A few months ago I wrote an article questioning why women tend to be less pro-legalization than men when it comes to cannabis.I recently received an email from someone who wanted to me to look at his article about the same topic. Today I am writing a response to that article: "Females Still Missing From The Marijuana Community" by Johnny Green.
As a quick summary the author of the article, Johnny Green, believes that women do not participate in the cannabis community because...
- Portrayal of women - "Since most females involved in the cannabis community use their bodies and looks to gain popularity, it’s the ones that avoid those actions that get pushed to the side."
- Negative associations with the term "marijuana" - "Marijuana was also said to effect women in a severely negative way when smoked, back when the word “marijuana” still contained an “h”. Perhaps that it is this negative scare tactic that makes women uneasy to admit that they smoke cannabis."
- Marketing towards men - "Or perhaps women are just too afraid to attempt to establish themselves in the community, since marijuana is a cause that is primarily dominated by males. "
I agree that these are all likely to be factors in why there are so few women in the public eye when it comes to the cannabis legalization & regulation movement, but I also believe there is something inherent to the current culture of cannabis that is keeping women away.
There isn't a whole lot of evidence that women actually use cannabis less than men, so I believe that one of the issues we are facing is that women are not admitting they use cannabis, too. They don't seem as comfortable coming out as pro-cannabis in the public eye or appearing in pro-cannabis spaces.
Buy why?
Women naturally tend to congregate in places where they feel welcome, and I believe they don't currently feel welcome in the cannabis community..
I disagree with this statement by the author, "For every one female cannabis grower, there’s at least ten male growers."
Why? On my website GrowWeedEasy.com, which teaches people how to grow cannabis, I've found via Google Analytics that out of hundreds of thousands of people visiting the site each month, more than 47% of all the visitors to the site are women.
If almost half of cannabis growers are women, why don't we see more women growing cannabis in the public eye?
I believe women are out there growing and using cannabis, but they're just not doing it in the same places as men in the cannabis community. Your average woman isn't even welcome in the cannabis community!
If you look at how women are portrayed and treated in the cannabis community, it's pretty easy to see why they might decide to grow and smoke cannabis somewhere else.
Let's just look at the growing world. Growers regularly refer to their plants by negative terms that apply to women. For example, bud-bearing cannabis plants are considered "female" plants and you'll often see growers refer to their plants as "their bitches" and talk about plant training by saying things like, "Bitches love when you train them hard," etc etc.
Just take a look at the results you get when you search for the term "bitches" in a growing community. See for yourself.
If we want to see more women in the growing community, we need to change the language we use. We must change how we talk about women as well as how we portray them when it comes to cannabis.
About half of the population of the world is made up of women, and I believe we will never get cannabis fully legalized until we can change the image that women aren't allowed or welcome.
How do you think we can start making the cannabis world more friendly towards women?
