please don’t get me wrong.
i have been blessed to have the most profound women mentors in all spheres of my life, felt the most unconditional love and acceptance from female sponsors in my recovery process, have been blessed with irreplaceable friendships and meaningful connections with awe-inspiring women, women have believed in me and opened doors for me into worlds where once only my dreams existed and i have found safe spaces in groups of powerful women and sacred sisterhoods where i have felt seen, heard, understood, respected and encouraged to own my inate power.
for these women, i love, honour and deeply respect and appreciate you. thank you.
but, before my social media gets soaked in hollow memes on the one day we are remotely recognised for the quintessential role we play in making every damn thing work, i am reminded of these times:
- when i have been openly shamed – with no attempts to hide the judgement in their eyes or the insults slipping from their lips – by other women for being too thin, too fat, not pretty enough, not tall enough, not fair-skinned enough, not black enough, not wealthy enough, just not enough.
- when social and mass media continue to flog the “Sex Sells” modality to death making it that much fucking harder to teach my daughters that objectification is not the norm of those that are conscious; but of those that think a woman in a bikini doused in oil is, in fact, the best way to sell, well, just about everything.
- when i have been shut down and left voiceless by women who held self-appointed power in lanes that i do not play in because i didn’t have enough letters behind or in front of my name.
- when this absence of perfectly placed parts of the alphabet have led women to make decisions about my intellect and deny me opportunities based on baseless assumptions about my capacity, abilities and talents.
- when i experienced gender-based violence, by women, through not having my explicit emotional and intellectual boundaries respected and, as a result, was actively harassed and coerced into believing that “I was the problem” because i refused to give in to incessant demands to be obedient and agreeable and “play nicely”.
- when women have subversively shamed me for my choice to engage in sex work without wanting to have a conversation about either the context or the choice.
- when, in my presence, women i have looked up to, with the loudest voices and the most sterling, stellar, informed opinions have gone silent when men have entered the space and pronounced (sometimes, not even overtly) these insights to be unimportant or trivial; and they have silenced themselves and left me confused as to how anything i have to say would ever be heard above a whisper.
these are only some examples of how my self-esteem, my psyche, my worth, my perception of myself have been, sometimes inadvertently, unravelled and informed my power as a woman, by other women.
please don’t get me wrong.
i do believe the true power lies within the Divine Feminine, balanced and in harmony with the Masculine. i am not saying that we should not celebrate ourselves, our mothers for their sacrifice, our sisters for the space they hold, our daughters for their purest of visions.
but it is easy to view gender-based violence within the traditional scope of “male perpetrator, female victim”. but we, as women, need to acknowledge that we may be at war with one another.
what i am saying, unapologetically, is that we need to stop gossiping, shaming, hating, hurting, rejecting, back-stabbing, humiliating, intimidating, stunting, gaslighting, underestimating, suffocating, silencing one another.
please don’t get me wrong.
i am not blameless or faultless in this regard. but i am starting to realise that upliftment of my sisters does not have to be about grandstanding but it is really about making small but significant and impactful changes to the way that i engage with and relate to other women. and the way i show up as a woman.
this is my commitment to myself and this is my truth and how i choose to honour the women that came before me that have made it possible for me to speak this truth.
we are in this together, Queens. let us change the stories of women, with love, awareness, respect, compassion and gratitude.
♥️🙏🏽👑✨
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