It often begins in silence — with words spoken thoughtlessly, with unspoken expectations, with assigned roles that no one questions. It is a slow, almost invisible process through which girls learn how much space they take up in the world and how much of a voice they are allowed to have. And precisely because it is so common, this reality is rarely challenged — it is accepted, repeated and, over time, becomes the norm.
It is said that "sexism" and "misogyny" are concepts easily spotted — we need only know where to look. We can begin by examining them in the simplest form of human expression: language and communication. The way we say things, and what we choose to say, reveals a great deal about how we see the world; after all, language is the first human act of making sense of the world around us.
If a word is offensive in its very structure toward a marginalized group, a child raised in an environment where that word is used constantly, without any context, will never question its meaning. Instead, it will shape a particular current of thought — a kind of mindset that holds "it is so because it is so." All of this feeds into a process of collective thought known as an "egregore": meaning that once enough people believe and practice something, it comes to feel entirely natural — take, for instance, certain gender stereotypes: women are emotional, men are logical.
Most girls are born and raised in environments that are not welcoming to them. They are treated as second-class citizens; they live in places where no law dictates what a man may do with his own body, yet there are countless laws and prejudices directed against women.
To hate a person is one thing; but to hate someone for something they never chose is something else entirely.
Perhaps the individuals who spread so much hatred are in the grip of an identity crisis: they do not know themselves, nor do they see reality. To them, everything on the other side of the wall looks like a threat. It is, of course, a Spartan mentality — and I cannot tell whether the cause is the steroid testosterone that has swollen their brains nearly out of their skulls, or simply the fear of the unknown: the fear that they might lose their power, and with it their manhood. And all of this rests on a single fact — that when a person has no worthy quality of their own, they will fiercely push and defend notions such as ethnicity, religion, and even gender ideology.
This harmful behavior weighs heavily on everyone — not only on women, but on men as well.
I have never managed to find the root, or the reason, behind all the injustice and the relentless discrimination against women. Perhaps it comes from fear, perhaps from an inability to understand, or perhaps discrimination has, over the years, hardened into an unwritten custom that fits men like a glove — and they guard this whole mindset like the apple of their eye.
The challenge lies not only in identifying injustices, but in breaking the cycle that keeps them alive in invisible, everyday ways. Change begins when silence gives way to awareness, when the normal is called into question, and when each individual takes responsibility for their own language and actions. Only through a sustained collective effort can we build a society where equality is not merely a declared ideal, but a lived reality.
