Translation: Camille’s #LetWomenSpeak speech in Geneva

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Standing for Women, led by Kelly-Jay Keen, is on a Let Women Speak European tour. Despite the solid police presence backed up by water cannons on standby, women’s safety could not be guaranteed. The event was cut short by gender fascists as is now common in so-called liberal democracies. You could hear the angry male voices booming in the background as brave women spoke in front of the UN.

I found one speech to be particularly powerful so I’ve translated/summarized Camille’s speech below:

When I was a teenager I wasn’t into femininity. I didn’t have a lot of friends because I didn’t want to wear make-up and high heels, and talk about boys all the time. Now I’m seeing all over again that girls and women are being told we’re women because we identify as women, that we accept all the things society says we should be and do. This causes me a lot of pain. When I hear the stories of girls who think they’re trans or non-binary because they don’t conform to gender, our stories are exactly the same. This ideology is dangerous for women, and gays and lesbians in particular.

My family couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to be like my female cousins. When I was a bit older, about 25 or 26 years old, I started watching make-up tutorials and wearing dresses and heels because I thought there was something wrong with me. I wanted to be accepted. Only then was I told, ‘Oh my god, Camille, you’re finally a real woman!’

In a way this made me happy because I felt like my efforts were successful and I was finally ‘normal’. At the same time, it killed me inside because I now had proof of what I suspected growing up: that people really did believe all the things I’d been told at home and at school, and by the women around me, which is that women are considered defective – not good enough and not ‘real’ women – if they’re not feminine. From that moment on, I stopped wearing make-up and all that stuff. I want to tell girls and boys that gender – the roles society imposes on you – is a prison. To be free is to let go of it. And don’t be afraid to say so to those around you.

The Law According to Lidia Poët: a feminist analysis

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The Law According to Lidia Poët is an Italian-language Netflix series based on the life of Lidia Poët, Italy’s first female lawyer. Despite having earned her law degree in 1881, working in a law practice for two years, and passing the Order of Advocates of Turin examination, Poët was prevented from practicing law because she was a woman until 1920. Described as a mature version of Enola Holmes, the combination of strong female character, period drama, and murder mystery is irresistible to me so I had to check it out.

Lidia is a sharp, gutsy, tenacious young woman who doesn’t waste time explaining why she isn’t what society says she is. She just gets on with her work, catching things her arrogant male peers don’t and quickly seizing upon opportunities to find clues. One episode features a lesbian relationship and though Lidia is heterosexual, she’s not interested in marriage or children. She creates opportunities for her niece, who seems to be legitimately in love, to spend time alone with her boyfriend. We also see in Lidia’s sister-in-law a woman who is resigned to patriarchy and grooms her daughter for a life of obedience and male servitude. She doesn’t approve of Lidia’s feminism but has no choice but to tolerate her as Lidia is living in her home and has somehow managed to twist her brother’s arm into allowing her to work for him behind the scenes. Matilda de Angelis offers an energetic and engaging portrayal of the feminist heroine.

Unfortunately, the series falls back on tired pseudo-feminist elements, wasting a lot of time doing so. My first critique is that independent female characters are never made all that independent and The Law According to Lidia Poët is no exception. Lidia insists the guy she’s sleeping with isn’t her boyfriend and true enough, she doesn’t pine. One gets the sense that she genuinely likes or may even love him but maintains her focus on her career and cases. A question few seem to ask is why female characters have to have romantic relationships with men in the first place. Over and over again, we get the message that women can be capable, autonomous beings, but there always has to be some man – or men – inserted into the story who is more than a friend or could become more. The imperative of romance is ever-present.

Viewers may appreciate that far from being chaste, Lidia is sexually active and unashamed. Still, we’re presented with that false dichotomy: belong to a man or have casual romps. How feminist can a woman be if she sleeps with men who use prostituted women? Surely this isn’t something the real Lidia would have done. The subliminal message to women is that men must be in the picture.

My second critique is the predictable female objectification. There’s an unwritten rule that the bodies of strong female characters must be exposed. The camera must capture carefully angled shots of her naked, hairless body, and erect nipples. Male viewers are rewarded with female nudity while female viewers – the intended audience – are reminded that women are ultimately never full human beings. There are a couple of quick pans of man bum. In one scene a man stands in the blurred background with his tackle out (one wonders if it’s prosthetic or CGI). Anyway, it doesn’t compare to the amount of gratuitous bare breasts on display. Another scene has Lidia investigating a wealthy murder suspect; naturally, on that very night he’s hosting a sex party. What does any of this have to do with a woman who fought to include her sex class in the legal profession? These decisions are deliberate.

Now for the third critique, related to the second: saucy fantasies and period dramas aren’t cool unless they include some depiction of prostitution. A boring plot gimmick that provides more opportunities and excuses to show tits and ass, brothels feature in tons of fantasy and period dramas, including Game of Thrones, The Witcher (including Blood Origin), Carnival Row, and Black Sails. The sex trade is often represented in an uncritical light or simply an inevitable fact of life. The oldest profession, don’t you know? In The Law According to Lidia Poët, Lidia visits an opium den to further her investigation. Naturally, there are high, sex-starved women draped everywhere and a half-naked temptress saunters over, advertizing her wares to a male patron. The theme of prostitution is sprinkled throughout, and though Lidia notes at one point that it’s hardly a good life, it comes off as opportunistic.

My fourth and final critique is that strong female characters are always portrayed by women who are conventionally (and exceptionally) attractive. Even if the historical person being portrayed isn’t particularly beautiful, only a dazzling actress is selected to play her. Matilda de Angelis is indeed gorgeous and does a commendable job, but these choices perpetuate sexist beauty standards, reminding women that we’re never good enough. Apparently it’s not enough for Poët to be an average-looking or even plain woman with an above-average intellect. Unless you’re a man, looks matter even if you’re a genius. A Review Geek article says of de Angelis (note that the writer is male):

Everything about her – hair and makeup, costumes – is compellingly crafted to embellish Poet’s appeal.

Arnav Srivastava for Review Geek

Her appeal to whom? If the principle audience is women, why should it matter to us whether the actors are beautiful? Surely this is more alienating than anything to the average woman. Why should we care about hair, costumes, and makeup, except to assess whether they’re well executed and historically accurate? This is the obligatory injection of femininity. It seems the assumption is that without the glossy femininity, romance, and sex, women wouldn’t enjoy a murder mystery series about Italy’s first female lawyer. Apparently one cannot make a modern production that’s exciting and provocative without these ingredients. Apart from perpetuating liberal sexism, it’s unoriginal and tiresome. With only six episodes to tell Lidia’s story, instead of focusing on what must have been a fascinating and groundbreaking development in women’s rights, the producers reduced the show to a smutty bastardization of Lidia Poët’s life. It wasn’t until the final episode that we see any depiction of feminist organizing. There are women demonstrating on behalf of her legal appeal, shouting from the back of the courtroom. She doesn’t even look at them. Somehow she has no idea women are gathered outside her home in a candlelight vigil to her honour her fight; she only finds out because she has to walk past them and even then, she doesn’t engage with them. Imagine what they could have done with the source material!

It’s unknown whether the show will return for a second season and the ending of the first deviates drastically from what we know about the course Poët’s life took. The Law According to Lidia Poët is clearly intended as liberal feminist, sex-positive entertainment so if you’re looking for an honest biography that engages with Lidia’s circumstances and the struggle for women’s rights, I’m sorry to say you’ll be disappointed. At the very least, the series may inspire people to learn about the real Lidia Poët, a brilliant feminist whose astounding accomplishments benefitted not only herself but women as a class.

What exactly does ‘queer’ mean?

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It used to be that people who described themselves as queer were simply gay, lesbian or bisexual. Some rejected the idea of reclaiming the slur on principle while others believed it was an effective way to change the meaning and thus the power of the word. Now fewer and fewer people are referring to themselves as gay, lesbian or even bi. Most just say they’re queer. Why is this the case, and whom does it serve?

https://twitter.com/SourPatches2077/status/1626037367542005760?s=20

‘Queer’ ultimately means whatever the person using the word means – and that’s the point. Referring to oneself as queer is a deliberate, often well-meaning attempt to signal one’s inclusivity. If you do say you’re gay or lesbian and insist that means you’re same-sex attracted, trans activists will call you a bigot (Don’t believe me? Scroll down to the bottom). Better not open that can of worms and make someone feel invalidated. One big happy rainbow family.

Queer is a word that describes sexual and gender identities other than straight and cisgender.

Planned Parenthood

Notice ultra-woke Planned Parenthood uses the word straight instead of heterosexual; this framing avoids associating biological sex with sexual orientation so it’s accommodating to gender identity.

The Unitarian Universalist Association, however, presents a much more expansive definition:

Although this definition is less widely known, many so-called queer people identify with the fourth definition. For them, it isn’t about sexual orientation or even gender identity necessarily, but the simple act of kicking against sexual norms. As a radical feminist, I believe some norms should be smashed, including gender, but not for the sake of it. That’s just nihilistic teenage rebellion. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett demonstrated that rather than happening in a social vacuum, social shifts happen in the context of pre-existing power dynamics. In a patriarchy, the sexual revolution of the 1960s inevitably found a way to exploit women while claiming to liberate them. A modern iteration would be SlutWalks which, conveniently for straight and bi men, give them exactly what they want.

I don’t care if men wear makeup, carry purses, wear their hair long or don’t know how to change a tire. Gender critical people often say they don’t mind men in dresses. Yeah, well radical feminists do, and not because the cocks in frocks are performing femininity. Now, one might think feminists would appreciate men adopting the feminine gender role. The first problem arises when men leverage gender identity to claim that doing so makes them women. The second is what femininity means to them. Men no longer perform femininity while acknowledging they’re men like they once did in the goth, glam, and hair metal scenes. Thanks to porn, more men than ever are internalizing the fetishization of the female body, transposing themselves as the female object of desire. As sexual submission is indelibly linked to femininity, these men get a charge out of pretending they’re a member of the subordinate sex, frequently identifying as masochistic “sissies”. This is evidenced by the explosion of sissy hyno porn and forced feminization. These men are otherwise known as auto-gynephiles. Men like the Oakville high school teacher with gigantic prosthetic breasts and protruding nipples, a dude who calls himself Rosemary Times and exposes himself in public and women’s spaces (NSFW), darling of professional gender critical feminists Debbie Hayton, and, as radical feminists have suspected all along, Lia Thomas. The list of AGPs is endless.

Once you see these things, you can’t unsee them and it becomes clear why cross-dressing in this context is neither innocent nor a human right. Men don’t have to worry about trans-identified females creeping into their washrooms, locker rooms, and changerooms to perv on or film them, film themselves while committing lude acts, or assaulting them. Women simply don’t tend to have that compulsion and even if they did, they could easily be overpowered by men. Trans activists always accuse “TERFs” of being prejudiced against trans people when in fact the issue is the ever-present reality of male violence and, that threat aside, the right of both females and males to privacy.

Because queer theory fundamentally values transgression, there have always been people – men, largely – with “marginalized” sexual interests within LGBT culture, notably becoming more visible in the 1970s with drag, transvestism, and transsexualism. As such, the LGBT/queer trajectory has been and remains controlled by men, initially with gay men and now, increasingly, straight trans-identified men. It was largely gay male culture, which can be quite misogynistic, that embraced practices like BDSM, leather families, porn, prostitution, etc. Some lesbians did as well, but to a much lesser extent and it wasn’t a feature of the culture of women-identified-women. In other words, these practices aren’t inherent to homosexuality or bisexuality. What does someone who likes to flog or be flogged, choke or be choked, or have multiple partners have in common with any random homosexual?

After the AIDS crisis and the recognition of same-sex marriage, LGBT advocacy increasingly shifted from sexual orientation to sexual identity. This allowed the kink community to gain a stronger foothold. Bottom feeders like pedophiles saw the opportunity to stake their claim, convincing some prominent queer activists to begin referring to them as “minor attracted persons” or MAPs. Michel Foucault, a founder of queer theory, has been accused of raping children and was at the very least a child sexual abuse apologist. Since Foucault and John Money, numerous prominent queer/trans activists have tried to destigmatize pedophilia and normalize the idea of child sexuality, that children are sexual beings, including Peter Tatchell and Jacob Breslow. Alok Vaid-Menon, posting from his Blackmatter Facebook account, once referred to girls as kinky and deviant. A queer Pre-K teacher in California published a post on social media questioning childhood innocence.

Bearing all of this in mind, it doesn’t take an evangelical Christian to question the appropriateness of bringing children to drag shows, which until very recently have been understood even by liberals as adult entertainment. That male drag performers are grotesque sexist caricatures of femaleness should be considered damaging to children, especially girls. We now have several instances on camera of men performing as scantily-clad female strippers interacting with children, taking their money or encouraging them to stuff cash into their g-strings. Even when performers are conscious of what’s appropriate, somehow some parents aren’t. These videos are real. The political persuasion of those sharing them is irrelevant. Those who believe Drag Queen Story Hour is innocuous might be surprised by what some LGB people have to say about the messages children are really getting from these events, including stories that encourage them to believe they may be born in the wrong body, can become the opposite sex, and should change their gender to fit their personalities.

The question isn’t whether LGBT people are perverts or predators. The question is, why do organizations like the Pedophile Information Exchange and the people who associate or sympathize with them always glom onto queer politics? Because the queer community and queer advocacy are usually male-led and unfortunately, male sexuality can be very problematic. Combine that with a movement whose ethos is rainbows and love on the surface and transgressive sexuality de rigueur underneath, and ‘queer’ can either be something beautiful or something monstrous.

Reclaiming the feminist legacy: language and defiance

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If being a feminist means recognizing that women and girls face unique challenges because we’re female and men as a class exert power over us, why do some women, especially some who campaign for women’s rights, reject the label?

One reason proferred is that the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ supposedly don’t mean anything anymore because the movement has been astroturfed and is dominated by women who are male-centred. These are the “sex positive” cool girls who go on slut walks and denounce you as a SWERF if you criticize the sex trade’s disproportionate impact on women and girls. They say that talking about this creates the stigma around “sex work,” which then inspires men who purchase sex to assault and kill women. The fact that men who target desperate and underprivileged women to purchase their consent are violent misogynists driven by their hatred of women is not only ignored but unspeakable. These same so-called feminists are also happy to allow male sex offenders into women’s prisons and for men to steal medals from female athletes, represent women in politics, and erase women as the female sex class in law and language. Obviously, they’re the opposite of feminist.

The problem with this stated reason for not identifying as feminist, however, is it’s rife with contradiction. The word ‘woman’ arguably doesn’t mean anything anymore either because trans activists have succeeded in bullying a huge tranche of the population into saying “trans women are women” and defining ‘woman’ as anyone who identifies as one. Should we then abandon the word ‘woman’ because it’s been pretty much mangled beyond recognition, most recently by the Cambridge Dictionary? Of course not. It’s nonsensical for women who oppose male appropriation of womanhood to reclaim the meaning of ‘woman’ but not the meaning of ‘feminist.’

For this reason, I’m suspicious that the real motivation might be a desire to remain in feminist spaces while protecting one’s likeability. Particularly if one has broadened one’s content to non-feminist audiences and makes a living off podcasting and writing. Why else would someone who founded a feminist platform and has published so much clear, uncompromising feminist writing suddenly become sympathetic to the ridiculous claim that incels are misunderstood victims? Women who date men have to make many uncomfortable choices, often between their feminism and their relationships with or appeal to men. They should nevertheless be honest about their motivations.

Another explanation a women’s rights campaigner has given for not identifying as a feminist is she believes some feminists really are man-haters and have gone too far. Standard MRA rhetoric of the “feminism is cancer” variety. Ironically, this person also acknowledges that some women sell other women out. I’ve heard one podcaster, a lesbian who vehemently opposes gender identity, say the word patriarchy is overused. How can it be that naming a system that degrades, brutalizes, and murders girls and women is considered excessive, rather than the system itself? Should we resort to sanitized language to describe our oppression, the same way liberation has been replaced by equality? Notably, the individuals who say these sorts of things frequently criticize liberal feminism, usually on the basis that it’s fake feminism, which is exactly what they’re engaging in when they eschew class analysis and refuse to name the problem. And anyway, why be offended by fake feminists when you don’t want to be a feminist yourself?

We use certain words constantly in feminist circles because the whole point is to talk about feminist concepts. If you get tired hearing about it, do the decent thing and bow out graciously and leave women to do the work. Don’t go whining to men and any woman who will tolerate it that women won’t shut up about our oppression. Outside of those spaces, people aren’t talking about patriarchy enough. Just because men bristle at the mention of male violence, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it.

Some arguments between feminists and not-really-feminists turn on the way in which mothers shield their boys from scrutiny. No mother wants to believe her son hates her and other females on some level. She’s inclined to believe she’s done a good job and may have even tried to avoid pushing masculinity on her son(s). But I suspect a mother who doesn’t want to call herself a feminist and parrots MRA talking points isn’t well prepared to raise a boy/man who supports the feminist struggle and treats women and girls with respect. If boys themselves weren’t a threat, many of us girls wouldn’t have experienced all manner of violence, including sexual violence, at the hands of boys. And yet we have.

There’s also the claim that feminism is the province of middle class educated women: “I’m working class and we don’t do academic feminism (paraphrasing).” A lot of radical feminists are working class and have never taken a women’s or gender studies course. I certainly haven’t and I certainly don’t come from a middle class family. Those of us who don’t fit this characterization are able to understand that naming the class of people who oppress us is critical to our liberation from them even if we believe the oppressive behaviour is learned and not biological. It doesn’t require a degree.

And what’s up with this business of identifying as a feminist, anyway? What does that even mean? Given the nonsense around identifying as a woman, or black, or disabled, we should be clear that some things are objective; words have meaning. Mere utterance doesn’t make something true, e.g. a man who says he’s a woman or non-binary is a man no matter what he says. If you satisfy the definition of feminist (what it actually means, not the bullshit version patriarchy has cooked up), then aren’t you a feminist?

You may not want to stain yourself with the title but you are what you are. You may resist in order to avoid some measure of punishment, just as some women and girls try to identify out of femaleness. The logical parallel should be evident to anyone who rejects gender identity. So if some women don’t want to call themselves feminists for whatever reason, they’re probably more male-centred than they’d like to admit. One might argue that what really matters is the work they do – tireless, brilliant, amazing work which benefits all women. That’s fair. We should give credit where credit is due.

But women aren’t fragile creatures immune to critique. Our predecessors defiantly marched behind the feminist banner. Our rights are once again under attack: our bodies, our spaces, our language. Now is the time to proudly reclaim the legacy of feminism. We don’t need another word to describe who we are. We already have one. It was taken from us. Whichever new one you try to use, they’ll try to take it from you too. Feminism, female, woman, vagina, mother, breastfeeding, menstruation, intersectionality, homosexuality, oppression, biological sex, patriarchy…

I say we stand our ground and say, “No, fuck off, you can’t have it, it’s ours.”

How gender critical are you?

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The phrase ‘gender critical’ has become commonplace in discussions around gender identity. In many ways, however, it mimics gender ideology’s propensity for confusing language and contradiction.

A quick primer if you haven’t read my blog or radical feminist work: humans are a sexually dimorphic species consisting of females and males, the two sex classes. ‘Intersex’ is a misnomer as people referred to as such are technically female or male but have sex organs that haven’t developed properly; they’re not a third sex. Sex is about reproduction, which requires a female and a male. Like other species, we’re wired to instantly recognize sex because our continued survival as a species depends on it. There are physiological differences between the sexes which are designed to facilitate reproduction, but they don’t extend to cognition, personality, aptitudes, hobbies, etc. There’s no female or male brain. There are many boys who take after their mothers and girls who take after their fathers. It’s not as though those genetic traits that females inherit from their male ancestors are rendered inactive. The truth is personality is highly individualized, shaped by genetics, environment, and one’s choices.

Gender, on the other hand, is the social hierarchy that shunts females and males into two separate, opposing, and unequal social classes. Females are trained into femininity and males are trained into masculinity. It starts before birth with ridiculous “gender reveal” parties and continues from there nonstop. The first thing people ask when they see an infant is, “Is it a boy or girl? Adults speak differently to babies once they know their sex. Masculinity encourages males to engage in the sort of behaviour that affords them power and dominance, while femininity encourages females to be self-sacrificing, self-limiting, and obsessed with being attractive and available to males.

Yet how many women who refer to themselves as feminists still perform femininity? Feminists used to recognize that beauty practices rob women of our hard-earned money, time, and focus, and are physically damaging. How many years of the average woman’s life are aggregately spent on hair removal, makeup application, hair styling, fashion and clothing, and other rituals? How many self-described feminists or supposedly gender-critical women take their husband’s last name as though they’re still a man’s property? Germaine Greer is correct that “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” but perhaps even less of an idea of how much women have learned to hate themselves.

There’s a glaring contradiction in being a woman who says girls should be able to be and do whatever they want while performing femininity.

I argue that women have a responsibility to live this message. To show girls that not being feminine isn’t just an option, but a necessary step to liberating themselves from patriarchy. This isn’t a choice men will support, including men who claim to be gender critical. It’s not even a choice many women will encourage other women to make. Because women who perform femininity do so knowing they’ll be judged, mocked, and far less able to attract or keep men as romantic partners if they don’t. This is where liberal feminism creeps in: women feel they’re being attacked personally and claim they just happen to like femininity, that these considerations are superficial and simply a matter of individual choice. But if you’re straight or bi and have hairy legs, don’t wear makeup, and dress solely for comfort as most men do, your dating options pretty shrink drastically.

Radical feminists don’t play these games. They’re not merely critical of gender. They want to abolish it. This means that as much as masculinity is inherently toxic, so is femininity. One can’t exist without the other. There’s no reforming gender roles. Femininity isn’t just harmful when men dress up in lingerie, become submissive or masochistic “sissies,” or perform their fetish in public and in female spaces. Sure, it’s atrocious that gender identity is enabling more and more men to deny their privilege and openly eroticize women’s oppression. But they’ll continue to do this as long as there’s a gender role attached to women to perform, because it’s the act of occupying this inferior sex role that excites them.

Canadian pop music artist Shania Twain has spoken about how sexual abuse by her stepfather made her hide and hate her female body. Every girl experiences female objectification and misogynist discrimination and abuse, and now with the gender identity cult offering them a way to dissociate from girlhood and womanhood and/or alter their body to make it unrecognizable as female, they’re doing exactly what you’d expect girls to do in a world that hates them.

Female celebrities are the most obvious example. Their brand follows the liberal feminist you-go-girl template of self-objectification and overt sexualization. They’re steered in that direction by everyone around them and thought we’re told they’re happy and powerful, they, like all women, know exactly what’s expected of them from years of being groomed by society at large. The path of least resistance is to create a narrative “owning” one’s oppression. The resulting contradictions are exemplified by Twain’s rationalization of how following a personal tragedy at the age of 22 she “began to embrace her identity as a woman”:

“All of a sudden it was like, ‘Well, what’s your problem? You know, you’re a woman and you have this beautiful body.’ What was so natural for other people was so scary for me. I felt exploited, but I didn’t have a choice now. I had to play the glamorous singer, had to wear my femininity more openly or more freely. And work out how I’m not gonna get groped, or raped by someone’s eyes, you know, and feel so degraded.”

Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Twain understands womanhood as an identity because defining womanhood as embodiment means that women are nothing more or less than an adult human female, and that’s just not good enough. It’s not just liberal feminists who perpetuate this message. Though not so overtly, many women who consider themselves gender critical may criticize gender rhetorically, but they don’t quite follow through on that conviction. It’s no coincidence that the women who are most visible in this space are quite feminine-presenting. As the brilliant radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys clearly and concisely explains in the video below, we can’t effectively challenge gender identity or transgenderism while holding onto femininity.

International Women’s Day is a Scam

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If you work for a public agency, large corporation, or a progressive small or medium-sized organization, you’ll know that International Women’s Day is coming up. In anticipation of this, I’ve seen a lot of internal communications on diversity and inclusion in my own organization.

This includes a story on a book by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay that we’re encouraged to read, titled The Confidence Code. The book explores whether confidence is a product of nature or nurture; whether people are genetically predisposed to self-confidence.

What they’re talking about, of course, is why many women struggle to accept themselves, express their views, and promote themselves. Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book. From the synopsis, however, one can gather that the book concludes that some individuals might be genetically predisposed to self-confidence, but it can be learned. I think this is just common sense. Brains are incredibly elastic, with quite a bit of individual variation. We inherit traits from both males and females in our lineage.

However we got here, women who struggle to accept and assert themselves must make a choice at some point if they’re to break the cycle of self-doubt. We have to decide that we’re worth it, that not only do we have something to offer others, but more importantly, we have something to offer ourselves. We have innate value. Men can continue to be arrogant and dismissive, but we can be sure that unless we push back, they’ll take advantage of our acquiescence. So whatever else happens, it’s critical that women encourage each other to stand up.

As well meaning as it might be, though, self-help discourse usually fails women and girls. When Shipman is asked, “What did you find is one of the biggest things women do that undermines their self-worth or self-esteem?”, she responds:

We don’t let go. And that undermines how others see us. I remember doing an interview and after it was over, thinking that I had asked a stupid question. Later that evening, that thought was still swirling around in my head. We can let a doubt go round and round in our heads til it can literally drive us crazy. It can be debilitating and is an enemy of self-confidence.

We don’t let go?! This plays right into the hands of every man who’s ever accused a woman of nagging or overthinking. Before we can explain why women have developed this pattern, we need to identify it accurately. It’s no accident that so many women beat themselves up about insignificant mistakes and never feel like they’re good enough. It’s not natural for women to hate themselves. We’ve been taught to feel this way about ourselves and other women by extension. It’s called internalized misogyny. We’re represented as headless bodies and objects of male conquest and control, and treated like ancillary beings, barely human. We’re treated like shit because we’re women. Is this really a revelation?

Millennia of male domination have entrenched this system, and men continue to uphold and benefit from it. Does Shipmen think we hate ourselves just because? Or we’re masochists? That we’re foolish? Weak? That sometimes we’re given the wrong cues for no apparent reason?

There’s no mystery here. This world makes no secret of the fact that women are hated. It’s no wonder that women implicitly understand that they’re screaming into the void. They know that they can embrace a few masculine personality traits and that might win them respect and advance their careers. But it could just as easily be construed as a threat, and they’ve been punished for violating the strictures of femininity before. Why should they trust that it’s safe to be themselves now? What’s changed?

It all starts the moment we’re born and is reinforced consistently throughout our lives in every social space, from every angle, until it’s so ingrained that women believe we’re somehow born this way and men don’t need to change.

In the article, Shipman acknowledges that some messages aimed at girls are part of the problem but then goes on to say:

Teaching a child to accept and even embrace struggle, rather than shy away from it, is a crucial step along the path toward instilling confidence. You are showing your child that it’s possible to make progress without being perfect.

This is where she loses me. Girls don’t need to be taught to nobly embrace struggle. They already know how to do that, and they do it well. Too well, in fact. The problem is that females face the struggles they do because they’re female, and that boys and men treat them the way they do because they know they can. Girls are amazing. It’s boys who need to be taught how to deal with conflict, not to lash out at others, respond with violence, or become numb to the pain of others – girls especially.

The key lies in Shipman’s gender-neutral language: “teaching a child”, “showing a child”. Teaching which children what? We need to get right down to the root of the problem. Unfortunately, the only women who are embraced as experts and deemed worthy feminists have a tenuous grip on the issue. They don’t threaten the system, which is why they’re given a platform.

Meanwhile, everyone goes on pretending that things are getting better, that if only girls and women would somehow realize they can liberate themselves, everything would be fine. But the first step to liberation is understanding.

With each passing IWD, I see society crawling toward this radical awareness and I wonder how we’ll ever get there at this rate. The greatest obstacle to progress is the illusion of progress.