Rant

Nike is everywhere. It's the logo on my sports bra. It's the logo on my socks. It's the logo on my brothers tennis shoes. It's the logo on my brother's backpack. It's like the Nike franchise never ends. When people think of Nike, they usually think of these things (shoes, clothing, etc), but no one thinks about the suffering that allows the company to stay in business. Writer Cynthia Enloe points out that women around the world are suffering because of companies like Nike. Enloe includes a chart in chapter three of her book The Curious Feminist that compares the minimum hourly wage that sneaker companies have to pay in various companies. The lowest wage is a disturbing ten to fourteen cents per hour. What is even more disturbing is that women seem to be trapped in this situation. As Enloe points out, if women try to get their wages raised, they risk losing their jobs to another country whose women will work for lower wages. Not to point out the obvious, but this is so unfair. Money shouldn't be valued over human life. Thousands of women are living in poverty working for peanuts while the Nike executives board their g5's and sip champagne. It's just ridiculous.

One of the worst parts is that even if this exploitation of poor women were made more widely known Nike's sales would most likely not decrease that much. I doubt my brother would give up the newest pair of Jordans to help a woman that lives thousands of miles away from him. To me, situations like women being exploited by shoe companies are crises. People band together when a hurricane comes and destroys a city, as they should, but when a hurricane in the form of multi-million dollar companies come in and worsens the lives of thousands of women, nothing is done.

Another part of The Curious Feminist that really stands out to me is the expectation that countries like South Korea and Indonesia have for their women. Enloe writes, "At the time, officials in Seoul tried to persuade those newly jobless women that giving up their paid employment was good for the Korean nation and resigning themselves to return to an earlier vision of womanhood as unpaid dependent was an act of feminized 'patriotism'." Why should women have to sacrifice their independence in order to serve the nation? Why are women in general expected to be selfless? This part of the book really frustrated me because I don't think it's fair to expect women to always make the sacrifices. Women being the sacrificial ones is a trend that is present in various areas of life like marriage and motherhood. Society doesn't pressure men to make sacrifices in the same way. If I'm going to give up something that I care about, I want to be able to do it because I want to not because I'm expected to as a woman.