patriarchy

My mother never found her soulmate. Instead, she found my father via the newspaper. The section was called “Eligible Bachelors, With Bachelor Degrees.”

The obsession with “gains” coupled with an unfounded opposition to makeup reveals a deeper cultural issue in the way we segregate genders.

While Trump may have empowered some men to feel as though they can proudly say and do racist and misogynistic things, in the end, these systems of thought were in place well before Trump came into office.

Marriage as an institution has helped men gain property, wealth and power at the expense of women, and I wanted nothing to do with that.

“Cool Girl” is no longer a defining compliment in my eyes. I’ve instead accepted it as a product of the male gaze.

Everywhere I looked, sex was there looking right back at me — for better or for worse.

Aside from the role that it can play in perpetuating rape culture, hypermasculinity helps explain why a lot of men may feel reluctant to vocally express pleasure during sex.

By having sex, I’ve tried to sever ties with the culture that equated my worth to my unpierced hymen and has so blatantly taught me, along with other Armenian women, that our virginity is the sole source of our value. Although in the eyes of many people in my community, I am impure for having premarital sex, I am at peace knowing that I had sex on my own terms.

I now put conscious effort into decolonizing myself by challenging gender binary expectations. Even though I sometimes catch myself saying sorry when I shouldn’t, speaking too softly, or moving to the side to let men pass, I am self-conscious of those actions.

America has long been plagued by unfairly contrived stereotypes, but few have been as widely and consistently accepted as the “classic dad.”