even unconsciously tapping into this trend and taking advantage of it for my own selfish benefit and visibility? It's a hard question to answer. I don't think anybody here is 100% altruistic or free from ego, especially by the way we've been raised. So it's very hard to be a 100% pure-race feminist. But we can try. And we can keep each other in check. And when I'm in doubt, I think about the five-year-old me. If you would've asked little Aurélie what she wanted the most as a gift, she would've said, "Peace." "Peace and balance." I hated conflict. When I would hear my parents fight, I would pray for hours to make it stop. When I was at the dinner table, I would feel the need to intervene between them, to balance their energies, to channel the conversation, rephrase the conversation - the phrases, the words - so that they wouldn't hurt each other that much. I hated the poison of spurious, the pleading ones. So I observed; I listened. And I could feel their deep pain below their anger. I could feel that my mom just wanted a more balanced marriage, with more love and appreciation. And I could feel that my dad would have loved to escape from the pressure of the family business and his overwhelming father. But they couldn't. They were trapped in their respective boxes. My dad was trapped in the man box. He was supposed to provide for the family. He was supposed to be tough even if he was a kid at heart. He was supposed to cope with his father's constant criticism, prove his value without receiving any word of appreciation. And my mom was trapped in a woman box - a very smart, educated woman in managing the household and bored to death in a rural, remote village, giving away her career, aspirations, and travel plans. And as I grew up, I realized that this personal story was actually a systemic one, from the rural villages of the South of France to the cities of Pakistan. The symptoms might be different, but the disease is the same. Because we all live in a matrix so embedded in us that we are completely oblivious about it. We even deny its existence. We live in a world of fear and domination. A world based on war and aggression, where the stats of military spending are actually up to eight times the stats of education spending. If we would stop spending on military for only eight days, we could provide and pay for the education of each child on the planet for 12 years. A world of deep, individual suffering. Because to prepare people for this world, we actually mutilate them to carve them into these boxes. From a very young age, we devaluate women. "It's a girl," are still lethal words in many places. Parents and teachers interrupt girls twice as much as boys. We train our girls to engage into quieter and calmer activities. We train them to conform and obey very soon. And we train our boys - through our ads, through our media, through our language - to fight, to address any conflict with violence, to disconnect from their emotions unless it's anger. We trap people into narratives. Women shouldn't be loud. Women are too emotional to lead. Women don't drive that well. And men, men don't cry. Men are strong. Men don't feel pain. And this matrix goes very deep. Our meta-stories are bias or myths or religion. Our stories are written by men, about men. Or about women, with a male gaze. So we only see half of the story. Today, millennials are asking for renewed gender roles. But what do they see when they look around them? They go to a nightclub and listen to "Blurred Lines": "I know you want it." (Laughter) Right? You danced to that one too. I did too. They see Donald Trump running the world. They see mass street harassment in India or in Köln. Toxic masculinity shooting people everywhere. We're reaching the limit of our system. The domination model is threatening the whole humankind. A world where half of the population is trained to oppress the other half is not a happy place. Both sexes are slaves to each other. So what can we do about it? Well, the first step is to reclaim the narrative. Words are magical. Words are powerful. Words are free; they're available to anyone. And those who tell the story are actually those who rule the world. So what is your story? The story you choose to tell. Not the one that others have invented for you - your family, your friends, your colleagues, the media, whoever. And I'm especially talking to women here. Because we are especially targeted by negative narratives. What is your true story? Honestly, truly, without an overinflated sense of self-esteem or underestimated. Who are you? Who do you want to be? And then the second step, for me, is to engage in collective action. For years I've been researching positive projects, solutions to balance this world. And what is fantastic is that new media is offering us new tools to shift the way gender and social activism has been done. It's more fun, it's faster, it's accessible to anyone. It can be called - it can be questioned for its depth or its impact, but I find it actually fascinating, these crossed roads between deep systemic social change and fun, fast, visual tools. Suddenly conversations which had been confined to very intellectuals for years go viral. And today more than ever, we need everyone to be a changemaker. So in the city where, supposedly, Hermione has been created, I would say that this trend that can be called "cool feminism" has many magic wands in its toolkit. One of them is humor. Humor is very powerful. There are different websites. One of them is "allmalepanels," where, for example, if you go to a conference where you actually see an all-male panel, you can take a picture and upload them on their Tumblr, and then you have a nice picture of David Hasselhoff with a thumbs up, telling you, "Yeah, you made it." Or you have this Twitter or Facebook account called "Man Who Has It All," which actually uses different images and phrases, and switches the roles. And you have, for example, an image of a man playing the guitar and just saying, "Are men too emotional to deal with political issues?" We have new channels, like ATTN:, BuzzFeed, 80 PLUS, which produce short, viral videos of one, two minutes, tackling a subject that was once buried in World Economic Forum reports, like the pay gap and this video that you might have seen about the woman discovering the pay gap and actually decides to work only 78% of the day. So she speaks, and then she doesn't finish her sentences in the middle of a meeting. Or she just backs off of a conference call 10 minutes before the end. She's like, "I'm only paid for 78% so -" (Laughter) Street activism, guerrilla activism is an interesting way of doing things and making change as well. In Paris, only two percent of the streets are named after women. Two percent. So a group decided to take matters into their own hands, and they took different images and pasted them all around Paris, like Quai Nina Simone and Street Frida Kahlo. And again, this is simple, cheap, but makes people think. Technology is helping us to leverage the power of the crowd. It's changing the way activism is done. Suddenly, platforms like change.org allow parents to question the brands who actually try to sell sexist t-shirts, for example, no? "I'm a hero," "I want to marry a hero" - like the Avengers one. All these new tools are helping us to balance the world. But for me, where this "cool feminism" trend is going beyond its alleged superficiality and blamed fakeness is when it actually changes the stories. When it engages counter-storytelling. Because how do you create a system of oppression? You create stories to back it up, to legitimize it. You create content, and you silence other voices. And how do you destroy a system of oppression? By new stories. If you want to change the world, you have to change the stories. So we need more female storytellers to tell the other side of the story. We need women to grab a mic, to grab a pen, to grab a camera to show their reality; to leverage the power of images; to impact people visually, emotionally; to use new media, like YouTube channels, newsletters, podcasts. To have an impact. And to convert the world into a collective of changemakers. Because now, more than ever, we have a collective duty of activism. And we have the tools to make it happen. We have a collective duty to reframe and rethink our unconscious biases. The songs we listen to, the words we use, the media we watch, the shoes we buy. We have to shift from a domination to a partnership model. To question the oppressive within us. To pass from the blade to the chalice, from Darth Vader to Luke and Leia Skywalker. And we have to be all, each one of us, part of this solution. Even if they call us fake. Gandhi used to say, "At the beginning, they ignore you; after, they laugh at you; after, they fight you; and after, you win." Small fluctuations can lead to massive system transformation. A new world is possible, based on trust and love. Because at the end of the day, what stories do is that they connect with our shared humanity. We are one. I am you, you are me, and deep down, we are love, no matter what they taught us. So now is the time to create this mass, this critical mass of new stories. To build a new archetype. Because it's a vital quest. It's a spiritual one. So that we can all finally find peace and balance. (Applause)