I love women.
It took me my whole life to realise this, but it’s true.
When I was younger, perhaps primary school age, I did not think of the significance of my friends being girls, or how they acted and what that meant to me, other people, or most importantly, themselves. However, when I was 11 and I started secondary school, a new phase in my mindset and attitude towards women began…
Internalised misogyny. www.culturalbridgestojustice.org defines it as: ‘the involuntary belief by girls and women that the lies, stereotypes and myths about girls and women that are delivered to everyone in a sexist society are true.’ This is the way I began to think of women and young girls when I started maturing.
I would walk past a female on the street and make a judgement about them. Whether it be the bag they were carrying, the way they were talking or the way they styled their hair, I usually had some sort of negative and purely unnecessary mental comment about it. In fact, this is an internalised feat almost everyone has at some point. I was never one to ‘slut shame’ and I quickly began to identify as ‘a feminist’ after I discovered what a feminist was, yet I did albeit subconsciously find ways to pit myself against other women, even if I never expressed any of these thoughts or ideas. The media was feeding me double standards; films and TV were implying that women characters were somehow less likeable and inferior; my peers were employing derogatory terms or plain meanness to demean a woman or young girl they didn’t like. All around me, people were subtly telling me that it was acceptable to hate other women for, well… being women.
When I became a little older, I learned to a much fuller and much less sugar-coated extent the struggles of women: women of color, binary trans or genderqueer trans women, women with disabilities… the list goes on. Even if they aren’t in any of the afore-mentioned minorities, they still have a hell of a difficult time being women. Not only that, but I learned more about the beautiful things women do; not only what women have done and are set out to do for society, but also the art they create, the understanding they have, the random acts of kindness they perform… everything about women, I grew to admire. Although not all of the role models in my life are women (for example, I consider my dad to be essentially my biggest role model, followed by various artists of any sort such as Gerard Way, Ned Vizzini), I have come to realise that I don’t have to pick and choose which women I look up to – every woman is an inspiration to me.
In a Buzzfeed video, a man states, “women should be everywhere.” I agree with this statement entirely, because women are resilient, strong, intelligent, kind and downright incredible.
Now, when I go out in public and I see a woman, sometimes my instinct will still be to discredit that woman for something on their exterior. That’s okay. It’s what society programmed me, and everyone else, to do. However, what’s changed is I now combat that with a positive comment.
“Her handbag is weird.” to “No, it’s great that she’s confident enough to follow her own style.”
“Her voice irritates me.” to “She’s done amazing things with that voice. Plus, if we all had the same speaking voice, the world would be boring.”
“She needs to wash her hair.” to “She’s probably really busy, and her body routine is as she pleases – you should be happy about that.”
You get the picture.
It might have taken me a big push to realise it, but women are individually and collectively incredible, no matter their style, skills, minority, or any other characteristic they might possess.
Every woman is more complex than a stereotype, more brave than they’re cracked up to be and more full of endurance than they’re credited for.
I love women.
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