Men may have mythologized Elizabeth as a savior for her alleged adherence to their rules, she is the noted exception.

Catherine’s lingering legend, however, came from her contemporaries’ custom of cruelly caricaturing her for proudly flaunting her behavior.

Were they more threatened by her sexuality or her success?

Or was it her lack of shame?

Catherine the Great (1729 – 1796)

Reduced to a nonsensical story about a nymphomaniac with a horse, all because her empire was too vast and her intellect too sharp to be remembered without ridicule.

Was it that they were intimidated by a woman who was too much for a mere man to manage?

Maybe she had 22 lovers over her lifetime.

Her body count was her business.

Overthrowing her own husband after coming to his country as a foreigner to take the crown demonstrates the grit, determination, and political savvy Catherine was innately blessed with.

A defender of women’s rights and expander of the country’s borders, she promoted education and culture while also strengthening the economy and infrastructure.

Catherine extended property rights, made divorce more accessible, and brought more visibility at court for noblewomen. Emphasis on the noble.

Feminist? Maybe. Classist? Absolutely.

Serfs, men and women alike, suffered under her rule.

Modernizing Russia, critical territory expansions, and the whole overthrow of her husband had to have made male chroniclers and her contemporaries feel emasculated.

One such ruler, Frederick the Great of Prussia said, “A woman is always a woman and, in feminine government, the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by straight reason.”

No one had their legacy shat on by the patriarchy like Catherine.

And they started while she ruled.

Certainly, she elevated her lovers to positions of power. She knew how loyal they were. How devoted.

Even her ex-lovers.

She placed Stanisław August Poniatowski on the throne of Poland.

Two others, Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin, were trusted above all and given tremendous power.

Orlov had helped her gain the throne while Potemkin became her secret husband and longest love.

She used men for her needs, personal and political, exercising power over them in a way few women through history have managed.

Or been willing to mention.

The shock was not so much that she had lovers… but that she had no shame about her behavior.

The patriarchy has never forgiven her for it.

A “lady” would have been discreet or shamed and in seclusion. Catherine was bold and unrepentant.

Debasing and dehumanizing her legacy with bestiality as penalty for a powerful, politically savvy, popular ruler, who enjoyed men as playmates and refused to apologize.

During the Cold War, the West took that horse myth and turned it into anti-USSR propaganda, explaining why a debunked rumor still resonates on playgrounds and school buses today.

Forget the lusty caricature and focus on the leader who prepared Russia for the 19th century during her reign of its “Golden Age.”

Catherine the Great deserves the epithet her people gave her, not the epilogue they used to destroy her legacy.

The pattern isn’t subtle — it’s systemic.

Strip women of power in the historical record, center their legends in sex and softness; and future women inherit those man-centered myths instead of a truth to aspire to.

We can correct his story and write her truth.

We hold pens now.

Though slurs were flung at the following queens, they learned to twist the system to their advantage and take control through the roles and rules men made for them.

The next played the game better than many a king and intimidated royalty across two continents.

To be less impressive a specimen, history softened her importance by centering her as a Medieval Queen of Love rather than the most influential woman of the twelfth century.

Part Two: Playing the Game

Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122 – 1204)

When you inherit a duchy the size of a small country, with the army to back it up, male egos feel soothed and strengthened remembering you as the “Queen of Love,” not the political powerhouse who succeeded where men failed.

But even Eleanor fell prey to the infidelity rumors that plague women in power.

Slurs that she was not only unfaithful to both her husbands, but that she was unfaithful incestuously.

A nice, softening of power for the era of chivalry and courtly love.

She did encourage the arts, particularly literature, poetry, and music, and was known for hosting troubadours and poets at her court.

Rather than diminishing her as Queen of Love, they should’ve written of the Queen of Culture.

Eleanor supported the church and architecture, donating to monasteries and other religious institutions.

Men made her out to be the muse, when she was the mastermind.

Andreas Capellanus wrote The Art of Courtly Love around 1185, reportedly inspired by the culture at Eleanor’s court. And all her ladies in waiting were like, “He doesn’t even go here.”

In the 19th century, scholar Gaston Paris exaggerated the connection between Eleanor and the concept of courtly love.

So, the contemporary author laid the foundation, and six or seven centuries later the myth was cemented.

In case any man felt too unmanned thinking about a woman with more agency and acreage than a King.

She wed Louis VII of France as a teenager. Alas, the two daughters she bore him did not suffice. He may later have regretted annulling their union due to a lack of sons though.

Why? Weeks after their marriage ended she sailed across the Channel flaunting her “assets” and quickly married Henry II.

THAT relationship produced five sons, with four surviving to adulthood and another two daughters.

Eleanor matched those daughters with men of power, creating queens and countesses.

Only large purses, property, or power married one of her boys.

Matriarchy and matrimony met in mutiny as she backed those sons in rebellion against their father, the king.

Years of ruling Aquitaine had prepared Eleanor well for leadership.

As Queen of France, she led her own army of Aquitaine soldiers to the Second Crusade and as Queen Mother, she ruled England as regent for Richard when he led the Third Crusade.

Until her death, she gave counsel to kings, helped manage her estate, and continued arranging advantageous marriages.

Eleanor wasn’t just a mama bear.

She was the medieval momager, negotiating crowns instead of commercials.

The Queen of Love married twice and used her connections to powerful men, both husbands and sons, to her advantage. Following men’s rules and playing the system worked to her advantage.

While the Virgin Queen also played by men’s rules, she used the system against the men.

Quite the risk to take with her very life on the line.

After all, queens were losing their heads left and right in the Tudor period.

Next, how Elizabeth played the patriarchy‘s game and won.

Elizabeth I (1533-1603)

The exception that proves the rule.

Her name almost more synonymous with the English age of the Tudor Period than her father who gave it the moniker

The Elizabethan Era.

It brought the Age of Expansion, The Spanish Armada and Shakespeare.

Ruling over all of it, Elizabeth I.

Glorianna. Bess, The Virgin Queen.

Forced to capitalize on a nonexistent trait to create her legend.

Hymen, my ass.

She still faced rumors of illegitimate children. She was accused of having lovers outside the sanctity of marriage.

Yes, she still suffered from slander and gossip.

But, let’s focus on how she managed men within the system they built to contain her. Used her beauty and matrimonial status when she was young and her power when she wasn’t.

Lord Dudley. Philip II. Sir Walter Raleigh.

She wielded her unwedded status as both an award and a weapon.

She stretched out courtship charades for years while shoring up other alliances.

Never intending to give up her solo seat on the throne, her father’s example as a serial spouse might have made her shy away from commitment.

The Virgin Queen, married to her people.

A woman choosing to stay single in Tudor England was the ultimate power play.

Outsmarted them? Yes.

She used the patriarchy to her advantage the way you might to get out of a speeding ticket.

Toyed with suitors and twisted her councilors around her finger.

History doesn’t get to rewrite her.

Elizabeth co-wrote her own legend with the patriarchy.

And she ends up referenced with reverence and respect.

Watch for “Part Three: Unforgiven” on the life of Catherine the Great — coming soon.

It rewrites them into myths that men can live with, without feeling insignificant.

Women with enough power to truly terrify the patriarchal pen holders had to be diminished in men’s favorite way to demean a woman: her sexuality.

They could be a seductress or a succubus.

The Queen of Love or a Virgin Queen.

A nymphomaniac who loved her horses.

Far easier for men to acknowledge sex than strength and strategy.

More palatable to learn of women’s beauty besting male brute force than their brilliance or bravery.

But, when we peel back the patriarchal patter distracting us and look beyond the made-up, masturbatory, misogynistic myths passed down to discredit them, their true, enduring legacies emerge.

Part One: Majesty Overwritten by Misogyny

Cleopatra (69 BCE – 30 BCE)

Remembered as the seductress of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, she is forgotten as the strategist who spoke multiple languages and kept Egypt independent for decades amid Roman expansion.

We’re taught the myth of her presenting herself to Caesar, naked and wrapped in a rug, to save her land and people.

Thanks, Plutarch.

He also credited her with being better known for her charm than for her looks.

But that story doesn’t sell like Liz Taylor’s version.

I learned all about her marrying her brother to consolidate power, but I don’t remember learning about her marriage to the second brother. Or that she was rumored to have killed him and a sister rival. Just to be on the safe side.

All a part of how she secured her throne in a dynastic struggle.

You might think of her dressed as Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sailing up to meet Antony on a barge, and not of her leading her own fleet of the navy beside him in battle.

While forced to retreat, it shows her courage and the respect she garnered from her people.

She was born a Macedonian Greek in Egypt. After three centuries, she was the last of her family dynasty to rule that nation, and somehow, she was also the first to actually learn the language of its people.

Cleopatra positioned herself as a unifier of Hellenistic and Egyptian culture to solidify her legitimacy and popularity.

A patron of development with a shrewd business sense, she oversaw building projects and stabilized Egypt’s economy by effectively managing taxes and controlling crucial resources.

Instead of the sexy Halloween costume, think of the ruler who kept Egypt free from Roman conquest for two decades using diplomacy and skill, not seduction.

She deserves more than the myths men want us to remember.

From Plutarch to Suetonius to Shakespeare and social studies class, Cleopatra’s legend formed over centuries.

When historians and Hollywood repeat the same tired tropes often enough, they begin to feel like fact.

Our next leader in the series only needed one bitter man to drag her name through the gutter and fling mud that stuck for millennia.

Theodora of Byzantine (c500 - 548 CE)

It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the Byzantine Empire.

A man with a grudge, Procopius, accused Theodora of sleeping her way to the top and keeping Emperor Justinian pussy-whipped so she could rule the kingdom.

And presto! Theodora gets turned into the whore, not the empress who expanded women’s rights and built protections against human trafficking.

Sidelined and unmanned by Theodora’s power and Justinian’s policies, Procopius wrote Constantinople’s first slam book, Secret History, late in their reign.

He undermined their empire in print because they undermined him in power. Easier to make it the succubus’ fault than risk blaming the man who sat beside her on the throne.

The most powerful woman in Byzantium, she ruled equally with her husband.

Theodora defended followers of a faith not endorsed by her husband. She built safe homes for prostitutes and other marginalized women who needed shelter and alternative means to support themselves.

The empress used her power to rewrite the laws that trapped women in the very system she was accused of embodying.

She expanded divorce rights and property protections for women, outlawed forced prostitution, and passed laws against human trafficking.

But Theodora had been an actress.

The shame! Justinian had to pass new legislation allowing their marriage

Just one more point of pride that Procopius perverted into propaganda.

A feminist and champion of the vulnerable, she should be remembered not for the rumors of her youth, but for reshaping law, religion, and empire.

All proof that Theodora was more than the misogynist “whore” label that history tried to pin on her.

Watch for “Part Two: Playing the Game” on the lives of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Elizabeth I — coming soon.

You heard: Us against them. House divided.

She meant: Men don’t understand these things.

She said: You’re too young for dating.”

You heard: My baby can’t grow up.

She meant: Boys don’t always hear no.

She said: “That’s too old for you.”

You heard: Your boobs are too big.

She meant: You know where they’ll look.

She said: “Coming straight home from prom?”

You heard: Do not come home pregnant.

She meant: I worry when you’re late.

She said: “So-and-so isn’t a good friend.”

You heard: I control even your friendships.

She meant: She’ll get you in trouble.

She said: “You really need more dessert?”

You heard: We love hungry. Not fat.

She meant: Life’s easier when you’re thin.

She said: “Someday when you’re a mother.”

You heard: I will die without grandchildren.

She meant: Someday you will understand me.

She said: “Nice girls don’t do that.”

You heard: Why are you always bad?

She meant: Small town reputations last forever.

She said: “Because I told you so.”

You heard: She thinks she knows everything.

She meant: My mother told me to.

She said: “I love you, my daughter.”

You heard: As long as you listen.

She meant: I love you, my daughter.

I liked a boy, he liked me. And when you’re eleven, that’s enough to feel like Zack and Kelly. Or Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper.

They mirrored our lives, going through the same things week after week. Maybe the script was older than that, more predictable too.

We had class together and lunch together.

He even liked talking on the phone after school.

That long walk from the third floor of the old building twice a day felt too short when he was beside me. Knowing I was going to see his smile and amber brown eyes light up across the room softened some of the rougher edges of that first year in the locker jungle of middle school.

It was my first school dance. Not a winter formal — just a winter dance. No one had “dates.” But, I would have someone to dance with.

I couldn’t wear something he’d seen me wear to school already.

That was the rule, unwritten but ironclad — girls noticed, and so did boys, or at least that’s what we were told.

Dragged my mom to every store in town, all three, before convincing her a trip to the mall forty-five minutes away was necessary.

We brought home a pink, white, and silver cardigan sweater that I would 100 percent keep buttoned up all night long.

Because —

The. Buttons. Had. Silver. Thread.

Running. Through. Them.

They would be the stars of the show.

When we danced around the darkened gymnasium and multicolored spotlights strobed across the floor, some of those lights would hit my sparkly buttons.

Even then, I knew where to draw the eye.

I remember we were almost exactly the same height. Four feet, eleven inches. Not even five feet tall.

My hands on his shoulders and his hands on my hips as we shuffled awkwardly in a box step around the school gymnasium.

The fumbled steps came not just from our inexperience but from our ignorance. I’ve been told to follow his lead but neither of us know how.

Touching, yet standing farther apart than when we walked from class to class.

Looking over his shoulder instead of into his eyes while we danced required a skill I hadn’t yet developed.

Doing it without seeming to ignore him?

That was a masterclass I was dying to attend.

Eager for my induction into this sorority of sirens and seductresses.

The sweat on my palms — never present when he held my hand walking through the hallway — coated my hands so slickly I would’ve worried if he weren’t also wearing a sweater over a turtleneck.

No way it would permeate those layers.

Funny, he was wearing a sweater I know he’d worn to school several times.

Meanwhile, other boys just recycled what they’d worn to school that day.

When we weren’t dancing, he hung with his guy friends and I clung to my girl friends.

So we could dissect the three minutes and they could haze him for it

In a herd to the bathroom. Fluff the bangs, now limp with sweat. All of us staring into the scratched mirror of the dimly lit girls’ room behind the gym.

The fluorescent lighting harsh and glaring in contrast to the light show of the DJ.

We compare notes on who has been asked to slow dance and who hasn’t.

Back then, we still waited for the boys to ask us. And at our first ever dance, it isn’t a given for all of us yet. Like it is for most of the 7th and 8th grade girls.

Some of them doing moves that would make Johnny Castle and Baby blush.

Kissing their boyfriends on the fringes of the dance floor even, in the shadows where the chaperones aren’t focused. We compare notes on that, too.

I can still smell the sweat and Polo and Love’s Baby Soft and Aussie Scrunch & Spray. Wearing a pink sweater with sparkly buttons while I danced with the sweetest boy in the sixth grade. I can still feel his hand clasped in mine, warm and safe as it guided me through jostling crowds and our first steps into adolescence. He led and I followed.

In a box in my attic, full of bottle caps and rose petals. With love letters and bubblegum jewelry.

Tucked in amongst other treasures of a guileless heart, you’ll find a button with silver thread running through it.

Questioning that now.

The other night I posted from a vulnerable place and hit my tenth subscriber.

Cue balloons!

The post that put me into double digits?

How could this round-number milestone not send me spiraling into self-doubt?

Spoiler: It did.

It infinitesimally increases the chance that someone is actually reading the words, you see.

That makes this experiment more real.

I’m practically begging you to read it but terrified someone actually will.

And I thought I was finally more sensible than at 16.

It’s harder now to comfort myself that “probably no one has read it,” when I wake second guessing a piece at 3 a.m.

When I wrote for newspapers a million years ago, changes were hard earned.

Once that story was printed out, cut, waxed, and rolled onto a newspaper dummy, only essential editing could be implemented.

It took effort to correct a glaring error, never mind a style change caught after the sixth read.

You’d have to reprint the entire column from the error onward, whether real or imagined.

It required strategic changes to format, font, or kerning — anything to avoid dragging other design elements into the mess.

A different word, a cleaner phrase — if it fit in the same space, it could save the whole layout.

Wielding an exacto knife with scalpel precision to change just what was needed could be lifesaving on a deadline with the van waiting to take hard copies to the printer.

Today, I can edit comments I posted to Facebook five seconds ago.

And with an essay from last month that won’t sit still in my brain?

Full rewrites.

Complete overhauls.

What compulsive perfectionist could resist?

As I dig deeper, I find that the truth, lighter than air apparently, floats to the top of my consciousness long after I think I’m finished with a topic or a memory.

So I write a passage over. I write a brand new section.

I hit the post button on a few before their time.

Because…if I hadn’t posted them right at that exact moment…I might not have followed through with it at all.

How easy it would have been to have talked myself out of this exposure.

Delightfully so.

To have avoided this letting of my veins onto the pages.

Or computer. Or phone screen?

There’s no romance in that.

I put them out there.

Raw. Unfinished.

But, out there.

I worried about them.

I fretted over them.

I’ve edited some and rewritten others.

Because the most important thing I have gotten from this newsletter and this writing project has nothing to do with followers or subscribers.

For the first time in over 20 years, I’m writing and editing and revising and writing some more. Every day.

It’s what I think about when I get up. It’s what keeps me up at night instead of doomscrolling.

Now that I don’t need chisel and rock, I’m happy to edit and rewrite. And rewrite some more. How does one know when to stop? In the digital age, it’s as easy as tapping the screen.

Too easy for an overthinker? Perhaps.

Too much control for a perfectionist? Absolutely.

An only child, how could I not be?

My parents raised me to believe I could do and become whatever I wanted.

They also raised me to be a “nice little girl.”

Little did they know how fundamentally contradictory that guidance would be.

It wasn’t preparation for the world they released me into.

A world designed by men, for men.

They allow us to adapt the feminine, in order to accommodate the masculine.

And they expect us to call it progress.

Study after study shows women — along with immigrants and people of color — suffer from perfectionism, imposter syndrome, are less self-assured and lack confidence professionally more than men.

We don’t just happen to be more likely to suffer from these things.

Men cause us to suffer those symptoms simply because they remain the default setting

The patriarchy conditions us to doubt our place within its confines.

I finish writing and, like Pavlov’s dogs, salivate over a new piece of my soul I get to dissect and disassemble.

Every piece that I write is never finished. Never good enough.

I’m always scared and embarrassed to show them to anyone.

Less so to a stranger.

Is that because I always think I can write it better?

Is that because I don’t believe I can write at all?

Or is it because I’ve been told what good writing is and this doesn’t look like that?

But, I’m writing how they taught me.

Write in your voice, they said.

Write how you’d talk, they said.

Make it clear and concise, they said.

The voice in my head telling me this isn’t good enough…

maybe that isn’t my voice at all.

Maybe it’s been The Man’s voice all along.

If something I say makes you nod in recognition, please like or share.

I know, I’m texting before you’re home from the date. I can’t help myself.

If I sound ridiculous and you shake your head in anger at how very wrong I’ve gotten it — take a second and tell me in the comments.

Ten people subscribed. Seventeen followed. I only know a handful of you.

(Hi, guys!! Erin — thanks for reading this stuff when I’m this crazy. And Megan, thanks for reading and for the inspiration for this one!)

I would love to know the rest.

Tell me what brought you here.

Let’s build something together that makes you want to stay.

Subscribe now

There was a woman.

You’ve probably never heard of her.

That wasn’t an accident.

This is part of RaisedByThePatriarchy — a series about unlearning what we were taught, especially the parts they left out.

[Image: Bust of Aspasia]

Humanities 101 didn’t cover this.

Of course not.

She didn’t fit the narrative.

Intro to Philosophy skipped her too.

Socrates was taught by a woman.

Wait — Socrates was taught by a woman?

Western civilization started with him.

But they were missing a step from the start.

They left out the woman who taught him to “use his words.”

Philosophy and democracy.

Law and debate.

All built on the Socratic method.

Built, of course, on the very rhetoric she taught him.

Socrates taught Plato.

Plato taught Aristotle.

Aristotle taught Alexander the freaking Great.

From the glory of Greek culture to everything Rome stole from them and then built on — and no matter what you think of the Roman Empire, you have to acknowledge its influence for goodness’ sake —to hear that this long line of penis-led glory, grandeur, and greatness was inspired by the teachings of a woman who had been hidden from history for millennia?

I was apoplectic. Indignant.

Quivering with feminine fury.

Another woman erased. Again.

Socrates had credited her.

Plato wrote about her.

The playwright Aristophanes blamed her for the Peloponnesian war.

(With no proof at all.)

[Image: “The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia”]

She was known.

Then buried under the weight of millennia and manly achievements.

They turned her into a courtesan or a prostitute to diminish her reputation and erase her legacy.

Just like Mary Magdalene.

A woman couldn’t be significant without being sexual.

Then they taught us SPA as a mnemonic device to remember the foundations of Western Civilization.

Socrates.

Plato.

Aristotle.

Aspasia.

Remember the roots of rhetoric.

She wasn’t just erased from philosophy.

She was erased from the origin story of Western civilization.

And I’m supposed to believe that’s a coincidence?

Philosophy isn’t just patriarchal.

Philosophy is the patriarchy.

Subscribe now

If you’ve ever made a point in a meeting,

only to have a man repeat it louder and get credit

you already know what happened to Aspasia.

Share if the hemlock doesn’t sound too crazy.

I can still see the illustration from my social studies textbook of the men with spears hunting for sustenance to feed their tribe.

Sometimes they’d even be dragging a carcass back or circling their prey — to add more visual interest.

Meanwhile the women “gatherers” walked

around looking for edible and useful plants.

Maybe they wove some clothing or baskets.

Whoop dee doo.

When a fire needed building, perhaps the artist could delegate that task to the one old man allotted to their tribe.

A woman could tend the fire or cook over it — never create it.

The men went on important, dangerous adventures.

The women had chores.

I was raised to believe that male dominance was a fact of life.

That the patriarchy wasn’t just real — it was

how things are supposed to be.

That it had always been that way.

Far more dangerous than being etched into human history before history was written —

It was coded into our DNA.

So, earlier this year, when I read that the available evidence doesn’t support these theories, I was dumbstruck and dumbfounded.

See, even if it doesn’t, and I would love that to be the case, how do I unlearn something that is known?

I’ve wrapped my mind around there being a fifth ocean.

And almost adjusted to Pluto not being a planet. Almost.

So, you’re telling me that because men studied everything and men wrote about everything and men controlled everything from the time we started writing it down until (checks notes) — pretty much now, they got to control the narrative?

Go fucking figure.

According to a 2023 literature review in PLOS ONE conducted by women researchers, childbearing didn’t keep women from hunting —

it shaped the tools they used and the prey they pursued.

Their age didn’t limit their contribution to the hunt.

Rather, as they reviewed studies from 63 locations around the globe, most showed older women with high levels of participation.

A 1966 symposium in Chicago (more than ten years before I was born) disproved the “Man is hunter” myth.

Yet, it remained common belief until the 2020s.

Was it having women scientists asking different questions?

Challenging the accepted narrative? Looking with different eyes?

Was it one more way for them to keep us in our place?

To diminish our contributions?

Of course it was.

So, I will find a way to wrap my brain around the fact that women played a much larger role — huge, actually — in hunting than we’d ever been taught.

I’ll accept this along with the new information that the gathering they did was considerably more significant to the survival of the tribe than ever before acknowledged.

In fact, it was deliberately downplayed and denigrated as women’s work.

Of course it was.

Not just passive passengers trailing along behind the big, strong hunter man. Women were equal contributors to the tribe’s survival

But, historians negate and neglect the contributions they DID give us credit for so it didn’t sound like women were capable of much.

So, it will take time and conscious effort.

I will have to work to undo the story so deeply ingrained in my worldview I had never thought to doubt it.

A story so rooted in my psyche that I questioned whether the new information could be true.

Worried that it fit my feminist narrative too smoothly and wondered if I was too eager to be convinced.

I double checked and verified and still have to remind myself it is true.

Because after all these years…

The myth spreads faster and lasts longer than a fact could ever dream to.

Sure looks like long hair and breasts on this caveman. And a narrow waist with feminine hips. But don’t tell the textbook editors.

If this made you pause, question something, or mutter “holy shit,” please hit like or subscribe for similar content.

I’d love it if you subscribed or shared it with someone else who grew up believing the same lie.

Subscribe now

That which Mother Nature does not kill us with during menstruation, she saves for the rest of puberty — to make us stronger, of course.

Boobs and bras.

Body hair and body odor.

Breakouts and breakdowns.

It’s when we start to truly hate our bodies properly.

With hard work and passion.

Dedicated to our craft.

Hours spent in front of a mirror filled with the self-loathing reserved for girls who believed the airbrushed lies of magazines.

Dark Oxy or white toothpaste dabbed on your zits. No fancy overnight pimple stickers. Not many options, at all, to be honest.

Your mother’s Noxema, the sting of Stridex, the burn of SeaBreeze.

The minute we grow hair we can’t wait to shave it off with our pink razors.

And then pay more for the pink privilege.

We had Nair for short shorts.

An Epilady? Just a medieval torture device from the late 1900s.

And why do we want to get rid of it? Why must we stay looking prepubescent?

Why is our hair inherently ugly and “unfeminine?”

Why do we shave our legs and armpits while men shave their faces? Maybe. If they want to.

Hair makes them manly. Staying hairless keeps us young.

Society shapes us into what men want us to be all the while convincing us it was our idea.

We couldn’t wait to start. We couldn’t wait to grow up. The joke was on us. Our moms told us to be children yet we rushed chest first into adulthood.

We wanted training bras before we needed them—and had no clue why.

We just knew we wanted to be older. Grown-up. Whatever it was that made us fit society’s attractive standards.

Standards packaged and promoted by the same ones who manufactured the products they sold us.

Why did no one tell us our favorite part of the day would be taking off our bra?

If we’d known, I bet we’d have waited just a little longer before begging our mothers to take us to Penney’s or Kmart for those little white bralettes with a pink rose sewn on the front.

Maybe we wouldn’t have worried about being attractive to the men of the world when we were still girls.

I bet we’d have kept our Wonder Woman underoos on just a little longer.

If you have your own pink razors, Wonder Woman Underoos, or Sea Breeze memories, drop them in the comments. I’d love to hear your story.

I couldn’t stand up yet.

Listened to tennis shoes squeaking across the tile floor and the confused whispered questions from my friends. 

Kept my head down and eyes averted.  

Waited until every single member of my class had filed slowly out of the library to head back to our classroom before getting the attention of the school’s librarian.

No recourse left but to throw myself on her mercy because when I stood up the telltale brownish-red stain that had leaked through my underwear and through my pants would be streaked across the vinyl seat of the library chair.

The shame. The horror.

The utter humiliation.

I wasn’t the first girl to suffer through this, and I wouldn’t be the last.

Because, at least, during my lifetime and the lives of the women responsible for me, we hid the whole bloody process.

All puns intended.

We hid the pads or the tampon going to the bathroom.

We struggled to hide any noticeable bulk in our underwear if we opted for a pad.

And, dear reader, I did opt for a pad. To the confused consternation of my peers.

But, I was already facing hot and cold flashes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, a fever, cramps that feel like early labor and Hulk-like rage.

Pain I would pass out from.

I had gone to doctors pleading for help.

Asking for answers.

They found no endometriosis.

Or didn’t know how to look for it yet?

Just take some ibuprofen and tough it out, I was told.

Adding a tampon to that?

Hard no.

I drugged myself with enough PMS pain reliever to calm an elephant’s uterus, clutched my heating pad with a death grip, and, learning if I fasted I wouldn’t vomit, sipped ginger ale, and nibbled a cracker or two.

A hot shower or, the holy grail of my period care, a bathtub nap—I know it sounds dangerous.

It probably is.

But, it was the best chance I had at feeling anything resembling human for the day.

I don’t know how else they expect us to hold down jobs, go to school, and parent children.

All the while smiling and hoping no one notices.

All the while, they hoped we wouldn’t notice:

Until 2023 they had never used actual blood to test absorbency on menstrual products. Guess that mysterious blue liquid wasn’t just for the commercials.

Or was it supposed to warn us about the arsenic and mercury they include as a bonus with every tampon?

And we suffer through all of it. So that we can bring life into the world. So that we can bring you into the world.

Only to be raised to be ashamed and hide the very bodily function everyone should be grateful we bear for the human race.

And to be taught that, somehow, losing blood from shedding the lining of a uterus is more horrifying than causing someone else to bleed their own blood.

It’s worse blood. From a bloodier blood place?

This life-giving, life-creating blood is more unclean than the life-taking blood spilled by the fists, knives, and guns men statistically wield at a higher rate than we do.

They punch walls in anger and each other in friendship.

That ignorant blood is worn as a badge of honor.

If mine is visible it disgusts the surrounding neighborhood and brings dishonor upon my family for three generations.

So I sat in that chair, covering my blood and shame, as a girl and a woman.

My greatest rebellion came the day I started talking about periods and products openly.

When I stopped hiding what I was carrying to the restroom.

When I stopped burying my wrapped menstrual pad in the trash of any co-ed restroom.

A small victory for the girl stuck in her chair.

Subscribe now

There’s a reason for that. It’s time to look closer at what we actually grew up laughing at.

“They couldn’t make a movie like that today.”

“People are too sensitive.”

Truth?

The real reason these movies couldn’t get made today?

Because they shouldn’t.

Revenge of the Nerds, for example.

My parents let me watch this when I was way too young.

I know I was in elementary school, maybe 8 years old at best.

Ridiculously immature and unprepared for the content.

The ending celebrates Lewis tricking Betty into having sex by pretending to be her boyfriend, Stan. Same costume, same setting—and she has no idea it’s him. The audience laughs. The film rewards him. But let’s be clear: this is rape by identity theft, dressed up as comedy.

To the credit of the creators, the stage adaptation has added consent to the scene. A modern touch to the troubled original.

Although, in typical male fashion, they referenced their own daughters in discussions of why the original was problematic. It’s never until they are fathers. Why do they have to picture their own daughters before the danger is real?

Animal House has statutory rape and a peeping tom scene.

But, my dad loved John Belushi and this was one of the VHS movies we owned.

So, it goes without saying that I can’t count how many times I’ve seen it.

Was I old enough for this comedic cult favorite? The ‘80s were a crazy decade and the Wild West for parental guidelines as my teen today tells me.

Thanks to his Gramma and a theater showing of Cocaine Bear, he’s seen an ‘80s childhood from the front row.

Which is worse for a 12 year old to see?

A drug-addled havoc-wreaking bear or drug-addled frat boys playing predators for the laugh track.

Which is worse? Raping her while she’s too drunk to consent or too young to say yes.

This isn’t some hazy, gray area between a senior in high school and a college freshman. No. This teen girl is revealed to be 13 years old. A child.

And the joke still landed.

The audience sided with the fraternity pledge.

In Sixteen Candles, Jake Ryan hands his drunk girlfriend over to a nerd for implied sexual favors.

Rape through the barter system.

An entire generation of women still considered him the ultimate crush for decades.

We watched these on dates. And with our parents. People laughed while munching popcorn. We all did back then.

And I might today.

It’s the soundtrack of my childhood. I can’t just erase it.

If I caught one on tv.

In the right spot.

In the right mood…

I’d laugh at them smoking pot with their professor in the bath tub.

At double secret probation.

I’d root for her to get the date with her crush. Even if he is an asshole.

Because it’s hard to be sixteen and awkward with a gorgeous, blonde older sister stealing your thunder.

The same way I want Long Duk to stay out partying all night with his hot American girlfriend.

There are scenes that would make me look away in agony because I’m no longer an eight year old girl who doesn’t understand the racism.

I’d still cringe when Farmer Ted sells pay per view access to those panties to boost his own clout.

Not sure if I could watch Nerds at all to be honest.

Some movies just don’t stand up to the test of time.

Some didn’t stand for much to begin with.

But, it was hard to write consent into the script before it was introduced into the culture.

What can I say?

We were socialized. It was normalized.

That taught us it was acceptable.

And a generation of men and women learned the lesson.

When I watched Uncle Buck with my son, he was maybe 8 or 9. He was horrified during the scene where Buck interrupts an attempted date rape.

‘She was yelling, ‘No!’”he shouted, visibly upset, as Buck burst in with a chainsaw.

We paused the movie.

I tried to explain why I was laughing, not at her fear, but at the chainsaw.

At the punk kid getting his comeuppance.

At the maniacal gleam I was anticipating in Candy’s eye.

But in that moment, I realized:

I had forgotten to be horrified.

He hadn’t.

To him, the ‘no’ was enough.

Terrifyingly ignored.

And, it wasn’t funny.

Maybe attacking one in person.

(Pick the bear, ladies.)

I have to say not all men — blah, blah, blah, or the angry dudes will swarm us like a plague of locusts.

It doesn’t matter if she posted it, liked it, or commented — he will tell her why her ugly bitch opinion doesn’t matter.

It’s as if they are sitting at home.

Waiting. Watching. Wanting us to engage.

Lurking on every thread to take care of a dumb whore like you, Jessica.

They won’t rest.

Can’t bear to think you might believe you know what you’re talking about.

Implode when confronted with evidence that you actually do.

You, a qualified expert, give an answer.

The correct answer.

He, a YouTube researcher, wants to argue his thesis against yours.

Post a picture with a new haircut?

Feeling cute?

Nah.

You just placed an advertisement for every man who has ever found you attractive.

If they’re currently single (or could conceivably be one day), prepare for them to invade your comment section.

So wield that power with care, Meagan.

They don’t like to see women happy or successful or powerful.

Do. Not. Be. A. Feminist. They hate that!

If they can tear you down — sweet victory!

They celebrate a manly triumph. Huzzah!

The comments section is not for the faint of heart or the thin of skin.

Although if you’re used to dealing with men in the real world, you should be fine.

They’re mouthier here, but less rapey.

Everybody needs a hobby.

For too many men, it’s reminding women, one comment at a time, to take up less space.

The comment section isn’t just toxic.

Online or IRL, it’s never just trolling.

It’s training.

For the Me Too-denying, misogynistic army they’re forming.

They taught us to be kind and not cause trouble.

Good little girls.

They taught us to be well-mannered.

Quiet little girls.

They sent us to school in dresses half the time, when not in our OshKosh B’Gosh overalls.

Sweet little girls.

All the while telling us that the boys pushing us down or pulling our hair did it because they liked us.

That taunting and teasing showed affection.

Normalizing assault and giving us its responsibility before ever giving it a name.

Training us for a lifetime of tolerance.

After all, boys will be boys.

⸻

It was 1982 when he tried to kiss me.

I elbowed him in the face and gave him a bloody nose.

Who got in trouble?

And a lecture about keeping their hands to themselves?

Who do you think?

I was five years old. In kindergarten.

⸻

I remember the PTA-sponsored skating rink parties, held once a month for elementary and middle school students.

With couples skate and ladies’ choice.

But what choice were we really given?

The year was 1984 and I was seven.

I skate over to my crush as Peabo Bryson plays and ask him to skate.

Colored lights flashing patterns across the wooden floor, my lips still red from eating two packs of Twizzlers, my Smurf roller skates laced tightly on my feet.

Pool, pinball, and Pac-Man breaking in over the music when we would round the corner near the arcade.

⸻

For the four minutes that Peabo sang, If Ever You’re In My Arms Again, this boy’s hand was clasped tightly in mine, and from that night until this day — well over forty years later — I have not once heard the song without thinking of that moment.

Easy to define systems when they’re slapping you in the face, less so while they’re shyly holding your hand.

I’m eight years old, getting glasses, and worrying they’ll make me ugly.

Worrying they will make boys not like me.

Not focused on the improvement to my eyesight or how that might make it easier to see in class or in the world.

Because already the world had taught me it valued my appearance more than anything else.

Pretty is praised. Ugly is punished.

⸻

In fourth grade my primary school merged with others to form a school for just the last two years of elementary school.

At 9 years old we got to change between two teachers and had a locker. It felt like a taste of high school.

Schools merging means new people. And one of them catches my eye.

For the first time since moving to this new town, I have a crush.

With my ugly glasses and uneven bangs, I’m less confident than two years ago.

I do nothing.

⸻

I’m ten years old, and I want a boyfriend.

Why do I want a boyfriend?

Laura has a boyfriend. That seems like a good enough reason.

Maybe I just want to be wanted.

Maybe because they’ve been asking me if I have one since I could talk.

Warning my dad he’ll need a shotgun to keep the boys away.

⸻

Before we could spell patriarchy, we lived in it.

And we called it elementary school.

Playing mommy because it’s the only world I know.

Feeding my doll, whose eyes closed when she was sleeping, with the disappearing milk and orange juice bottles when I was only two.

I sleep with my Raggedy Ann doll on my twin bed with Holly Hobby sheets.

I get a toy vacuum, toaster, and blender, giving me a well-stocked toy home.

The perfectly set stage.

When I get a desk, we play office and secretary. But, never the boss.

No one told us we could.

My Barbies had a dream house and pool with a spa. And Kens.

Always Kens, who came with wedding gowns and expectations.

I played with some toys not designed to make me Susy Homemaker.

It was the age of Lite-Brite and Etch-A-Sketch, after all.

Most of us didn’t question the script, though; we didn’t know we could.

Unless you wanted to be called a tomboy, not a risk everyone was willing to take.

Whether it was your friends playing with similar toys or the hype of Christmas 1983 with its infamous Cabbage Patch riots, everyone in the country knew what the hottest toy of the season was each year, even without social media and the unboxing going viral.

It would’ve been almost impossible to have designed a better way to awaken maternal instincts in children than the “adoption” of your very own Cabbage Patch kid.

The best part was sitting down at six and meticulously completing the paperwork before mailing it off to wait for the official adoption certificate to come back in the mail with its raised seal that gave it a sense of gravitas and, in our eyes, made it binding.

We became their parents.

The worst part?

The man whose name is scrawled across one butt cheek of each doll and claimed to be the creator stole the idea from a woman after he bought one of her dolls at a craft show.

Martha Nelson Thomas thought of each doll as an individual. Along with adoption certificates, she included information on the doll, including likes and dislikes.

Thomas initially agreed to Xavier Roberts selling her dolls. She later backed out over the high prices he charged and her fears he would steal her ideas.

Her particular concern? The birth and adoption of unique dolls.

A new concept and, arguably, the most marketable part of the toy. She sued over mass marketing when he sold his version to Coleco.

Took her creation.

Turned it into billions.

Settled out of court.

Because of course he did.

But, we didn’t know the back room deals. All we knew was our Cabbage Patch Kids needed parents to take care of them.

And we became those parents.

Rehearsal for the largest role society planned for us.

When I grew up and had a child of my own, I made sure he had both a tool bench and a play kitchen.

Yet, on a recent shopping trip, I saw a toy kitchen set that tempted me to buy it.

Until I realized that I instinctively thought of my niece when I saw it, not her brother.

My critical lens kicked in, and I left it on the shelf.

A mixer, toaster, blender, and coffee maker. Not much seemed to have changed since my childhood.

The mixed gender packaging did show some progress.

Now, only the toaster had a little girl on the box.

Apparently, boys can blend, mix, and make coffee in today’s liberated times.

The foam toast looked just the same as it did forty-five years ago, though. I still remember exactly how that felt between my teeth.

And, critical lens be damned, the little girl inside me still wanted to take it home even as I walked away.

Some of you escaped the pink sparkle pipeline and broke free from the norm.

The rest of us can still feel our teeth marks in the foam toast.

Bullshit.

Just another lie adults tell children. We all know how much the words we choose can hurt.

Slurs? Those slice deep.

The inherent misogyny in so many of society’s dismissive, derogatory expressions hurts women as individuals, certainly, but destroys us as a society.

When we are seen as less than men, it becomes easier to degrade us and treat us as things.

Disposable.

So many of us go along with it.

Smiling nervous, awkward smiles.

Pretending we’re in on the joke to keep them complacent and the implied threat just that.

Laughing in fear so they know they’re in control of the situation.

Others of us remain silent and hope for complacency.

He might take any engagement as encouragement.

Today’s option to call out the sexism and microaggressions existed to a small degree, but almost inevitably harmed the prey rather than the predator.

They teach us well. Sadly, nice little girls make excellent students.

It all goes back to that singular premise drilled into a boy as he toddles his first steps. No matter what he does, he must never act girly.

To insult a man, we reflexively feminize him.

The worst offense any man can conceive of is being compared to a woman.

After all, they’ve been taught since birth that we are inherently inferior just by how people speak to them.

And about us.

How else should we expect them to talk when they are alone in their mancaves and the manosphere?

Because, eventually, when being female is the punchline or the insult often enough, those words can turn against us.

And turn violent.

We aren’t equals to them, we aren’t always human. Just objects to desire, use, and discard.

Every time a grown man catcalled or commented on my pubescent or teen body, those words left their mark.

Some left lasting scars.

I was only eleven when I first heard the horrific expression:

“If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed.”

It already applied to me.

Head down in shame, cheeks flushed in rage and mortification. Pretend you don’t notice and look for routes to safety while walking just a bit faster.

Not enough to attract attention. Not enough to give them a reason to come after you.

Just trying to get home.

By eighth grade, I was wearing a 38C bra and was only two and a half inches below my adult height. But, I had such a baby face with chubby cheeks and braces.

Living three blocks from campus in a college town probably didn’t help the situation, especially since I had to walk my dog every day after school. But catcalls and encounters seemed frequent.

“Hi, sweet tits!”

“Hey, baby, how ‘bout a smile?”

“Check out her rack.”

More understanding of what they meant now than two years ago. When you develop that size at that age, you learn a little earlier what they think of us. Men and boys.

You’ve been taught being attractive to them is a good thing but you know the way they express it feels gross and disturbing. Thirteen had already mangled your psyche.

Ingrained guilt and confusion for something we hadn’t done.

In a time when those words brought shame, not to the men who threw them like bricks.

But to the young girls who took the hit of them full force, square in the face. Stunned.

The humiliation of being the target made the language explode like a bomb inside your stomach.

Fear and dread.

Was I marked in some way? Did all men see me like that?

Those words of the patriarchy…

Leaving shrapnel fragments of shame inside you.

Hidden. Hurting. Haunted.

Hunted.

Because when these grown men sexualize children with catcalls, with their eyes, or worse, little girls feel guilt and responsibility for the words used against us.

How many generations were taught they would never matter as much as boys? That making men comfortable and being polite or not making a scene was more important than our feelings. To the detriment of our safety.

Language is the seed of every system that grows around it. You reap the words you sow.

The seeds of misogyny sprout around the world; an invasive species choking out the buds of equality and blossoms of humanity.

That’s metaphor.

In real life, it kills women and girls.