Thoughts

I will be blunt. If you use phrases like 'girl dinner', 'girl math', or 'I'm just a girl' ironically or not, I simply don't respect you. If you feel the need to disparage an entire gender just because you don't feel like thinking, even if that gender is your own, then I have no reason to respect you. Sexism is not something I will tolerate even if it's from women. So why do we?

I think it has to do with the type of woman who says these things. 'girl dinner', 'girl math', etc. Overwhelmingly, it's young white women saying things like this. Moreover, it's a sort a woman who spends a lot of time on social media, talking about how tired she is of working and existing in the modern world with its modern problems and how she just wants things to be simple. I won't say this sort of woman is a facist, because I genuinely don't think that most of them are. I think this sort of person is useful to actual facists, but I don't think these women are facists. I think they're tired, and scared.

The modern world is mess. There are a lot of problems that are very obvious. These problems seem unfixable, or at least very difficult for one person to anything about. However, when we look at history, these are problems we've dealt with before. There have been economic problems, social issues, and mass movements for or against social change for pretty much forever. This isn't to dismiss the concerns or fears that people have. It is to say that these concerns, your concerns can be dealt with. These issues can be solved, and the people causing them have names and adresses. We went to the moon. We fixed the hole in the ozone layer. We defeated facism once, and we will again. But we won't do it by trying to a return to a better, imaginary, simpler, time. Because trying to do that is exactly what fascists are trying to do.

I once again cannot stress enough that I do not think these women are facists, at least not most of them. I think that because scared, tired white women are useful propaganda tools for fascists, they get used by them. Some of them inevitably are, unfortunetly. But the majority of them are just scared and tired.

If you're familiar with the concept of a feedback loop, what I think is happening here is a feedback loop of the way women are conditioned to behave in a patriarcal society. Women are told in that kind of society that they need to diminish themselves, to obey and not think. So when women raised in that sort of environment are made to try and think, to do things as the whole person they are, it's difficult for them. This reinforces the idea that life will just be easier for them if they don't think, if they just do want other people want, if they just obey, then life will be easy. But it isn't. That's not ease, that's familiarity. It's a cage that you will eventually grow too big for unless you make yourself small and miserable forever. It only feels easy right now because it's a problem you're already used to working with. That will change. The real solution is not to put yourself down, to retreat into familiarity, it's to break the loop.

Instead of saying things like 'I'm just a girl' own up to your mistakes. Admit that you're confused or that a task is hard. Find someone to help, do research on how you can do something and understand it better. If the women who did the calculations that put someone on the moon can do those (and by hand no less), you can certainly figure out how to solve your own problems. All this is to say that sometimes, it's alright to go to your friends and say 'Girl help, what is this?'.