I was taught before I could read that my worth lived somewhere between my obedience and my usefulness to men. The Church handed me that lesson wrapped in Catholic guilt — and the women in the pews reinforced it, passing it down like casserole recipes.
Those women. Those god-awful women.
I’m not talking about women who choose partnership, family, or devotion. I’m talking about the ones who built their entire identity around male approval — and then weaponized it against other women.
The ones who learned the rules of the patriarchy so well they became its most enthusiastic enforcers.
They’re everywhere. At work, in the Church, in your family, in your comment section.
And they are exhausting in a way that men rarely manage to be — because white men were handed their power outright. White women clawed for it. They earned their seat at the table by making sure other women stayed on the floor. And they are proud of it.
They Don’t Just Hurt Themselves. They Hurt All of Us.
When a woman finally works up the courage to name what was done to her, it’s often another woman — a mother, a mother-in-law, an aunt, a church elder, a “friend” — who tells her she’s lying, exaggerating, or that she brought it on herself.
Male-centered women are the first responders of the patriarchy. They arrive before anyone else to contain the damage — not to the victim. To the system.
They hurt young girls most of all. A man telling a girl she needs to be smaller is awful. A woman telling her — a woman she trusts, a woman she’s supposed to see herself in — is formative. It becomes the voice in her head for decades.
I still hear those voices. All of them belong to women.
They make it harder for the rest of us to leave. Every woman who stays and enforces becomes evidence that leaving is the aberration — that the women who go are the broken ones, the selfish ones, the failures. They give the system credibility it doesn’t deserve.
And they vote against us. Organize against us. Testify against us. They show up at school board meetings and legislative hearings advocating — passionately — for the continued diminishment of women. Including their own daughters.
White women aren’t just a footnote in the story of women’s oppression. They’re a whole damn chapter.
They Think They’re Protecting Men. They’re Making Them Weak.
When you tell a man there are no consequences for how he treats women — that women will stay, will forgive, will shrink to fit whatever space he leaves — you are not loving him. You are stunting him.
You are keeping him in permanent emotional adolescence where he never has to develop accountability, empathy, or the basic ability to function when things don’t go his way.
Male-centered women normalize bad behavior so thoroughly that an entire generation of men grew up believing they were owed women’s labor, women’s bodies, women’s patience, and women’s silence. Any deviation from that arrangement felt like a personal attack.
Patriarchal men are just a bunch of babies.
And Now Women Are Choosing the Bear.
Last year, women were asked whether they’d rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear. They overwhelmingly chose the bear.
Not because women hate men — because we’re exhausted by the constant risk calculation that comes with them. We’ve been doing that math our whole lives, and the odds don’t add up anymore.
Women are quiet quitting men. Choosing themselves. Choosing each other. Dating less. Marrying less. Building lives structured around their own peace instead of someone else’s comfort.
And men — a lot of them — are having full, spectacular tantrums about it.
They don’t know what to do with themselves. And why would they? Nobody ever made them learn. The male-centered women in their lives spent decades making sure they never had to. So now, when women simply opt out — not even fighting, just quietly leaving — these men are lost. Angry. Loud about it in ways that are honestly embarrassing to watch.
The Andrew Tates. The Joe Rogans. The manifestos. The legislation — the SAVE Act alone is set to disenfranchise millions of married women’s votes if it passes. Men who never had to develop a personality because their needs were always someone else’s responsibility.
This is what coddling produces. You didn’t protect them. You crippled them. And now the rest of us are dealing with the fallout — in our legislatures, in our streets, in our everyday lives.
This is why Grindr breaks at every republican convention these days.
Now Let’s Talk About White Women’s Whiteness. Really.
I am a white woman. I’m saying this as one of us.
And I understand — completely, without defensiveness — why women who look like us, and women who don’t, don’t trust us. Hell, I don’t trust us. We are the worst.
White women get offended when other women don’t extend them automatic sisterhood. They clutch their pearls and make it a whole thing: “Not all white women.” “I’m one of the good ones.” “That’s reverse racism.”
Spoiler: reverse racism doesn’t exist.
That reflexive demand to be trusted before it’s been earned is exactly the problem. It is exactly why you shouldn’t be trusted yet. Trust is built on history — and our history of performative allyship, wine-mom tears, and live-laugh-love bullshit while screwing everyone else over is straight garbage.
We were the first ones they practiced on. The surveillance, the bodily ownership, the legal erasure, the manufactured dependency — white men built it on white women first. We were the blueprint. And once it worked on us, they scaled it.
Then they offered us a deal: stay in your lane, enforce the hierarchy, and we’ll let you be better than someone. Too many white women took that deal. Enthusiastically. Gratefully. And it makes me sick.
White women voted for the preservation of slavery. White women reported Black men on lies that got those men killed. We were the moral gatekeepers of a deeply immoral system — and we performed that role with conviction — because the alternative, solidarity across race, would have cost us our proximity to power.
This is not ancient history.
This is the 53% of white women who voted against their own bodily autonomy in 2016. And in 2024, 51% did it again. This is white women calling the police on Black children just living their lives. This is white women in feminist spaces centering their own comfort over everyone else’s survival and calling it allyship.
Every time a white woman performs outrage about being mistrusted, she’s doing exactly what the system trained her to do — making the conversation about her feelings instead of the historical record that earned that mistrust.
You want to be trusted? Stop being offended that you aren’t. That offense is a tell. It means you still think trust is something you’re owed — and that is a very white, very patriarchy-shaped way of moving through the world.
The future is female. Not just white-female.
I Was Groomed. And Women Did Most of It.
I was groomed — systematically, from childhood — by a religious structure that told me my body was a problem to be managed and my highest calling was to serve someone else’s story.
The men in my life didn’t have to work very hard. The women had already done most of it.
But I left anyway. I took my power back. I sat in the uncomfortable truth that my whiteness was ugly — and the only way to turn it into something useful was to stop performing and start cost-paying.
Cost-paying means you take the hit when you call out racism in a room full of people who will like you less for it. You don’t wait for a person of color to go first. You lose the business relationship. The family dinner. The comfortable silence that was always a form of complicity. You give the speaking slot to someone who needed it more — and you don’t announce that you did.
The cost is the point. If it didn’t cost you anything, you didn’t spend anything. You just rearranged your feelings and remained the same asshole you were when you started.
I understand the architecture of what was done to you — because it was done to me too. You were handed a survival strategy cosplaying as a value system, and you ran with it because it worked.
But it’s time to grow a spine.
We are the givers of life. We don’t cower to the life we create — we nurture it, guide it, and tell it to shut the f**k up when it’s out of pocket. That’s not partnership. That’s a power dynamic. It’s 2026. Stop it. You’re embarrassing us.
The tragedy isn’t just what was done to you. It’s what you did with it. You chose to pull the ladder up behind you. And every woman who couldn’t get out because of you is part of your story — whether you claim her or not.
Black Women Were Right. About Everything.
Black women have been sounding the alarm on male-centered white women for generations. They named it before the rest of us had language for it. They tried to tell us — white women especially — what was coming.
We didn’t listen. Because listening would have required giving something up. And white women, as a class, have historically been unwilling to do that.
Black women were never offered the deal. They were enslaved alongside Black men. Raped by the men who claimed to protect white women’s virtue. Forced to nurse white children while their own were sold. There was no rung on the ladder for them — no proximity to power, no survival strategy that required betraying Black men, because safety was never available to them regardless.
You can’t buy someone’s complicity with protection you were never going to provide.
Black women were right that white feminism was a con. First-wave feminism built its coalition on the explicit exclusion of Black women — won suffrage, then abandoned Black women to another 45 years of voter suppression without a second glance.
Black women were right about intersectionality. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us the word in 1989. White feminism spent the next three decades watering it down into a buzzword. But Black women knew it because they lived it — and white women resisted it because acknowledging it meant giving up a feminism that centered their experience as universal.
Black women were right about solidarity. They showed up — for everyone, repeatedly, often without reciprocity. And when they named that imbalance, white women got defensive. The cycle continued.
They were right about who was going to vote against reproductive rights. Right about who was going to call the police on a child. Right about who was going to disappear when the movement got socially expensive.
Right about all of it. With receipts. In real time. For generations.
If you’re a white woman reading this and feeling defensive — that feeling is information. Sit with it. Don’t manage it. Don’t make it someone else’s job to soothe. Just ask yourself: what is it protecting?
Listening to Black women is not charity. It is long overdue accountability.
They have been carrying this truth for a very long time.
The least we can do is finally stop making them carry it alone.
“every woman who couldn’t get out because of you is part of your story — whether you claim her or not”
You are right. Therein lies the rub, that painful friction we cannot dull or deny. If any of us laughed at the $h!t pie eater in ‘The Help’ we need to own our part in taking a bite too! We were an architect in that resentment and dished up our own defilement whenever and wherever we were party to the racist patriarchal agenda! And we WERE, when we SAW it and SAID NOTHING! Reflecting back, I did it too, and I hold no excuse for what I’ve left undone. The only path forward is to own it, not here, out there or in any public forum, making a show of it, but inside. It is the only prerequisite for lasting change, in my heart, not my ego, where my behavior will find accountability and change my actions. It is where the spine resides as well, where none can see it, but where our function will be forever different. For what we now know, we can never NOT know, about ourselves, our complicity, and what we can accomplish when we let go of the evil within us.
When the little bit of power they've been given is in 'being better than someone' then that power is clutched tightly.
This grooming by other white women is responsible for choices I made that totally f*cked up my early years. Taking back that power and choosing myself was not easy - but so very, very worthwhile.
Now, in certain circles, I'm the 'difficult' one. The one who 'thinks she's too smart' or too educated or 'better than' the rest of 'us'.
My black women friends were behind me every step of the way as I broke free, and I will never forget how that kind of love and support feels. I won't forget it - and I do my best to share and show the same to everyone else.