Born in the early eighties on the western side of the planet and seeing almost all the women around me working, it took me a while to realize the limitations imposed on them in a veiled way.
Maybe that\’s why a rebellion against gender inequalities has always been part of my personality. I didn\’t understand why I couldn\’t play ball with the boys, or why I was considered different by the girls for asking the boys to date me.
In my childhood perception we were all equal, all free and endowed with the same rights. Until I started to be scolded for my spontaneous attitudes, many at school, always by teachers.
The first was a photo of a couple embracing in a tent that I pasted into my diary when I was eight years old. I thought the couple loving each other in the middle of nature was beautiful, but the teacher thought it was obscene.
When I was 10 I organized a group of girls to take satisfaction from a boy who chased them at all intervals, pulling their hair, stealing objects and doing other annoying things considered normal for boys. Unfortunately they were already very angry when this happened and ended up hitting him. I was called to the board and it was no use justifying how much the boy had already mistreated us before.
At 11 I incited a revolt against the daughter of a teacher who abused her relationship with a figure of power to mistreat other girls and always got away with it. Another teacher isolated our group in a room and forced us to apologize to the girl.
It was strange that I was being scolded for things that came so naturally to me, like expressing my opinion and rebelling against injustice. She was even more impatient and angry. But I was still myself in my pre-teen life. Until I was dumped by the first guy I liked for a hottie type colleague. It was then that I started to shut myself down.
It was all so unfair and painful that it was even better not to say anything, not to get involved with anyone and try to fit the standards. And magazines telling how a girl should behave, dress and eat were not lacking.
Despite having always been thin, I had image disorders and episodes of bulimia. I started having insomnia, being super anxious and wanting to control everything: my appearance, my thoughts and especially the thoughts of others. Pleasing, or at least not displeasing, the other was unconsciously the goal.
Only today, at 38 just turned 38, do I realize how much I was oppressed by a society that says, since we were born, how women should be, clipping our wings, killing our essence!
We live in the country of laws, but it is absurd how much we are still ignored by them. Because the law doesn\’t matter if those who interpret and apply it are people with mentalities created by patriarchy, sexist, determinist and conservative.
Our body is not ours, we are seen as an object! Our nakedness is an affront and our short clothes depraved. The female anatomy is shaped and evaluated according to what it serves others. Our thoughts are not ours, we cannot express them, we run the risk of being boring, inappropriate, unpleasant!
We are judged and limited all the time!
Is what you think of yourself and how you see yourself really what you feel? How many times have you omitted, stopped wearing an outfit, didn\’t go somewhere, held back the laughter, believed you weren\’t capable of doing something?
Worse: how many times have you judged, questioned and criticized another woman under the same macho gaze you\’ve been judged your whole life?
Toxic, limiting and abusive masculinity is so strong that it is reproduced among all genders as an inheritance. Passed down from mothers and fathers to sons and daughters. And so we maintain a society conditioned to the desires of men and which imprisons the spirit of women.
We need to reflect every day on who we really are and who we want to be. We need to question the judgment of the other and our own. We need, above all, to change the type of inheritance we are leaving for those that will come!
Women will never be free if the look of education continues to be different between them and them. The perspective of equality must be done under the eyes of justice, rights and freedom!