Dear Society,
I wouldn’t address this to you if it wasn’t imperative. I lost faith in you when I attuned to what has built you and what your mechanisms are. You reward those with mindsets of the narrowest kind – the ones which purge you of any blame to your foundation. You punish and obliterate those who deviate from your norms, because you cannot bear to see desynchronization and, further, can never take onus for what you birthed.
You told us to take precautions for our well being. You told us to never wear revealing clothes. You told us to never venture out late at night. You told us to learn self-defense. You told us to be vigilant in our actions. You told us to commute by private transport. You told us this and you told us that.
Despite your rules, we are dying.
So maybe the blame is being dislocated. Articles of clothing cannot fight brute force. Walls of our houses are permeable to those we trust and shouldn’t have. Self-defense is futile when combating the offense of hellish desire. We can only hope for vigilance when our body goes numb.
You are in a dire need of major remodeling. You who dictates what a ‘victim’ should have worn, should have said, should have done… you perpetuate a cycle that leads to why victims of brutality exist and why predators roam in abundance. You are a master of dusting things under a carpet. You are woven by threads of unfailing cruelty. You are the heartless culprit behind the woebegone circumstances of women.
But your edges are tapering. You are cracking.
And through those cracks, women are emerging. Defiant and cosmically loud. Like phoenixes out of ashes, we will surface. We will own our anatomy. We will watch you and your rules do the opposite – burn to cinders and cease to hold any authority over us.
Sincerely signed,
A woman who hopes to see your collapse.