patriarchy

I don’t remember when I started holding in my stomach. [...] It’s hard to trace a habit so ingrained that I don’t know it exists. Until I’m lying on a table and her hand rests at my solar plexus and she tells me to let go. I can’t. I don’t know how, or not yet.

Now that I’ve turned 30 (and wear caftans) I’m done reading vapid click-bait offering prosaic advice. This is not one of those articles.

[CN: ageism, sexism] What kind of screwed-up culture do we live in where young girls are considered to be sexual beings, but women over 40 are “too old” to be desirable?

I’d like to think my son won his first (and only) beauty pageant because of his sparkling personality, curly mop of hair, bright blue eyes, and adorable tuxedo — but the truth is that he won because he was the only boy in the entire pageant. He won every category I entered him in, regardless of his looks, personality, or actions. He literally won just for showing up. It was the embodiment of both white and male privilege.

My moment of discovery literally came from Googling ‘how to tell if you’re attracted to someone’ late at night. I stumbled across someone else asking the same sort of question and found a reference to asexuality. It clicked instantly, it explained everything — definitely a light bulb moment. It was such a relief to find out other people felt, or didn’t feel, the same way. But at the same time it was kind of terrifying because I became aware that everything I had been taught and thought I knew about sexuality had just been thrown out the window. It was a whole new world, a real paradigm shift, and it felt great.

Many of the women in that article look quite young, having grown up in the world that feminism fought to build. They may think they don't need it, but their signs show that they clearly do. The tearing down of the patriarchy has a long way to go.

One of the most insidious things that patriarchy does is the complete and utter devaluation of anything that is considered “women’s work.” Not only does patriarchy limit what women (and all trans and nonbinary folk) can do in the world, it also takes what we do manage to do and tells us it isn’t worth anything.

I live my life at the intersections of blackness and womanhood, which means my presence is doubly erased and my words often fall on deaf ears. Even in spaces created to challenge power structures that disempower black women, we often find ourselves seemingly shouting our grievances into the ether.