Kill the man inside your h3ad
Why women often become their own harshest critics, and how that begins
There’s a monologue in Euphoria where Jules says that as girls, we spend most of our lives thinking about what men want.
When I first heard it, i thought she was talking about attraction.
Years later, i realised she was talking about something much bigger.
shame.
because nobody is born ashamed.
Children don’t look at their bodies and immediately start searching for flaws. They don’t compare themselves to other girls or wonder whether they’re desirable, feminine, or worthy enough.
Somebody teaches them.
I know this because i wasn’t born ashamed either.
If anything, i was the opposite.
My mom loves telling people that when i was little, she’d dress me up and i’d immediately take my top off. not because i was making some grand statement about freedom. i was just comfortable. i hadn’t learned yet that a girl’s body was something people would eventually have opinions about.
That lesson arrived soon enough.
I got my period when i was nine. By twelve, people had already started commenting on my body hair, boys laughed at it, relatives pointed it out. Jokes were made. Advice was offered.
The source hardly mattered. The message was always the same: there was something wrong with the way i naturally existed.
Looking back, that was probably my first introduction to womanhood.
not puberty.
correction.
The idea that my body belonged to public opinion.
And once that lesson is learned, it spreads everywhere.
Women are told what to wear, how to sit, how to speak, how much space to take up, how attractive to be, and exactly where the line is between confidence and arrogance. The problem is that the line keeps moving.
be attractive, but don’t look like you’re trying.
be desirable, but not sexual.
be ambitious, but not intimidating.
be confident, but still agreeable.
The standards contradict each other so often that many women grow up feeling like they’re constantly failing a test nobody explained.
eventually, the criticism becomes internal.
You stop needing other people to judge you because you’ve learned how to do it yourself.
That’s the real meaning of the man inside your head.
not an actual man, an internal observer!
a voice that asks how you’ll be perceived before it asks how you feel.
a voice that has absorbed years of beauty standards, family expectations, social rules, and other people’s opinions.
and it doesn’t only come from men.
That’s one of the hardest truths to talk about.
Some of the deepest wounds women carry come from other women.
i remember telling my sister that a boy had a crush on me when we were kids. her response was, “You’re not even that pretty.”
We were children.
And yet we had already learned that girls could be ranked.
that attention was scarce.
that another girl’s success somehow threatened our own.
It’s a lesson women keep being taught in different ways throughout their lives.
Friendships end because of male attention.
Women are compared against each other.
Girls are encouraged to compete before they’re encouraged to support one another.
For years, i thought this was natural.
Now I think it’s one of the saddest things the patriarchy ever accomplished.
It didn’t just teach women to seek validation from men.
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It taught women to distrust each other.
The same thing happens with sexuality.
A woman who makes her own choices is often treated as a problem to be solved.
She’s called vulgar.
too much.
a bad influence.
The labels change depending on the situation, but they usually point toward the same expectation: stay within the boundaries other people have chosen for you.
I’ve been judged for the clothes i wear.
I’ve been judged for choices that affected nobody except me.
I’ve watched people confuse autonomy with immorality.
And I’ve noticed that women are often expected to carry responsibility for everyone else’s comfort.
even when that comfort comes at the cost of their own freedom.
The consequences don’t stop there.
Many women know what it feels like to be catcalled before they’re old enough to understand why or say no and not be heard or to be treated as a body first and a person second.
What makes these experiences so damaging isn’t just the event itself.
It’s the shame that follows.
Somehow, the responsibility always seems to find its way back to women.
What were you wearing?
Why were you there?
Why didn’t you leave?
Why didn’t you know better?
A violation occurs, and the guilt changes address.
For a long time, i thought freedom meant becoming the kind of woman nobody could judge.
eventually, i realised that women don’t exist.
Someone will always think you’re too loud, too quiet, too sexual, too conservative, too ambitious, too emotional, too independent, or not enough of any of those things.
The goal was never to win their approval.
The goal was to stop needing it.
That’s what killing the man inside your head actually means.
It means questioning the voice that tells you your worth depends on how you’re perceived.
It means noticing when you’ve become harsher on yourself than anyone else around you.
It means refusing to turn other women into competition.
It means asking what you want before asking what will make you acceptable.
Most importantly, it means remembering that shame is learned.
and anything learned can be unlearned.
I think about that a lot.
especially when i imagine the girls who are ten years old today.
The girls getting their first period.
The girls being teased at school.
The girls learning to see themselves through other people’s eyes.
And I think about the women reading this who are twenty, forty, or sixty, remembering versions of the same story.
different details.
same lesson.
None of us were born believing our bodies were problems or that we had to earn the right to exist comfortably in our own skin.
Somebody taught us that.
which means we can teach something different.
to ourselves.
to each other.
and to the girls who come after us.
