A pink school bag. Long hair worn down. Dainty earrings. These are the expected traits of a stereotypical woman.
I find no shame in admitting that I have not only accepted, but deeply enjoyed our assigned suppositions. I can confidently state that I absolutely love being a woman. But every rose has its thorn.
And I haven’t been pricked by the thorn of my mere existence until recently. It sounds dramatic, I know. Maybe even blandly cliché. A tale as old as time: the struggles of a woman in a patriarchal world. As much as I wouldn’t like to spoil my bottom line so early on, I’d like to reassure that I’m not here to complain. Where has that ever gotten us? No, I’m here to rewrite the narrative and offer a more favorable, potentially more contentious perspective.
Nowadays, the world has a decided structure for each person’s life, guys and girls alike. You start at daycare, transition into middle and high school, followed by college and then off to the workforce. In the stages of education, you’re taught what you theoretically need to know. That knowledge is then either confirmed or debunked by your experiences outside of the classroom.
My entire life, I was in an all-girls school and what I needed to know about the reality of being a woman in a man’s world was fed to me on a silver spoon while I was sitting in a lecture. Terms got thrown around, like internalized misogyny, patriarchy, sexism, and while I adjusted to the agonizing epiphany that your gender forcefully dictates some of your perpetual outcomes, that adjustment remained what it was meant to be at the time: theoretical. I was too young and mainly too privileged to experience what it actually entailed.
Fast forward to college, I’m an engineering major. Here’s the kicker: I’m fascinated with the world of race cars and their engines. Cue the laugh track. If male stereotypes had a king, cars would be sitting on thrones in a blue-colored castle. Naturally, it’s a male-dominated field. All of the classes I’m in lack a strong presence of women, and I’m the only female in all of my lab groups.
If you’re expecting this next paragraph to be a parading of my victim card, let me put your mind at ease. I’m here to simply share my observations: men hate women. I hope this statement ruffles some feathers because it’s meant to be provocative, not factual. Obviously, I could never assert this as an objective truth. I only share this because that statement is the only viable conclusion if I were to treat my experiences as variables in an equation and receive a value. Numbers don’t lie, right? Yet I don’t believe that assertion to be true.
Despite my calculator screen showing me integers of hatred and prejudice, I believe that the misogyny we experience is not a result of men unambiguously loathing women but a result of historically flawed teachings. If you teach a toddler that hitting someone is a form of love, there can’t be room for frustration and anger when they grow up being violent. In simpler terms, you reap what you sow.
The implication here isn’t that we, as women, actively enable disrespectful, sometimes dehumanizing behavior. The truth is different but equally incendiary: It takes two to tango. Before I get too controversial, I think most of us can agree that society with all of its factors of culture, tradition and organized religion is the main perpetuator of the dominance of patriarchy and the internalized belief that men hold more superiority than women.
While many inspirational women have fought to fight this imbalance, others have internalized the roles they were assigned. Not on purpose. In this twisted reality of toxic gender roles, both men and women are victims of a historically constructed mentality. We can point fingers. We can be enraged. We can create a cork board with pictures and red strings to try to pinpoint the first domino that pushed the rest. But if someone believes the sky is purple, then to them, the sky is indisputably purple. And in a way, that is exactly my point.
Misogyny should not be treated as an inconvenience. If we do so, then frustration is the only outcome. Misogyny should be treated as a matter of fact, not a flaw (which it is), but more so as another aspect in this life. What I’m trying to encourage here is neither yelling at each disrespectful man to keep him in check nor succumbing to the undermining connotations of a man’s words. Because I have fallen victim to that. Whenever my classmates would insinuate that my work could never be nearly up to the standard of theirs or throw around kitchen jokes, I would laugh it off. I would let it slide simply because “I didn’t care that much.”
But indifference has consequences and allowing someone to belittle you, means extending the path for their belittlement to reach others. It means not giving yourself the adequate respect of wearing your belief in yourself with a smile. Respect begins with refusing to diminish your own. And most dangerously, it means giving men silent approval that it is, in fact, OK to treat women with no reverence.
The answer is quite simple: Wear your beliefs without throwing an internal fit of how better life would be if things were slightly different. Do so, not in an aggressively vocal way, but in a way that is as natural as your existence. When your intellectual ability is underestimated, assert with calm confidence that you are more than capable. When you’re being drenched in disrespect, put on a raincoat and address which lines were crossed. When your passions are questioned, don’t give into the discouragement and use it to fuel the rest of your journey.
Treating your obstacles pragmatically as variables in the equation of your life while staying true to what you believe in allows you to reach your destination without the road feeling like quicksand. When everyone starts slowly becoming the change they hope to see in others, the world begins to move forward with us instead of against us.
