Are Moms Going To Start Giving Daughters The Talk About Misogyny?
Maybe it’s time we did.
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You know, as a white person, I realize I have a lot of privileges. One that I didn’t know I had until recently was not having to have The Talk that my friends often did.
You know The Talk, right?
My friend Tyler* explained it as such: after a certain age, most black people and some Hispanic people get a talk from their parents. That talk is about how they are not going to be welcome in parts of their own country.
It’s a talk about facing facts that people don’t like to talk about, such as:
Realizing that you could get beaten or killed for being in the wrong establishment
Having to learn what people meant by “Oh, he’s one of the good ones.”
Realizing that America may be your home country, but it’ll never be “home” the way it is to whites.
Why some people won’t want to hire you just based on your name, even if you have a degree.
And why it’s never really safe around police officers.
As a white, upper-middle-class kid, I never had that Talk. And yet, most of my friends who I met in my twenties had it growing up as kids. Finding out about it was a shock, but now, I’m beginning to wonder if I should give my own kid a similar talk.
In recent years, I can’t help but wonder whether I should give my daughter a similar Talk about boys.
When I was a young girl, girls weren’t really given “the talk.” They knew what sex was, they were told how babies are made, and they were told it would ruin their lives if they got pregnant.
However, we weren’t really told a lot of things. We were generally told that we’d all “meet a great guy, marry him, and have kids and be happy.” That was what we were told about relationships.
Kids were, for just about everyone else, a given. I was the freak who realized early on that parenting was not something I was cut out for, but that’s a different story.
We were handed the life script. We were told each girl gets her own Prince Charming who will protect and provide. We were told we’d all be as happy as our moms, in nice homes.
And then, we were warned not to be sluts, though no one explained why it was bad because no one could come up with a logical reason to hate sluts aside from “people will hate you.”
I feel like I wasn’t really prepared for what real life was. I resented the fact that no one explained shit to me. And now, the growing trend of Red Pill behavior scares the shit out of me.
It’s become apparent that a scary proportion of men do not like women — and no one told me that.
I wish someone would have sat me down and told me that a large percentage of men, if not the majority, don’t like women. As in, they’ll sleep with them, but they hate them for existing and only like what women do.
I don’t know many women who didn’t have horrible experiences dating, who haven’t been blamed for being abused, or who haven’t had to run from a partner because of abuse. And it’s getting worse. And it’s getting harder to leave.
Misogyny is scarily ingrained in our society, and it’s getting worse. It’s a fact of life that I get increasingly aware of every day. Every day, I wonder whether I’ll see another law protecting women repealed, another right stolen, or another case of lethal domestic violence.
Honestly? I’m beginning to wonder if I should give my kid something that I’d call “The Women’s Talk.” And sadly, I think it would likely have to cover things that aren’t that unlike what I’ve heard parents of color explain to their kids.
I’d have to tell her that men pose a danger to her life, that she will never be treated as validly as men are, and that she will be blamed if a man hurts them. I’d have to tell her that she might not have the same rights I did at her age.
And I’d have to tell her, that’s what Red America wants — to make sure she understands she’s not a full first-class citizen of this stupid country.
The 4B Movement and the modern dating scene highlighted issues plaguing women today.
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I don’t think we really appreciate how badly women are treated today. It’s so bad that women are openly choosing to eschew dating, marriage, and kids altogether.
I don’t think men understand how bad things have to be as a woman for so many women to choose to drop dating. The reason I say this is because it means that the messages women got as young girls are being overridden.
Girls, at least those I grew up with, were taught to rely on men to provide, protect, and love them. We all assumed we’d have our husbands, do right by them, and live happily ever after.
Every single rom-com was a form of propaganda encouraging girls to believe in love, even after heartbreak. We were all neck-deep in movies where men were the heroes women needed and the guy gets the girl.
I can’t even name how many of those movies I watched. I also can’t name how many movies I watched where the real good guy was the nerd and not the hunky bad boy. Those movies affected me — and not in a good way.
Those movies had me believing that nerds were good guys when, in fact, they often were the most abusive guys I dated. It took years for me to quash that negative lesson.
Are we really grasping how awful things have to be for a large percentage of women to overcome the programming society bludgeoned into us? Do we, as a society, really acknowledge how wild this all is?
It is impossible for women to ignore the ugly truth anymore.
Look, there is only so much hate a person can handle before they realize that they are being targeted by society. For ages, misogyny was often brushed under the rug.
People used to be able to point to laws and tell women, “See? Things are equal here. You have rights to your own body and the right to work. What more do you want?”
We can’t even pretend that things aren’t getting bad anymore. The political War on Women, the Red Pill, and the manosphere makes it abundantly clear where women stand for far too many men.
So yeah. Maybe I will give my kid The Talk. I just hope she listens.
"It’s become apparent that a scary proportion of men do not like women — and no one told me that."
Nobody told me that an equally significant number of women hate men, too. It would explain the behavior of at least some of them...
I grew up in the 70s reading my mom's Ms. magazine. Because of her feminism, I knew about rape and domestic violence and misogyny. We had the books in the house: Simone deBeauvoir, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millett. I did a lot of exploring and a lot of partying, but I was wary of bad people and bad situations, and so, luckily, nothing terribly shitty happened to me. I didn't raise my daughters that way. My stupid mistake was thinking they had a father who would protect them. That's what the statistics and the pundits said: girls need fathers. What a fool I was. Give your daughter the talk. Give her some books, too.