Don't let women's rights make you hysterical now dear.

It's been nearly a year and a half since my last post. I guess finishing uni, travelling and Netflix got the better of me. But there's a topic that is so constantly discussed I wonder if that has desensitised some of us to the reality of it. We can read an article, shake our heads sadly, close the window and watch e4 without any real connection with either section of information.

 In my severe boredom over the last couple of days, I’ve inevitably spent a lot of time on the Internet, looking for new work togs, checking up on Facebook and following the persistent stream of interesting news feed links. I’ve spent two days bouncing between videos entitled “What it’s like to be a woman at night” to articles entitled “Women Wear Too Much Makeup Because They Mistakenly Think Men Like It”. I watched a clip on Upworthy about “Fattitude” where I find myself welcoming statements such as:

 “…when you are calorie deficient you are not as cognitively active as you would be otherwise, so it’s a way of weakening women and keeping them focused on something irrelevant so that they can’t be as powerful in the world.”

And then afterwards I went to the gym and had a low calorie dinner because I want to slim down for the summer hols. I found out that other women split their keys between their knuckles when walking around at night, and that the terms “hysteria” and “hysterical” come from the Greek word for womb, hystera, and that it was once a disease specific to women that could be diagnosed, leading to a set of words used solely to describe women nowadays who are expressing gender mutual emotions, such as anger, stress or pain.

Now I’m reading news of little girls kidnapped and sold as brides in Nigeria for $12 a piece and an article about the disassociation between the monsters who rape women and the men who exchange witty sexist banter down the pub, and I find myself lost down the rabbit hole of double standards, dependencies on context, and 1000s of words dedicated to trying to blame someone or something for the state of women’s rights in the world rather than figuring out a way to solve it.

Maybe I’m being monumentally pessimistic, but I don’t see a clear path for fixing these age-old opinions and ingrained ideas about women in society. The Internet is a magnificent tool for making many aware of misconduct it has to be said, but there is a darkness waiting behind every light switch. It has to be acknowledged that the Internet makes negativity even more accessible, in the form of pro-ana sites, a constant bombardment of thin white girl adverts, umpteen quizzes like “which Disney princess am I?” encouraging western women to repeatedly try to prove themselves in irrelevant realms of supposed necessity.

I want things to change, but it’s going to take a while for people to accept that equality is not simply granting women the same treatment as men, it’s when we live in a world where the differences are not highlighted in order to make society function. Equality is so often morphed into fighting for a win-lose situation…Women against men and vice versa.  It has to be a win-win, because until then it can only be a lose-lose, despite what money/power based successes people decide to focus on.

If equality truly wins, it will be the day when no child has to come out to their parents, a size 10 won’t have to squeeze into a size 12 in Topshop, a woman won’t be persecuted for her attire (whether that be overly modest or the opposite), a woman won’t be constantly made aware that almost any man could overpower her in any given situation, and so many other things. SO MANY. It’s no wonder we don’t know where to start.

When I read all of these things one after the other, it becomes apparent that our society is no closer to the concept of equality. Men are still told to man up, and women are still told to calm down.