The Modern Woman's Struggle

Being a woman is hard work, with all the societal beauty standards and pressure to look a certain way it can be overwhelmingly hard to keep up with the next trend for women; there are all kinds of issues that women have to deal with in today’s day and age. You have men thinking they can tell you what to do with your body like we don’t know how to run our own lives, women have been running houses for years so I think we can manage our own bodies. It’s not just the men either, you have women who are ready and willing to tear another woman down rather than come together and try to make the world a bit more female-friendly. The struggles that a woman has to go through may not seem all that bad to some people but for the woman who is going through it it can feel like the weight of the world is on her shoulders. I want to talk about a few of these struggles and how they have been affected over the last few years, because yes, these issues have been touched on in one way or another and they need to be shown for how they have affected women.

The first struggle I want to talk about is societal beauty standards and how women are somehow meant to live up to this ideal of what a woman is supposed to look like; you see it all the time on social media with women posting pictures that have been heavily filtered. These pictures are touched so much you would think they were a doorknob, a little clean-up is fine but these women take it way too far with all the face-tuning and photo-shopping they do. This leads me into how just a few years ago there was a big scandal about models being photoshopped way too much and the media being called out for letting it get as far as it did, but the thing is we always know. By now you should be able to look at a picture and tell if it has been retouched or not, and if they are not doing it with photoshop or face-tune they are doing it with makeup. I myself don’t use anything to enhance my pictures, what you see is what you get with me; I don’t like taking pictures, so when I do, I just post them as is without thinking about it because I am who I am.

The next struggle I want to discuss is the constant need for competition between women, we are constantly being made to compete whether it’s for a job or the attention of a man we are being shown the only way to get ahead is to tear another woman down. We should not have to go through other women to get where we want to go but rather we should be helping each other to reach the goals that we have for ourselves be most likely those goals are the same. It’s been seen countless times where a woman’s success is seen as slight to other women instead of inspiration for them and motivation to go out try to recreate the success that was previously done. That may have been the case in the past but now we are all about female empowerment and trying to work together as women to advance the rights and well-being of women in today’s society. I try my hardest to be positive when I see a woman doing something successful because I want someone to look at my successes and see them as inspiration and motivation rather than as competition.

The final struggle I want to get into is female rights and advancement in society; women have to deal with a lot of B.S. in society but the one that takes the cake is the rights associated with our bodies and how we are seen in the world. For a long time, women were told how to govern their bodies by old-ass white men who have no idea what a woman goes through on a daily basis and will never know all the things that we have to do to take care of our bodies. Things such as contraception for women were not available; it wasn’t until sometime in the 60s when women finally had a way to take control of their reproductive organs and live how they wanted. Women also have to deal with workplace issues as well with a man getting paid more for the same job regardless of whether a woman can do the job better or not, and we really don’t know why. Sadly society will always try to keep a woman two steps behind a man no matter how good she may be at the job, and the issue of a women’s body will always be a hot button issue for years to come.

There are so many issues that women have to go through on a day-to-day basis, these were just the ones that I thought about first and felt deserved to be talked about, and I know they are the most common ones, but they are common for a reason. We as women go through a lot when it comes to how we live and what we do and the more we move forward there are always going to be someone who is waiting to drag us back to the starting line. I say all that to say, we need to keep up the fight for equality and freedom of body and mind while not letting any negative talk and action deter us from our ultimate goal of true freedom and peace. I want to thank those of you who took the time to stop by and read what I had to say on the subject because I know that what I say is just my opinion and may not even be true for most of the people who read it but it’s how I feel. Once again thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that you come by to read more of what I have to say about other subjects that may pertain to this or other things.