Recently, I have seen an influx of articles which tell women to cover up in order to be respectable. What's even more alarming is that these articles were written by people of my own age, most of them being authored by women. What is disheartening to me is that we have a textbook example of internalized misogyny: women repeating the garbage that men spew out about women's bodies to other women, turning them into an object to be judged rather than a human being.

In the medieval era, women had little to no rights at all: they were simply the property of either their fathers or their husbands, being referred to as so-and-so's husband/daughter, not by their own names. They even judged a woman's worth on her sexual activity: if she was a virgin, she was at the top of the heap, while wives were considered the lowest since they've had multiple children. What's disturbing to me is that we still have the ghosts of these ideas still haunting the collective consciousness of the 21st century. We still police women's bodies, their clothing, their sexual activity, and even their hair in order to keep them confined to the archaic ideals of what femininity is.

You do not own a woman's body.

You do not have the right to tell her what she should and should not wear. You do not have the right to call her a "slut" for engaging in sexual activity. You do not have the right to chastise her over the choice to cut her hair short. As a human being, she has complete and utter control over her own body and that is final.

In American politics, abortion is one of the most talked about issues regarding women's bodies. What I don't understand is why this should even be an issue, why should the government even be policing a woman's body? A woman has the right to abort an unwanted pregnancy, it is her body after all. Unfortunately, right-wing ultra-conservative bible-thumping red neck politicians believe that the life of a single unborn fetus is more important than that of the woman who is carrying it. However, when that fetus is finally born and the mother is hoping for some sort of government assistance, the same people who demanded that she carry it to term turn their backs on her. Talk about a double standard.

I do not understand why it is so difficult to explain to others why women have rights as human beings. They act as if women were some alien species from beyond the galaxy, a mystery to all who encounter them. All I am asking is this: let women have fun. Let them wear what they want. Let them do what they want with their bodies. You are not their owner and they are not your possession.

The female human body is not a possession, end of story.