A letter to my nieces

And yours

Darling, 
have you started to figure it out? 
Are you catching on 
to the way this works or 
are you clutching onto 
a blind bitter chaos
they've gifted you? 
Are you wondering if you're
alone? Doesn't it feel as if 
it's just you 
dangling from that cliff?
Haven't you been raped or
groped or smacked or
leered at, maybe worse,
dismissed? 
Aren't you tired of saying 
"my bad," frosted with 
Easy Bake blame handed down 
through the matriarchal line?
Have you noticed yet 
how the shadow is missing?
Or maybe now it's all shadow
(as your body is consumed)?
Are you keening or screaming
or pounding the desk? 
Are you crawling back up
inside to hide -- might as well. 
Aren't you tired? Smiling and
coiffing and marscara-ing and 
then having to ask 
for such an obvious thing?
Smacking down snide remarks.
Talking to deaf ears. 
No wonder we look away: 
it hurts to discover 
love is conditional.
How it isn't wrong,
won't change, can't grow
doesn't listen, 
already knows it all,
brushes you aside 
to be first. 
A drowning man will
always pull you under.
Are you strong enough 
to swim to shore 
through the undertow 
of resignation?
Good. I'll see you there.

Further reading and listening: The Hidden Brain: How our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives by Shankar Vedantam.

From Vedantam’s “Hidden Brain” podcast episode: Too Sweet, Or Too Shrill? The Double Bind For Women

“What we have found consistently is that when we present women and men with exactly the same credentials, qualifications and backgrounds for a job that is traditionally male - held by men in our culture, thought to require male attributes - we consistently find that the woman is seen as more incompetent than the man.

“Sometimes women really do show their competence and it's unavoidable and we can't we can't deny it. And what happens then? Well, the research that I've done has shown that when women are truly successful in areas where they're not expected to be, there's a very negative reaction. There's disapproval and they are penalized.

“They're disliked, but they're also seen as really - almost really awful depictions of what kinds of people they are.”

— Madeline Heilman, professor of psychology, New York University, speciality: gender stereotypes and bias