✋🏽Men Wanting to Define Womanhood Isn’t New

Throughout history, men who seek to control, abuse, or dominate women have always wanted one thing first:

To define womanhood for us.

They want to decide:

• What we are

• What we’re not

• What we owe

• What we can become

Let’s make this plain. Here’s what control looks like—no matter who the man is:

10 Ways Controlling Men Try to Define Womanhood

(So They Can Control Women)

1. “A real woman would never…”
   They shame, silence, and manipulate us by defining what a “real woman” is. It’s never on our terms.

2. Redefining womanhood to include everyone… but us.
   They erase our biological reality while keeping our labor, our language, and our identity.

3. Expecting submission without consent.
   Whether he’s her husband, boyfriend, faith leader, or community leader, he expects her to follow—without question.

4. Policing her duties.
   Cook. Clean. Smile. Serve. Be obedient. Be sexual—but not too sexual. These “duties” come with unspoken threats.

5. Controlling how she refers to him.
   Even when he’s not around, she must speak about him a certain way—or face consequences.

6. Erasing her voice.
   When she tells the truth, they call her bitter. Angry. Unqualified. Ugly. Emotional. Difficult.

7. Gatekeeping her womanhood through suffering.
   They say you must endure pain to be a “good woman.” As if suffering is our rite of passage.

8. Dictating her appearance.
   Dress this way. Cover up. Show more skin. Wear your makeup this way. Wear these clothes, and not those clothes. Smile. Lose weight. Wear your hair how he likes it.

9. Rewriting her history.
   They tell their version of our stories—what we meant, how we felt, and what we “should have done.”

10. Shifting the goalposts.
    The rules keep changing. Just when you think you’ve done it right, suddenly it’s not “woman enough.”

Abusive men make the rules of womanhood, while women carry out the real work of womanhood. Abusive men insist on it with consequences attached.

🎯 The Point:

Men who seek power over women always want to define womanhood first.
Because when you control the definition, you control her destiny.

Let’s be clear: Womanhood is not for men to define.
Not by her husband. Not by her community. Not by her oppressors. Not by strangers.

💥 We define ourselves.
💪🏽 We decide what it means to be a woman.
🕊️ We speak the truth, whether they approve or not.

When Men Define Womanhood: The Power, The Harm, and The Resistance

Don’t Erase Us to Include Others: The Cost of Confusing Oppressions

The Power and Authority of Womanhood: A Call to Honor and Protect Female Voices

Celebrity Trials, Silencing, and the Spectacle of Misogyny

Women Who Menstruate Have Every Right to Speak with Authority on Periods

Why Does the Racist Masculinization of Women Obligate Us to Fight for Others—But Not the Other Way Around?