Women Need to be Seen as Equal.

Women across the world are being silenced, taken advantage of, and viewed as “less than” men. This needs to change. While some countries have been able to make a lot of progress in closing the gender gaps and demanding equality, there are still places like Iran and Afghanistan where women are still being severely oppressed. This civic artifact lays down a very powerful statement. The placement of the search bar over this woman’s mouth as a visual representative of the silencing of women, along with the filled in answers popping up below really creates a striking case. Women need to, “be put in their place”, “know their place”, “be controlled”, and “be disciplined”; these statements are absolutely not okay, yet strongly believed by many men in countries where this is the cultural norm. This would fall under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal number 5: Gender Equality.  We can view this through the lens of visual rhetoric, taking in the dark colors and the object placement of the search bar over this woman’s mouth, these are all intentional strategies of getting this point across. We can also view this through the lens of commonplaces, because they use the ideas and values that used to be cultural norms. This image uses these phrases in the search bar line because they want to highlight how society keeps placing women as things to be controlled rather than equals to men, this is a commonplace because many people still believe women should be submissive to men. This visual uses these ideas in the search bar to show how commonly these ideas are believed, thats how search bars work, they fill in the rest of the sentence based on frequently searched phrases, so this piece pulls on the common knowledge that viewers know how that works too. Overall, I think this visual is very powerful and shows an important message: women need to be viewed as equals, regardless of what society’s narrative has been.