I’m all for women empowerment.
Yes, I want to be paid the same amount as a man in the same position.
Yes, I want to have the same over confidence in my skills that they seem to be able to pull out of their ass.
Yes, I want to be skilled at gaslighting, lying and making people believe bullshit.
And yes, I want to walk around without a bra on that my boyish figure occasionally lets me get away with in society’s eyes.
But do you know what I really want?
I want to be able to walk around at night without having to call my flatmates because someone is following me home. I’d like to not feel like I’ve been punched in the ribcage with anxiety when a stranger approaches me. I want to be able to go on a date with a stranger and not have my live location on and my best friends waiting up for me to come home. I want to be able to dance in a club without the fear of who might be coming up behind me.
With all the false trust and naivety that I carry, I’m still paranoid and have only been proven right to be. I’m naturally over trusting and have only been met by mass disappointment in (mostly) the male species, a disbelief in how they could carry themselves with such.. horridness.
While I admit that this doesn’t apply to all men, I can just as confidently say that all women feel this way. I’ve walked with earphones in, but no music playing - to avoid being approached without the risk of someone sneaking up on me. I have faked being asleep just because I didn’t want anything physical. I have paid mass amounts for an Uber, instead of taking public transport, all while still having to send the details of the driver and car to my closest friends.
With all my precautions, I have still been followed home, in and out of tubes and throughout the mall; catfished; emotionally and sexually abused.
With the last one, I was asked why I didn’t scream. Why I didn’t kick and fight my way to freedom and why I had spoken out about it. Read that again, why I had spoken out about it.
We all speak out about women empowerment but at the end of the day, we can feel all the empowerment we want, post tiktoks doing the silhouette challenge and some creepy man will still be the one to take that enjoyment away.
I can of course relate to this, as a woman, and I'm very sorry to hear what you've gone through. The silver lining in all of the nonsense that we as women have to put up with in today's society is the fact that we, as a collective, as half the population here on Earth, are standing up for ourselves and each other, starting businesses, taking on challenging roles and careers, and year by year are less likely to put up with any shit from men. That being said, we still have a long way to go.