respectthefemalebody:

• Growing up with period stigma enacted on your own body, internalizing a cultural belief that periods make women irrational and illogical and are physical proof of our inferiority.
• Having to walk a tightrope between being a “slut” or a “prude” while the boys around you are all watching porn and openly discussing what they want to do to female bodies. Knowing that you have to accept the painful things that boys want to do to your body or else you’re a “boring vanilla prude” who is “closed minded” and nobody will like you.
• Being told that boys who bully us in the school yard are mean to us because they like us, having the boys get away with teasing us, being blamed for the boys’ behavior towards us, learning that we need to take responsibility for the way boys treat us.
• Knowing that if a boy dislikes you for any reason he could label you a “bitch” and get everyone to turn on you because people will always trust his word over yours, so you grow up being extra nice to boys to make sure they won’t call you a bitch.
• Watching every woman in media wear makeup when men don’t, ever since childhood, and internalizing that women need makeup to be professional or presentable in public, but men don’t. Knowing that this skill is required for you to learn in order to have a social network. Eventually apologizing for when people see you without makeup.
• Being given dolls to play with, toy kitchen sets, and taught to emulate being a mommy ever since childhood. Growing up with the assumption that marrying a man and having babies is inevitable and you need to start preparing for it immediately.
• The people around you viewing women who get abortions as murderers, so you grow up thinking that no matter what, if you get pregnant, you’ll have the baby, because you don’t want to be a Bad Person so you grow up already accepting that you don’t get to control your own experience in your own body and forced pregnancy is just something you’ll have to get through at some point.
• Constantly being told that marriage is the happiest day of a woman’s life, while at the same time the men around you have an attitude of marriage being “game over” so you know you have to work extra hard to please the man in order to make sure you get that promise of happily ever after that Disney sold you.
• Growing up with religions worshiping father gods, with the power of creation attributed to that father god, and feeling disconnected from your own control over your body, as if this father god could make you pregnant and you’d just have to go along with it to be a good person. Knowing that what you want for your own body doesn’t matter.
• Doing more chores than your brothers, especially around the holidays, when they get to sit around and relax with the men but all the women have to work in the kitchen to cook and clean both before and after the meal. Learning to clean up after men.

Being told that you can’t lift that thing, run as fast as any guy around, wouldn’t understand technology (so noone teaches you how to understand it or do the other things), or having your shyness and social anxiety praised as virtue. Mocking loud girls but accepting that behaviour in boys as “totally natural”.

And finally internalizing all that shit that is thrown at you until you believe it yourself and have to unlearn it when it almost feels too late.