Daily sexist attacks directed at women in public positions must be stopped, the Women's Club of the Assembly said, stating that there is a fear that what happens every day in the public sphere will be accepted as normal.
As stated, the Women's Club is very concerned about the level of contamination of public space with sexist, misogynistic and very lascivious statements addressed to women in public positions, and, as they said, the most frequent targets are female politicians and journalists.
According to the co-presidents of the Women's Club, Branka Bošnjak and Vesna Pavićević, social networks are the terrain where this type of unacceptable communication flares up.
"Unfortunately, we are witnessing that even some public and party officials, and supposedly respectable businessmen, are not immune to this way of expression, and they follow it lightly," the statement said.
According to them, when it comes to this type of attack on women, "it seems that all ideological differences are erased."
Bošnjak and Pavićević remind that the inappropriate sexist comment of the Old Guard of the Liberal Alliance towards MP Aleksandra Vuković was recently recorded, then the "shameless statement" of the spokesperson of the Social Democrats, Nikola Zirojević, addressed to Minister Vesna Bratić.
"Recently, a very lascivious comment by a member of the Government's National Commission for UNESCO, Jovan Markuš, addressed to MP Draginja Vuksanović Stanković, and to the ultra-rightist (Vojislav) Šešelj and his outrageous qualifications at the expense of Cetinjanka and Vuksanović Stanković," the statement added.
The entire ideological spectrum, as stated by Bošnjak and Pavićević, is unique when it comes to humiliating a woman and "they all look at it as a completely natural thing".
"It's amazing how natural it is for men to see a woman as an object. In their eyes, women are primarily the body and appearance, and there is always some inappropriate allusion on that account," the announcement states.
Bošnjak and Pavižević said that unfortunately, despite the increase in the number of women in high positions in Montenegrin politics, it is not rare that instead of polemics with their, usually very clear positions, they resort to commenting on their appearance and their way of expressing themselves, their temperament, their appearances.
"What is particularly worrying is the high degree of tolerance towards these increasingly frequent occurrences, by those whose duty it is to condemn it, and I mean the very top of the state and our fellow politicians and the media", said Bošnjak and Pavićević.
According to them, there is marked selectivity.
"Everything is possible for Draginja, but not for Vesna, or vice versa, depending on which media is in question and depending on which political camp it originates from," the announcement says.
That is why, as they said, the Women's Club warns that it is high time for a change in the way of communication in public space.
"Because there is a fear that what happens to us every day in the public sphere will be accepted as normal, that everything will be treated as a trifle, that we will Google it and get used to it," the announcement states.
Bošnjak and Pavićević said that when you count the announcements of the Women's Club regarding such outbursts, you can see that the situation is alarming.
"Unfortunately, the intolerable ease with which such statements are made is very worrying, as is the fact that those who make them are still surprised by the reactions of the Women's Club because they see nothing controversial in them," they said.
It is also obvious that in Montenegro, as they said, in the wider community, sexist outbursts are mostly justified by some kind of macho tradition in which this type of insulting women is a benign male pastime.
"Benign when it is not about their mothers, daughters, wives or sisters," the statement added.
Bošnjak and Pavićević say that such contamination of the public scene must be stopped urgently, because, in their opinion, all limits have been crossed.
"Once again, we appeal to the institutions of the system to respond within their powers and to all of us in the public sphere not to tolerate and publicly condemn such outbursts and not to allow this kind of discourse to become our normal everyday life, and considering the trends, we are threatened by exactly that." ", the announcement states.
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