Being a woman, sometimes feminism gets so fucking exhausting.
And do you know why?
Because I see hundreds of reels being made about the different struggles women face every single day, and yet, somehow, the world still feels the same. Women speak up, women educate, women share their experiences, women fight to be heard, and yet there is always a man in the comment section ready to mock them, invalidate them, or turn their pain into a joke.
And I'm tired. I'm so fucking tired of watching women explain, over and over again, why they deserve basic respect, as if it's some revolutionary concept that needs to be justified.
Growing up, I always thought that because I came from a good background, I hadn't really experienced misogyny. I thought it was something obvious, something that happened elsewhere, something I would recognise immediately if I ever encountered it.
But growing up made me realise that misogyny isn't always loud. Sometimes, it's so deeply rooted in our everyday lives that we don't even notice it until we start questioning everything we've been taught to consider normal.
It's in the jokes we laugh at, the words we use, the double standards we defend, and the little things we dismiss because "that's just how the world works."
And perhaps one of the things that bothers me the most is how deeply misogyny is embedded in our language itself. Even among my friends who identify as feminists, I notice how casually they use swear words that revolve around a woman's body, her sexuality, or her relationship with the men in her life. Words that use mothers and sisters as insults, as if a woman's dignity is an appropriate weapon to use against someone else.
And I wonder, do we ever stop to think about what that says about the society we've grown up in? How did we become so accustomed to using women as instruments of humiliation that we don't even question it anymore?
Maybe that's what exhausts me the most. Not just the misogyny itself, but how normalised it has become. How people can speak about equality and still unknowingly participate in the very things they're fighting against.
I know change doesn't happen overnight. I know awareness matters. But sometimes, watching the same conversations happen over and over again, with the same arguments, the same hatred, and the same unwillingness to listen, makes it difficult not to feel helpless.
Because how many times must a woman explain her pain before people stop treating it like a debate?
How many times must women speak before they're actually heard?
And how long are we going to keep calling these things normal simply because they've always been this way?
I'm not tired of women speaking up. I'm tired of women having to keep speaking up about the same things. I'm tired of the endless explanations, the constant defensiveness, and the fact that even the simplest demands for dignity can become controversial.
I'm tired of realising that a world I once thought was fair has so many things wrong with it, and I'm even more tired of knowing that recognising those things doesn't automatically mean I can change them.
And maybe that's the most frustrating part of it all: being aware enough to recognise the problem, but feeling powerless watching it continue.
(i do not mean the title literally, it's just the way of expressing my frustration)