Laughed Out of Town

I want to write a letter and make everything okay.

I don't even know what "okay" means anymore.
So what if by magic or summertime or luck I can wake up tomorrow without the weight of a million and one thoughts on my mind. So what? I'll still be a female in, as my psych of women professor says, a "white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society". I'll still be part of an invisible system; so ingrained in everything we are, and we do, and we see, and we think that people would rather laugh than take the time to realize it exists - to see how the world could be different one day.

Arendt said that evil was the product of inattention, not a creation by hateful minds. Like weeds in a garden, evil exists when we ignore what's really going on; when we deny the bitter or overwhelming truth. The truth is that in America and most of the world, men/males are the power-holders - specifically white men, but men nonetheless. It's a passed down mentality, an inherited system, not something the boys of this generation just came up with one day on the playground.

Power: "possession of controlling influence, authority, might".

Yes, we've come a long way through history (in a relatively short amount of time) to establish women as equals with men. Even just 40 years ago, women didn't have the same experiences or opportunities available as they do today.

Remember, men did not give women the right to vote. Whites did not give blacks civil rights. It was raged for, fought for, and only then was it won - not given.

There is a lingering oppression among women. An internal oppression. We are always talking talking talking about the media: ads and TV shows, films and songs that objectify, categorize, simplify women. As both men and women, we know in our hearts that we do this to ourselves; allow ourselves to listen and soak in these messages, to perpetuate and personify what we see because all we want to do is belong. Those women who rebel against this definition of femininity must abandon our gender in order to be taken seriously, to be "one of the boys". As I've learned in my classes, there are generally two kinds of women (as there always seems to be), the ones who seek to be liked by men and those who seek to be more like men. Everything is in relation to the powerful; the characteristics or desires of the ruling force. The sinners vs. God. The slaves vs. the master. The pawns vs. the president. Women vs. Men.

The good girls vs. the bad girls.
The cheerleaders vs. the fighters.

If you don't believe me (and you're male), ask yourself:
Which is more like you?
A) Does who you are depend on whether you are ever loved by a woman?
or
B) Do you forgo traditional masculine traits in order to be "one of the girls"?

I bet you laughed at that, didn't you?

These are the two choices, the two scripts, that women are told to choose from. And we are told to unconsciously pick a side before we ever know the whole story, so by the time we see the truth, it's too late - our choices are too ingrained in our chosen identity. The resulting civil war and policing among women, the competition and manifestation of insecurities, is why we have the reputation for "cattiness" or "girl-fighting". Even if you managed to reject either script entirely, you will still be surrounded by either side of that civil war. And moreover, if you try to show them how they've fallen in line, distracted from the bigger picture, they'll join together then -- and laugh you out of town. Good luck with that.

The truth is that, through some trick of time travel, things could easily be reversed. There could be an alternate universe where Women are the ones given agency, unspoken authority, unchallenged visibility while Men must adhere to a strict set of social rules about what it means to be a "good boy". Power is situational, men and women still hold the same strengths and weaknesses within themselves - are more diverse among the different personalities and nationalities and cultures and choices within a gender than between genders. The words "power", "ambition", and "anger" do not have to belong to men, just as "beauty", "kindness", and "sensitivity" are not exclusively female. The only differences remain in our perceptions, the stories and scripts which we have internalized - what we have been lead to believe.