Photo from BBC News
I have just seen the above picture of you and your wife with your new baby daughter and I just felt like congratulating you. You are just like me or like anyone of the 500 couples that I've taught at my antenatal classes in London, U.K.
But you see? There is something very special for what I must congratulate you enthusiastically as I trust it could change you forever, you didn't just have a baby you've had a girl! And before I go any further, please let me also congratulate you and your wife on your noble decision of donating 99% of your shares to charity. I guess becoming a parent brings that sense of responsibility with the future and with others. But here is a different gesture that you can do to protect not only the future of humankind but also your daughter. And it has been clear to me since I, like you, had a daughter 4 years ago. In the picture attached you can see me with her, demonstrating at your London office (or so we've thought) my daughter was a baby just like yours and she was in a carrier that day and I was trying to protect her rights and mine.
We were campaigning because Facebook kept censoring our breastfeeding pictures.
Photo by Denise Sumpter
The promotion of breastfeeding can save millions of lives in many parts of the world, but this is just a small part of the big big problem. Facebook is just like our world but in a small scale, so it has it's good use and it's lovely people, and it also has bullies and not so nice people, but then there is the control, the power and the dominance it is still the same as in our world... the capitalist power, the advertisers, the money!
And when you are a girl, just like your daughter is, what matters in this world is just your body and your sex for the commercial interest around it. Advertising feeds on the insecurities of women since they are toddlers, sells them toys to remind them of their place and their concerns, labelling them in pink and telling them to pursue beauty, advertising feeds from telling women that they are unable to birth or feed their children. And it benefits from our bodies when naked for others and not for ourselves, not for our pleasure, not for feeding our babies, not for birthing them, but rather for being objects to be used by the sexual needs and desires of others.
So there are many ways of saving the world, Mr. Zuckerberg mine is making it better for my daughter and all the women of the future, because it is only fair and because doing so can change the entire core of this society.
Because it could empower women, and if that happens women including your girl will become part of the decision makers in an equal and fair way and if they choose to marry they will do so to people who love them, respect them and support them and because of that they will have less chances of doing so out of desperation and as a side effect of the socially promoted low self steem, so then they will have less chances of becoming a target of domestic violence , and if they choose to become mothers they will be doing it out of choice and in equal conditions and then they could do so by feeling fulfilled and they will therefor mother their babies from a sense of power, freedom and respect and that will have major repercussions in the future generations, and when those women are older they, just like many men do, could be respected and admired in equal terms having completed a lifetime of achievements from equal opportunities and then they will become wise women who could continue to provide insight to the world from their knowledge and experience... Oh Mr. Zuckerberg! I do hope you can see the world through your daughters eyes and change it!
Because investing in your daughter's future as a woman is investing in the world and its future, and in possibility and in hope!
But above all I wish you all the best for your journey as a father, for still today protecting women from sexism is something that not even all the money in the world can guarantee.
I truly and honestly hope that you and I can get to see our daughters growing up free of the commercial interests that are currently placed on them.
With gratitude for your time.
Jesusa Ricoy Olariaga
Facebook user (as an activist)
Mother & Childbirth Educator