updated from June 22, 2025 Nina Simone's song, “Four Women," is powerful because each woman has been made into someone else’s story. Aunt Sarah i

A woman with a headscarf looks thoughtfully.

Photo by Arthur A/Unsplash

updated from June 22, 2025

Nina Simone’s song, “Four Women,” is powerful because each woman has been made into someone else’s story.

Aunt Sarah is expected to carry pain. Saffronia carries the violence of racial history. Sweet Thing carries male projection. Peaches carries the fury that comes when a woman is done being used as the room where everyone else gets comfortable.

“Four Women” shows how Black women are forced into roles before they are allowed to be people: the mule, the wound, the fantasy, the rage.

Males demanding that the world stop, shift, and reshape itself—laws, policies, language, protections—all so more men can be “listened to,”
even if they’re dressed differently…. this time?

That’s not radical.
That’s not new.
That’s the oldest story on Earth.

When a man wears a dress, many people still read him through the lens of maleness first. Depending on the setting, he may be mocked, targeted, fetishized, or punished for crossing gender expectations. That can be dangerous, and it should not be dismissed.

Still the world will allow him to maintain his maleness in all other ways. Society often treats maleness as portable power.

His voice may still be treated as more authoritative.
Even in a dress, he may still be listened to as someone with the right to define the room, explain the issue, correct women, and set the terms of the conversation. As he does this, on television, of course, people look at him like he discovered a cure to a disease.
His discomfort may become everyone’s assignment.
If he feels excluded, embarrassed, challenged, or unseen, the room may rush to repair that feeling. Women’s discomfort is often treated as ordinary background noise.
His boundaries may be honored more quickly than women’s.
When he says, “This makes me uncomfortable,” people may respond with urgency. When women say the same thing, they may be called dramatic, hateful, paranoid, bitter, or difficult. On her, discomfort is “attitude.” On him, it is a command that he be comforted immediately, if not sooner.
His identity may be centered as the main story.
Instead of asking how women are affected, the conversation can shift toward his courage, his expression, his pain, his journey, his rejection, his right to belong.
His presence may override women’s need for privacy.
Women may be told to adjust, accept, move over, be kinder, or “educate themselves,” even in spaces created because female privacy, trauma, religion, culture, disability, age, or safety needs matter.
He may still benefit from male social confidence.
Many males are trained from childhood to take up space, speak over others, challenge rules, expect access, and assume their needs belong at the center. A dress does not automatically remove that training.
He may be seen as complex while women are seen as cruel.
His needs may be described with nuance. Women’s boundaries may be flattened into bigotry, fear, ignorance, or meanness.
His pain may be treated as more politically urgent than women’s fear.
People may organize quickly around his hurt feelings while asking women to provide evidence, statistics, patience, compassion, and perfect language before their fears are taken seriously.
He may be allowed anger without losing credibility.
If he is angry, it may be framed as righteous, wounded, or understandable. If women are angry, especially Black women, they may be stereotyped as aggressive, irrational, jealous, hateful, or unstable.
He may still be protected by male solidarity.
Other men may defend him, not necessarily because they understand him, but because they recognize a male person being challenged and instinctively resist women setting boundaries.
Women may be pressured to prove they are not hateful before they are allowed to speak.
That is a trap. It turns women’s safety concerns into a character trial against women.
His access may be treated as justice, while women’s separation is treated as discrimination.
The moral frame gets flipped. A male person’s access becomes the highest good, and women’s boundaries become the problem to be solved.
Female socialization may still be used against women.
Women are often trained to be polite, accommodating, emotionally available, and afraid of being seen as unkind. That training can be exploited to make women surrender space.
Women’s lived knowledge may be dismissed as prejudice.
Women often know the difference between abstract inclusion language and the real-world patterns of male entitlement, intimidation, sexual threat, and boundary-testing. But that knowledge may be treated as backward instead of protective.
The room may still organize itself around male consequence.
People may ask, “What will happen to him if women say no?” long before they ask, “What has already happened to women when they were not allowed to say no?” You know us women. We are master storytellers. So, we tell the story. The true story. Because we are women, the story is dismissed.
He may be granted individuality while women are treated as a class to be managed.
He is one person with a story so all hands on deck. Women become a crowd that needs correcting, training, softening, or disciplining.
His vulnerability may be believed more than women’s vulnerability.
This is especially bitter because women and girls are often expected to disclose wounds, explain trauma, and expose private histories just to have basic boundaries respected.
Women may be asked to carry his belonging.
Instead of institutions creating thoughtful policies, women are told to absorb the tension personally: be welcoming, be quiet, be flexible, be kind, be brave, and be less afraid even when nothing has been put in place to enhance her safety. Thoughts and prayers. Hers will have to do because no one else will offer.
He may still get the benefit of public sympathy.
Women’s caution may be treated as cruelty. His distress may be treated as moral evidence.
The deeper message is that maleness still travels with him.
The dress changes the presentation. It does not automatically erase the social training, social power, physical threat potential, or cultural habit of centering male people.

But when a woman wears a dress, especially in a world shaped by male entitlement, she is often read through the lens of female availability, vulnerability, beauty standards, sexual access, and “you should have known better” blame.

This is the biggest difference of all. She will be blamed, shamed, and perhaps slurred. They routinely set misogyny to music now….and not just the music created by Black people.

There will be no rescue for women that the other women in society don’t labor for. HARD.

There may be a small circle, but there will not be large protests to support her. And that is because she is a “her.”

Maybe her family will push for a new law that should have been the law a long time ago, but there will not be a revolution or call for change.

That difference matters.

A woman in a dress may be treated as:

sexually available
responsible for men’s thoughts
“asking for attention”
easier to follow, corner, touch, or shame
less believable if she reports harm
at fault if the dress is judged “too short,” “too tight,” “too feminine,” “too grown,” or “too noticeable”
public property for commentary
something to be managed, covered, moved, watched, corrected, or controlled
someone to conquer, dominate, and control.

And for Black women and girls, this can become even more dangerous because racist stereotypes often add another layer: assumptions that they are more “grown,” more sexual, less innocent, less vulnerable, less worthy of protection, or somehow responsible for the aggression directed at them.

Systems bending over backward to center male voices—whether clothed in suits, softness, or slogans—has never been revolutionary. It’s just a remix of the same power grab from women we’ve seen for centuries.

🗣️ You want to do something new?

Try listening to women.
Truly listening.
Not extracting, performing, copying, or reshaping our words into costumes.
But hearing us.
Following our lead.
Letting us speak without interruption, without fear, without being overwritten.

That would be new. Fresh.
That would be just. Fair.
That would be historic. Forward.

The question is not whether fabric can change meaning. The question is why women are STILL expected to surrender reality whenever male feelings enter the room.

🔥 Because the truth is this:

Women have been speaking.
Women have been warning.
Women have been grieving, writing, building, bleeding, surviving.
Women have been telling the truth long before the world deemed it fashionable.

But the world keeps asking:
“Can we hear from men on this?”

No. You already have.
Over and over and over.

What you haven’t done is listen to the women who never had the stage.
And that, right there, is the real revolution.

P.S. Consider letting go of the lie that people are disenchanted about “a few little lies” or “a few little lost opportunities”. We are smarter than that even if you don’t think that we are.

Telling us more lies will not inspire us to put our trust in you.