Sexism: My not-so-eloquent two cents

I read today that every minute one woman dies in childbirth worldwide. And most of these deaths are preventable through family planning. However, funding for family planning has gotten smaller and smaller over the last decade. Three guesses why...

And I've been reading a lot about sexism showing its ugly face during Hillary's campaign (apparently Katie Couric grew a spine and said something about it). I'm no believer that it was responsible for her loss; however, like many others, through her campaign we got to see some very ugly and public examples of sexism and misogyny. Most of us were probably neither shocked nor surprised; we're not that civilized after all. We hear it every day. The cat calls, the battle of the sexes remarks, etc. It is a fact of our lives. We might have even laughed at some of the jokes or t-shirts with stupid acronyms. 

What bothers me is that people, men and women, who think it's cute or funny to be sexist, to propagate battle of the sexes nonsense, don't see how their attitudes help shape global policies that are responsible for women dying in childbirth in the 21st century. Sexism and misogyny are not the same thing. Rather, misogyny is a particularly nasty form of sexism. But you can be sexist without hating women; you can be sexist and be a woman. The issue is understanding what sexism is, what is does, and how it plays out in millions of tiny and giant ways all over the world.

I am reminded of a song I was taught as a child in Sunday School. Basically it went "be careful little eyes what you see, be careful little ears what you hear, be careful little mouth what you say." There was a bunch of other stuff too, meant to instill religious guilt, but what stuck with me was the "be careful" part. Be careful, it matters. It is shameful that self-censorship and mindfulness in speech gets labeled as "political correctness," rather than an honest and earnest attempt at being respectful of other people, or wanting the world to be a better place.