No matter how much it pains. No matter how heavy the weight is. No matter how much it makes you want to scream inside.
Just keep silent. Because girls are meant to be kept quiet. You can’t fight the system and you definitely can’t win.
At least that’s what I started to believe in, that is until recently. I started to lose my faith in feminism, thinking there’s only so much I can do. Everyone around me accepted the gender roles and identities given, they think of sexually ascribed roles as the norm, they think that’s the way it’s supposed to be and there’s only a certain extent into which feminism can go. I stopped having conversations about women’s rights, I was somewhat put back in my place, I was dreaming too much. I was ‘westernised’.
If your origins into the British identity arrived by immigration, you’re not quite fully British nor are you quite fully from where you came from. Caught between a dual identity. Assimilate too much and you’re a ‘coconut’, do nothing and its your culture with the ‘backward mentality’, the culture that oppresses women. You never quite fit in. Its a constant battle, not just in your own mind, but between those around you attempting to exert that their way of thinking is the superior way. Who do you turn to? Your friends with your same dual identity crisis? But their the ones who say I’m dreaming. Or my western friends? But the best advice they can give me, is to just move out and get my own place.
But that’s not the problem. It’s not like I’m abused and trapped like a damsel in distress. I am at university, I do have a part-time job. I am encouraged to achieve my dream job, whatever the hell that is. Its just that to a certain extent, my values and thoughts are not reciprocated. I shouldn’t have the attitude that a ‘woman does not need a man’ because at the end of the day, she needs a man and there is nothing she can do about it. Because face it, when your in a situation of sexual harassment it’s your ‘boyfriend’ or ‘brother’ that can help you. My importance is not primarily driven from me as a female, I’m not valued as just a woman. I need protection. So I can’t travel the world independently because whom will protect me then? Or being weary about the way I dress, because at the end of the day perverted creeps do exist and you just don’t want to give them the ‘opportunity’. But why should I risk my love for fashion & style because of hormonal men whom have zero respect for women. Or being a prude for not being interested in men? I just don’t want to be an excuse or entertain your egoistic desires of ‘how many girls can I entertain’.
So the problem is not that I’m just some oppressed women. The problem is that I’m assumed as being oppressed, and if I am oppressed, it is discrete and there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t fight every misogynistic pig out there, fight every guy who looks me up and down as if I’m a prized sexual object because all he was doing was ‘simply looking’, I can’t fight the way people’s language naturally belittles feminism ‘oh no, don’t bring feminism into this’. But how can I not? It’s a part of my daily expression, my daily thoughts, my daily actions.
So this is why I want to write,
I’m tired of the silence.
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