i feel as though i am a women, but what defines me, or you?

Its the 21st century. As women, things haven’t been easy throughout to time and so we’ve had to fight for what we believe and what we deserve. Some may say that women’s issues are dead, as we are in a century where we have policies that make discrimination illegal  in the workplace and in schools. So in retrospect we all should have what we need. But in the real world we can’t eliminate discrimination from within the hearts and minds of people.

For example, I choose to wear the skimpiest shorts the world has ever seen and a boob tube and walk outside in broad daylight, now this is only hypothetical but the amount of people who would scream things such as whore, slag and slut at me and are women is insanely high. Now in the 21st century, i should be able to choose how i dress without thinking about what people will think about me or be scared of the ridicule that will most likely come with me being myself. In this day and age, we as women should be able to appreciate that people see the world in different ways and as such interpret things differently. Including style, so if someones wearing torn clothes that look dirty, perhaps their own personal circumstance deems them to have to wear such clothes. We often don’t think and buy into what society deems acceptable and what we should like and not. Should i have more respect for a women in a $5000 dolce and Gabbana jacket than the girl in the boob tube?

Another example at our lack of progress is in the way in which we compare ourselves to the opposite sex. If i choose to sleep with 50 men, who’s business is it but my own? If i am completely safe and use all the right protection does that make it any better. Why do we seem to devalue women’s lives in relation to who they’ve slept with and how many times they’ve slept with them. Why is it that if i sleep with more than 3 men then I’m deemed a whore, prostitute, slut or any other derogatory name people can think of? I don’t think our answer is in using the bachelor analogy. Most women use the idea of a bachelor who sleeps with multiple women on and off and gets praise for it from his counterparts and say if it’s okay for him to do , then why is it not okay for me to do it?

I think that if we can’t stop comparing ourselves to the opposite sex then we will never progress. We must somehow learn to value ourselves enough to go where natural intuition and instincts take us. As if we have to constantly explain to others why we  ‘submit’ to our most basic and primal instincts, i.e sex then we will forever continue in explaining why we do things and why we choose what we do. If so, then we will lead a life of mediocracy and pain where we only value ourselves by what is deemed ok for us by society due to our race, gender, disabilities etc, rather than learning to make mistakes and putting our own value on what we think is right or wrong for us as individuals, we will forever be manipulated by the opposite sex and our fellow women to feel less about ourselves due to some small indiscrepency.

When we learn that we don’t have to love every women on the planet or agree with what every women does but that we should rather respect every women for being just that, then we might get somewhere. Just maybe.