Author: Archit Tripathi / Source: did you know?
This is a man’s world. And even though the song does acknowledge that it wouldn’t be nothing without a woman or a girl, our society still seems to be pretty lacking in appreciation of that fact (or the fact that it’s not exclusively a man’s world anyway).
Women have been treated as lesser for such a long time that it’s become subtly encoded in our everyday lives, sometimes to the point that it takes others to point it out to you even as it’s happening to you. Below, several women share their memories of the first time they were discriminated against based on their gender.1. Extra Credit
Oh, I remember it well. My 9th-grade geometry teacher called a boy to the front of the class and praised him for being the only person to correctly answer the bonus question at the end of that week’s test. I raised my hand (very out of character for me, but that’s another story…) to remind him that I had also answered it correctly, but he responded by saying he hadn’t forgotten, he just hadn’t felt it was worth mentioning because GIRLS CAN’T DO MATH! I swear I’m not making that up, and I promise he wasn’t just kidding with me. He was an arrogant, misogynistic jerk. I’ve never been so happy to be done with a class! No, he did not laugh. No, he did not apologize. Yes, he did eventually give me the extra credit points I deserved.
2. Systemic Sexism
I remember a constant sense of rage about the fact that I had to be a girl from the age of four.
Experience (mostly with other kids in other families) told me that girls were less capable than boys and deserved less freedom.
There were many things that built up over time that convinced me being a girl was inferior to being a boy. For example:
- The fact that girls were always expected to be wimps in every situation where boys and girls were playing together
- Regularly getting excluded from fun because “you’re a girl” (which I assumed was an insult for some legitimate reason)
- The frilly dresses I was forced to wear, just “to look pretty” (which I couldn’t understand the point of)
- The awesome toys that friends wouldn’t let me play with because they weren’t for girls
- The stuff girls were constantly told they were bad at; not by my parents, but by other kids or other families (science, math, fighting, fishing, climbing—all stuff I loved)
I hated what being a girl seemed to represent, and felt forced into being perceived as somebody I would never want to be. Being a girl, I believed, was unfair. And in my little kid brain, anyone who was OK with being a girl was stupid.
This meant I believed anything girly was just idiotic. (Which was rough for me, because my parents still wanted to dress me up and didn’t want other families to think I was too boyish. So I spent a lot of time feeling forced to act like an idiot.)
I felt a great disdain for anything feminine. I even created a rule for the make-believe games I’d play with my sisters. The rule was that you could only play if you pretended to be a boy.
My disdain for girliness had nothing to do with what it actually means to be a girl and had everything to do with propaganda about what a girl is supposed to be. But a young kid isn’t going to…
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