in a society that despises the feminine, our words have meaning.

There's this misconstrued argument I see wafting around that we aren't built to hate women. It's something that happens, but society has progressed to a point where its involvement is minimal. It's probably peers. I mean - they have Women in STEM projects! But, from my observation, we couldn't be more wrong. Everything revolves back around to the society we live in, and this is a dislike that's ingrained into our brains from the moment we learn to understand the meaning of words.

Because that's where it starts.

It always starts with the words.

Words are more powerful that we give them credit for. They can build and destroy nations. They can bring peace in a time of war, they can rile up the most harmonious of our fellow humans. And hatred for women begins with what we say.

I've heard these throwaway phrases several times throughout my life. 'Don't run like a girl', 'don't cry like a girl', 'you have to be a man!'. I've heard them being said to my male friends, in front of me. I've heard them uttered among those friends afterwards as they direct them at one another like thinly veiled bullets of implication. About me. About women. Regardless of intent, here is another translation: 'if you're running like that, you're not a good runner - just like girls', 'if you're crying, you're weak - just like girls', 'be a man - because being a girl isn't something you should want, or be okay with people thinking you're like'. These phrases suggest that there is something inherently wrong with being associated with girls, or that there's something wrong with us. These are the marks of femininity - crying, weakness, instability. And as these phrases are ingrained in boys and girls alike throughout their whole adolescent lives, how in the hell are we to expect these boys and girls to grow up liking women? They've been taught their entire lives to reject being associated with the feminine, so anyone who leans into these feminine ideals must be lesser than. And in the situation of these boys being ridiculed for being like girls - how are we surprised when they grow up hating us? We taught them that. Now we give women the work of teaching those boys turned to men that, actually, women are just like them.

Though, don't get me wrong, those women grew up to hate each other - and themselves, too.

When you grow up as a girl in a world that doesn't like the feminine, you do anything you can to avoid coming across as too girly. Every girl goes through her 'I'm not like other girls' phase where she rejects makeup ("omg I could never cover my face in all that, who's she trying to look nice for?"), rejects pink ("that's SO girly, how embarrassing! How does she expect to be taken seriously..."), rejects the boybands ("wow, it's so cringe that she could like One Direction, she's obsessed with boys."), and she even rejects certain brands and types of coffees ("I could never go to Starbucks! How basic - omg and she got the seasonal pumpkin spice latte?! What an airhead!"). Well, these were the ones I rejected in my phase, anyway, and most of the women my age experienced the same in yheir own. Those things that represented the feminine, the ones that were mocked because women enjoyed them. None of these things actually have any correspondence with negative personality traits. The only common denominator is that it was known that girls liked them. But every girl tries to reject them at some point, because isn't it just so embarrassing to be a girl? Being associated with these things and trying to be taken seriously is like trying to thread a needle with knitting yarn.

We try so, so hard to stop being thought of as just another girl. Because men were allowed to have all these really cool interests like being able to code fun programs, being science-y, gaming together, being thought of as interesting and having all these really unique combinations of hobbies that created this really individual personality that people can pick apart from the crowd. And we were women, we either liked makeup or we didn't and only one of those garnered intellectual respect. Though, not as much as boys respected one another. I mean, you were still just a girl. And as girls, we hated our gender enough that we also shunned each other - hence the stereotype of girls backstabbing other girls and throwing them away for a measly crumb of male attention. It all buds from this dislike of being associated with something as feminine as another girl, and also this desperation to be recognised by a man as an individual, because that means you've made it. You're no longer just recognised as a girl. You're a person. You're finally recognised as something you've always known yourself to be - an individual.

Obviously, there are going to be other influences. But this is a primary one.

I'd like to say that I come from a place of moderate expertise since I can track my phase back to that source. I disliked pretty girls who liked fancy Starbucks drinks for a long time in my younger years.

But, the difference here is that most women are forced out of that phase. It becomes a choice of recognising that what we've accepted about women for years is actually a bunch of crap, or hating yourself forever and never truly being recognised as an individual. So, herein being the cycle of women who know that women are great, and men, who have no motivation to go through the rigorous thought correction that has to be done to decondition what has been ingrained. And so forth comes the passing of the torch, from mainly men, onto further generations, while these self-aware women are teeming from the weight of a society in which at least half of it doesn't really care about reconditioning itself to not see femininity as something lesser than. I still see this nowadays in my more feminist friends - "oh, I don't really like girls who go to Starbucks, that's kinda basic." As if coffee somehow defines the superficiality of your character?

There's so much wrong with the world, but so much of it can be fixed at the mere thought of the words we say. At the mere question of the phrases we relay to our children. Just a small "wait - that actually doesn't seem like a very healthy thing to be teaching." Maybe just tell those boys that they can do it, running is a skill that takes time. Maybe question why they're crying. Maybe tell them that the world is tough, but they can be tougher with a little support from the people that love them. Let's stop telling our kids that men are so much better than women as an excuse for lazy teaching. Let's teach our kids that it's okay to feel sad, it's okay to do badly, and that they're tough enough to get back up and face the world when they're ready. And that we'll help. Because we love the next generation enough to not brush them away when they need us with the lousy, extreme expectation we hold boys to at the expensive of girls.

Let's just do better.

< 87% baked >