It changes its name.It stops saying, “Control women,” and starts saying, “Protect tradition,” “protect families,” “protect morals,” or
It changes its name.
It stops saying, “Control women,” and starts saying, “Protect tradition,” “protect families,” “protect morals,” or “protect everyone, protect us all.” “The good of all.” “The greater good.”
SHE isn’t against that ….is she? SCAM!
Photo by Luwadlin Bosman
2. It makes women look like the problem.
A woman names harm, and suddenly people focus on her tone, her anger, her wording, or her timing.
3. It turns women’s boundaries into cruelty.
When women ask for privacy, safety, fairness, or single-sex spaces, the tactic is to call them selfish, hateful, dramatic, or exclusionary.
4. It uses guilt to make women back down.
Women are trained to be nice, fair, and caring. Oppression uses that training against them.
5. It recruits women to defend the old rules.
Sometimes women are rewarded for saying, “This is fine,” “Stop complaining,” or “Real women don’t need all that” (especially true for celebrities and other high-profile women who thrive on wide spread attention, acceptance, and admiration. For them, quantity over quality.)
6. It pretends control is care.
It may say, “We are protecting you,” while actually limiting women’s choices, movement, money, education, safety, or medical care.
7. It makes women’s rights sound dangerous.
Voting was once called dangerous. Women working was called dangerous. Women owning property was called dangerous. Women saying no is still treated as dangerous in many places. Women living alone, dangerous. Women being alone, dangerous. Are you seeing the pattern yet?
8. It attacks the gain after women win it.
Women may win a right on paper, but then the fight moves to enforcement, access, cost, stigma, loopholes, and backlash.
9. It uses confusion as a weapon.
It floods the conversation with so many arguments that women spend all their energy explaining the obvious. And explaining. And explaining. And, explaining. Like moms explaining to their toddlers. Except, toddlers are super adorable.
10.It makes women prove their pain.
Women are often expected to explain, document, justify, soften, and repeat their suffering before people will even consider believing them.
11.It calls silence peace.
If women stop speaking, people say things are calm. But quiet does not always mean safe. Sometimes quiet means women have learned the cost of telling the truth.
12.It punishes women for noticing patterns.
When women connect the dots, they may be accused of being bitter, paranoid, hateful, divisive, or “too political.”
13.It tells women progress is already finished.
It says, “Women have rights now, so what are you complaining about?” This hides the fact that rights can be weakened, ignored, priced out of reach, or taken back.
14. It separates women from each other.
It tells young women their mothers were weak. It tells privileged women they are safe. It tells poor women to be quiet. It tells Black women to be strong. It tells abused women they chose wrong. Division keeps the pattern alive.
15. It waits for women to get tired.
This is one of the slickest parts. Oppression knows women are raising children, working, surviving violence, caring for family, fighting bills, and carrying grief. It counts on exhaustion.
The simplest way to say it is this:
Oppression keeps power by making control sound reasonable and making women sound unreasonable for resisting it.
That is the trick.
Once women see the trick, the spell starts to break.