When I entered high school, I was forced to internalize the idea that all women are “too” emotional and thus, way too much drama. Guys, on the other hand, are the cool ones, the chill ones, the fun ones. This was reinforced by the sudden bombardment of online content that consistently created a “crazy girl” trope wide enough to fit all girls and glamorized the one girl in the group of guys. The images attached are just some of the many.
Most of the girls in my school eventually ended up looking for friendship exclusively in men. The one girl in a group of four men was considered “cooler” than an entire group of ten women. What this ended up doing was creating a condition where only boy friendships were legitimate and teenage girls had to constantly look for masculine associations in order to validate their presence and worthiness.
Conversations that constantly delegitimized womanhood and vilified femininity ended up making girls conscious of themselves and made it much harder for them to figure out who they are and where they belong. They were constantly provided only two extreme positions, neither of which created a natural habitat for girls because they were made to feel like an outsider in both of them.
Existing gender hierarchies led to the production and dissemination of such images that not only pushed femininity and womanhood to a lower pedestal but also considered women as sub-human. These conversations presented men as higher mortals, the worthier ones. This eventually conditioned teenage girls to believe that they are not intelligent enough, not competent enough, not worthy enough. We were forced to run after an ideal that was not meant to be chased.
There are a couple of things to be dissected here. Firstly, women are constantly told they are worth nothing if they are not associated with a man or men. This leaves very little of the girl herself left because they are constantly adapting herself to fit better into a man’s definitions. The process of devaluing a woman’s existence starts so early that it slowly and constantly erodes and corrodes what they really are. In addition to that, girls are taught to define and measure their worth according to a man’s yardstick and since men are men, women learn to think lowly of themselves. Secondly, and most importantly, it normalizes abuse in women’s lives. Since we have been conditioned to consider ourselves unworthy, it takes a lot of time before we actually come to demand basic human decency from others for ourselves. This means we take years and years of abuse thinking we deserved it or we did something to cause it or that it happened because there wasn’t another man around.
I am eroded and very little of me is here. I try to create a better world with whatever I have and hope that is our saving grace.
UnshelteredPolitics 