Morning Thoughts

I thought about Hillary Clinton this morning. And how, if you asked any Average Joe to name a female politician, she is probably the only one they could name. How she couldn’t afford to be as radical as Bernie, how she worked her way up through the system for years, how she’s by far the most widely known female politician, and how it’s unclear if she will be president.

It isn’t really about her, though. This post isn’t about her. All of the political debate and discussions around her are just a reminder to me of how much of a white supremacist patriarchy we live in. Of course that sounds extreme. We’ve all become numb to it, we’re living inside it after all. I can usually get by without it bothering me most of the time. And then sometimes, on a random Wednesday morning, I’ll think about how Hillary Clinton might not become president, and everything I regularly notice and just put aside, all the things we occasionally talk about but never get that angry about, come rushing in.

80% of politicians are men.

95.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs are men.

85% of domestic abuse is against women.

91% of rape victims are women.

Women are still paid less than men, including celebrities and athletes.

It’s so normal to us that old white men are governing women’s bodies, that the movies and TV shows we watch are overwhelmingly male, that “guys” is used to describe a group of people, that the world is designed for men. We always rationalize it, never admitting to the subconscious bias and stereotypes that drive us as a society.

Women are seen as weak. We are taught to be weak. We are taught to be submissive and gentle and feminine when we’re young, to not fight back, to play with dolls and take care of others, to mediate and placate others, to give up our physical space, our emotional space, our wants and needs. We are trained at a young age that it’s our dream to lose our identity and take care of our husbands and children. We’re allowed to have other aspirations as long as we’re “a wife, and a mother, and”. We are beaten and raped and receive death and sexual assault threats. Then we get blamed for it all, for not fighting back hard enough, for being too aggressive or bitchy, for wearing clothing society tells us we should wear, for not wearing clothing society tells us we should wear, for existing in any way or shape or form outside of this thin line we always have to walk.

Honestly, I don’t think we will ever get to see full gender equality, not in our lifetimes. And if Hillary doesn’t win, I don’t know if or when we will ever have a female president. But we will swallow our grief and anger over the fact that this is the world we live in, and that we can never win. We will numb ourselves to reality, and gather the strength to push boundaries, and keep pushing, until we pass the reins to future women, and they continue to do so, until the world gets there.

I guess, at the very least, there’s a small amount of solace in knowing that even if we never experience it, we had a part in making a difference.