Girl's Day.mp3
Hearing world, unlimited fantasy, welcome to the radio station of XXMU. We are a team, yes we can. This is Be in English, I’m Shawn. A late happy Girl’s Day wish to the girls listening to our program. And by the way did you go see the Girl’s Day festival held by the Student Union on March 8th? I heard it was fun! But today I would like to talk about the culture background behind the Girl’s Day and the controversy about the existence of this feast. After the song, please tuned.
You may not know about this young holiday created by Shandong University in 1980s, but you must know the International Working Women’s Day on March 8th. The Girl’s Day is created to differentiate between girls and women in order to highlight female rights and appeal boys to care about girls. Mostly this festival is held in universities for various reasons. Firstly university girls don’t want to be called “women” and want to have their own festival. So they chose the day before the Women’s Day. Moreover, now this festival provides boys a chance to send gifts to girls to show they are care about them whereby to communicate with them.
Actually many other countries also have festivals like this. In Japan they have Peach Festival (Hinamatsuri) on March 3rd. On that day parents will set up platforms covered with a red carpet displaying dolls in order to wish their girls healthy and happy. Sweden has Saint Lucia’s Day. Saint Lucia is the Goddess in Sweden tale who protects all girls and during that day girls will dress up as goddess and send cookies to people.
It seems that all the foreign Girl’s Day have quite deep culture background, but why do we need to create such a Girl’s day so close to the International Women’s Day instead of just celebrating those two together? The main reason is that girls feel being discriminated to be called women. In their minds women represents married, old female. Which is why we have so many other names for Women’s Day. But actually it’s not. In fact the action to create those two separate festivals is discrimination to the elder women.
Moreover, creating Girl’s Day itself may involves discriminations between male and female. Why do girls need special care? We are born equal and have equal rights. Therefore we are supposed to care about each other instead of unilateral care.
I’m not saying the festival itself is bad or something, I just want to mention that we, our culture still need trims to be a sex-balanced one. Such as Sweden have both boy’s day and Girl’s Day. In boy’s day boys are dressed as lobsters to symbolize lobsters’ braveness. Why couldn’t we?
OK. That’s all for today’s program, what’s your idea about the Girl’s Day after taking time listening to us? Share with us via the official Wechat account, follow the topic Be in English in our Weibo account, or follow the topic Be in English in our QQ number. I’m Shawn. See you next Tuesday, bye.
