As I woke up this morning, I checked the news on-line and found the image of Pakistani women wearing chains around their wrists, protesting and demanding their rights today, International Women’s Day (IWD). The image inspired me and concretized why this is truly one of my favourite days of the year. Before I even got to the news, I had been excited to find that Google was giving a shout to all my sisters: The world’s most heavily used website had a Venus symbol in place of the second ‘o.’

We, as women, struggle all year, working, and then working hard to clean up after the men in our lives. We also work and fight to have equal access to political and economic life. And we still have a long way to go. So, really, IWD has a much more profound meaning than our symbol on a website.

The revolutionary history of International Women’s Day is often forgotten, as our day becomes more and more depoliticized and commercialized. The legacy of struggle for ‘bread and roses,’ and the upheavals for the right to vote and the right to choose are becoming glossed over or forgotten. Even among progressives, the central role of working class women fighting for decent conditions on the job is often overlooked.

That women’s day is largely ignored today in North America isn’t that surprising; everywhere we look, pundits and ‘experts’ are telling us that feminism is dead, irrelevant or worse. That the international side of it is forgotten is even less shocking, in a society that shuns real global solidarity, preferring a cynical mix of tokenistic charity and exotic holidaying.

But even with these not so great expectations, nothing could prepare me for the surge of anger that welled up inside me when I came across L’Oreal’s attempt to cash in on women’s day. On the cosmetics giant’s website I found their effort to “celebrate women’s day.” It encouraged women to send pre-made e-cards to each other with the L’Oreal branding, in order to gather emails for future product promotions. The hook was that for each e-card sent, the company would donate an unspecified amount to a Canadian charity.

If this wasn’t enough, they even appointed Heather Locklear and Beyonce as UN-esque “ambassadors” to women’s day. As I stared at the screen in disbelief at one more example of the blend of collective stupidity and celebrity worship, I couldn’t help myself from flashing back to those Saturday Night Live skits when Wayne and Garth fantasized about Locklear and told her, “We’re not worthy!”

Surely we, as independent women (as Beyonce herself has described us), are worthy of a much more substantive recognition of women’s accomplishments and ongoing struggles than this bottom of the barrel marketing ploy. And surely women need not be so isolated from each other as to be reduced to sending e-cards to celebrate our collective experience of inequality.

The scam of L’Oreal’s women’s day ‘charity benefit’ is just a tiny part of the multi-billion dollar scam that is the cosmetics industry.

We need to see through this muck and, by looking to the history of women’s struggles, realize that we can achieve victories towards social justice. Women continue to be under attack around the world, often still disenfranchised and everywhere still economically disadvantaged and exposed to physical violence. No amount of cosmetics can cover up this reality. And to change it will require not celebrity product pimping, but women uniting internationally to demand equality and justice. We are, after all, worthy.

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