What does being a woman mean? Being a woman means never being able to go outside after dark without being scared—a fear
that should have passed when we were children. It means bobbing and weaving through the crowd at a mall or a store to avoid any men who look suspicious or make us uncomfortable. It’s avoiding using dating sites or social media because of fear or disgust at receiving messages with vulgar or sexual offers. It’s almost like living in a dream where you scream and nothing comes out of your mouth—where people are staring at you struggle and fight and they won’t do anything to help you.I was fourteen years old when my therapist told me, “You can’t trust men. Ever. And never, ever look one in the eye.” At the time, I did nothing more than dismiss the woman as crazy. But the older I got, the more her words seemed to resonate. It was like in the old fashioned Disney movies when the film starts with a big story book that opens up and the words turn to pictures. Only I’m not watching Cinderella lose her glass slipper, or Aurora’s dress switch from pink to blue. Instead, I’m watching newscasts about girls who were roofied, whose rapes were filmed and put on the internet, and who have been bullied out of school or even killed themselves because of the backlash they received. And the words coming to life are those of my therapist, who I deemed crazy, telling me I could never trust a man. Living life as though you can't trust roughly half of the population seems rather strange, but it’s a harsh reality for myself and millions of other women across the world. And that reality is why we need feminism.
And I mean true feminism. The type of feminism where women and men are paid equally for doing the same job. The type of feminism that promotes a world with paid maternity and paternity leave.
I’m talking about the type of feminism that would ensure people like Brock Turner are instilled with the values that teach him that the only type of consent is the word "yes" from a sober woman, and the type of feminism that brings attention and support to male victims of rape and educates people on the fact that it happens. No one who has had their body invaded in such a way should feel ashamed to come forward and say so. But our current society promotes an environment that shames anyone who does so and that refuses to dole out punishments to fit the perpetrators crimes.
Our society does nothing more than aid the degradation of both men and women. Women are made out to be objects. Pawns in a game of machismo, women are taught to fear and to groom themselves to be the looking objects of men. And men are made out to be pigs and monsters—when in reality it’s a small minority speaking for the majority. And it’s time that the system changes.
