Have you ever been loved or wanted by a man while feeling like he resented you for your power over him?
The power dynamic between genders related to love and relationships is constantly evolving, affected by the culture and what is deemed contemporarily accepted by society. I think we all feel a little lost in this concoction of needs, wants, judgment, and lack of limits, especially if we have been affected by multiple cultures in our upbringing.
I was raised in a catholic community with quite clear rules for what was required from a man and a woman and how a woman should be treated. In this equation, a woman could have almost limitless opportunities in life as long as she could take upon herself endless responsibilities with little to no help (apart from financial support) from her partner.
Also, having a partner was the only viable option for having respect in society. Both promiscuity and being unpartnered were frowned upon.
Back then, I didn’t feel like women were hated. Frequently abused, maybe. But in my memory, I think I believed the reason for that was women’s weakness, not the fear of their power.
In 2022, I think it is pretty clear that it is not a weakness for which women have to suffer. Why would it be? Weakness means submission, which puts everyone in a nice, easy-to-understand hierarchy.
Certain men, and yes, of course, not all men, feel threatened by the perceived power of femininity. At the same time, they find it easy to ridicule the whimsical, sinister, and frail nature of everything that is traditionally associated with it.
Yes, women are both sinister and ridiculous. Both resentful and weak-minded. Overambitious and limited. They are trapped in combatant victimhood.
Probably the perfect example of that, a dead horse that has been beaten ad nauseam, is the pop-culturally iconic moment of the interview between Cathy Newman and Jordan Peterson. Cathy Newman is presented here as a hateful feminist trying to put on the spot a brave intellectual, proving that the whole feminism is a radically leftist ideology and painful to watch moaning with no substance.
This hate is also fuelled by multiple influential women who found their place in society as traditional mothers, wives, and women of value who love nothing more than complaining about feminism, trans people, and black dwarves in fantasy series. I have often heard that we should pity women like that as they found their way to live in the patriarchal society by adjusting to the social requirements better than everyone else. Even though I am usually a simp for compassion, I don’t think I can agree with that sentiment. The example they set can be, in my opinion, harmful to their young followers, who might become defeatists in the most transformative years of their lives. Very often, they claim that modern feminism is cancer to society (they cannot necessarily criticize the whole movement as they still benefit from its achievements – at the end of the day, they do drive and vote) as if all the problems related to power struggles between genders were magically solved thanks to the invention of the washing machine.
At the risk of sounding like a crazy feminist, I will say that pretending that there is no discrimination anymore is being blind and conformist. But at the same time, we must acknowledge we are still way more privileged, living in western societies, than many other women in this world. And this will hopefully lead me smoothly to the main reason why I am writing this note, as there has been no day in the last month where I wouldn’t think about this one woman whose name cannot be repeated frequently enough.
Mahsa Amini, a woman who died for a reason so ridiculous, so made up, so arbitrary that the frustration it causes me breaks my heart and boils my blood.
Mahsa Amini, who was only 22 and had her whole life ahead of her, died because she showed a little bit of her hair in public, symbolizing her sexual power over men.
Mahsa Amini, whose life was deemed worthless by the authorities supposed to protect their citizens from moral decay.
If she had died in vain, I don’t know how we can all keep living in this cowardly world.
And her death is all proof we need to show that we need to keep struggling toward equality, and while the process might be very erroneous in many cases, taking a step back will cause suffering we cannot afford.
And to answer my first question – yes, multiple times.
