...

Since 2016, we have all witnessed society changing in ways that are disconcerting. I think we’ve all always known that the thread holding the rights fought for was thin, and fragile. But as a collective, we masked. A generation was raised that women are equal, and though we knew on an intellectual level that our systems were not keeping up with ideals, we hoped that we were on the path of progress.

But history always repeats itself, doesn’t it?

The abolishing of slavery, women’s suffrage, abortion rights, the civil rights movement were all triumphant wins, weren’t they?

But they were not simple wins. We can change the laws, and even the norms, but hearts are not easily moved. That is why it is 2025, and I will confess that I feel that we’ve made very little progress to evolve as a society. If we did, a lot of bad real life tropes would not be achingly common. Some ways women, especially of color, experience problematic behavior:

• A woman often undergoes interrogation about their past sexual life, specifically with females as a vehicle for the fantasies of the privileged male.
• There is no boundary of friendship or professional etiquette that will stop males in power from feeling they have the right to flirt. The more those advances are resisted, the more they double down. Once the goal is attained, they will neglect their conquest and focus on the next "win."
• Women of color are hypersexualized to the point where their humanity is erased and they become exotic vehicles to fulfill privileged male fantasies. I say privileged males, because there is something unsettling about the male gaze in our society. It is not a gaze of love, but a gaze that objectifies.

Since 2016, society has been normalizing the continued exploitation of groups that have been marginalized, belittled, and colonized for hundreds of years. Even the groups that seem like allies often engage in a performative form of allyship. I trust no side of the political fence, though we know the one that promotes fascism and have wet dreams of expecting mothers, barefoot in the kitchen.

The fake allies easily recognizable. One archetype is the male that cheats on his wife and flirts with women privately, only to talk of equality and the value of their partner. They often praise their wife and family, but they are simply commodifying them to use as a form of social status. All while objectifying all women. But there are others and they are rampant. They mask as allies, but never truly elevate anyone beyond those that provide them the culture fit that they feel comfortable with, at best. At worst, they compartementalize the humanity of those less privileged than they. For the selfish need to extract the value that they want to satisfy their own desires.

I have said this before, but we live in systems. Hyper-individualism is not only a myth, but a concept weaponized to gaslight people into blaming themselves for what ills befall them. Even if those ills come from a lack of agency. There are very few dynamics one will encounter in one’s life that is not the result of the macro social-political-economic landscape of our time.

I recall an age when I believed that empowerment was catering to the male gaze by pretending that my opennes was not a sad attempt to connect. I felt I was subverting something by being frank and honest, while simply feeding the machine what it wanted. How many ways did I think I was doing something good while simply covering up the rot? As we say in Puerto Rico, traté de tapar el sol con un dedo.

The way we handle agency and our responsibility as humans can border on the illogical. Personal responsibility is often skewed to the point where many are blind to what they do wrong, all while perpetuating systems that hurt AND deny the impact of those systems. To ascribe responsibility to systems is not a vehicle to cop out. It is a rude awakening to wake up and see the dream for what it is.

For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
– Audre Lorde