There's only one thing crazier than someone writing about women's rights in 2026 - and that's that the concept even exists. The nonsense is so great that it is difficult to even begin this text, just as it is difficult to understand how it is possible that all the previous ones did not lead to a sobering and fundamental change.
People exploit inanimate nature as if the future does not exist, as if they have no children... As one short film says, "they cut down forests as if they could make oxygen themselves". The majority have no objections to the cruel exploitation of animals, for example, to the killing of noble creatures for the sake of ivory, or to "artificial" breeding for the sake of obtaining milk, eggs or fat. Until recently, no special attention was paid to children either, there were many of them, in the time before antibiotics they died easily, and at the age of seven they started hard physical work. Even today, there are those who beat children and those who propagate such behavior, while even the most terrible forms of abuse cannot be eradicated. And while some of this is justified by appeals to pragmatism, nothing stands up to serious moral scrutiny.
In each of the mentioned situations, you can place yourself (as if) so far from the victims that your empathy will not work. Who still sympathizes with pines and oxygen, animals have no consciousness, children understand nothing and forget everything - various excuses are possible. But women make up more than half of humanity! They are not a minority, they are not without consciousness and reason, they do not forget abuse. Even worse, women gave birth to us, raised us, loved us, protected us; probably most of the best you've experienced came from a woman, especially if you don't have a mother-in-law. When it comes to women's rights, it's about our mothers, sisters, friends, wives and, most terrifying of all, our daughters.
And, yes, despite all that, women's rights are a concept that must be talked about even today. Ranging widely from being banned from attending schools, through the banning of professional identity and financial independence, to the still huge number of marital murders - all this requires much more than a story.
The problem has not been solved even in the "west", where there is not only a clear difference in wages for performing the same job, but also Jordan Petersons who justify it in various pseudo-scientific ways.
And notice that nowhere in this passage does it say that the victims are women, and as you read you assumed that. It's just too obvious, so much so that we think it's natural, that women don't have the power to keep boys illiterate, women who sexually abuse children are hardly ever heard of, I don't remember any man being tried or executed for walking around with uncovered hair.
We must also admit to ourselves that all the greatest minds of our history advocated for this state of affairs - statesmen, founders of religions, philosophers, poets... Only one of those great narratives refers to the fact that Adam and Eve were not created together, at the same time, but that Eve was created from Adam's rib while he was asleep.
FREUD'S CONTRIBUTION TO WOMEN'S DISORDER
However, I am particularly concerned about the contribution of psychoanalysis to this whole problem. Apart from the fact that he was never psychoanalyzed and supervised, Freud had no one to draw his attention to the fact that some of his texts were not very wise to publish. They certainly include those about female sexuality. Freud's conservatism and lack of life experience are already evident from the statement he gave to a female patient during a session: "The great question that has never been answered and to which even I, after thirty years of studying the female soul, have not found an answer, is What women want. "
Maybe this should sound like curiosity, but it's actually contempt – women can be difficult, if not impossible, to understand, unless there's something seriously wrong with them. In Freud's texts, these attitudes are explicit, for example in the claims that women cannot overcome their tendency to envy, develop a mature personality structure and make a significant contribution to civilization. Freud notices that some girls envy their brothers and interprets it as a different morphology of the sexual organs, blind to the fact that the girl sees every day how her parents are more happy with her brother, feed him better, give him more freedom... Especially in traditional societies, until recently, every girl was treated as a "child for someone else's house", so then she should not envy the one whom, from her perspective, they loved enough to keep him close.
DEHUMANIZATION WITHIN THE FOUR WALLS
What I here call excuse, blindness and contempt is actually something incomparably more insidious and destructive. Whenever we say "female mind" (or paraphrase it in the scholarly way that Freud did), we are applying the mechanism of dehumanization - viewing and labeling someone as less, lower than a human being. In its worst version, dehumanization is when the Nazis reduce the inmates to numbers tattooed on their arms and then kill the number, not the person with identity, feelings, family history, talents. Or, if you want closer to home, it is the mechanism that connects the jokes about Muja and Hasa with the eugenic ideology of Biljana Plavšić. In milder versions, it is any insulting term that treats another as a non-human and turns it into something that everything is allowed - exploitation, abuse, rape... Someone does not have enough empathy to see the other person as a human being who deserves respect and kindness, so he projects his inhumanity onto that other person.
And it's strange that you do this to people you see as different, less valuable and deviant by some criteria, that you use the dehumanization of foreigners as a basis for setting yourself up as a norm and measure.
But how bad it is for us when we had the need to build social structures in which we do this to the closest members of our families, practically ignoring the consequences of taking away dignity, independence, self-respect, individual feelings, not to mention sexual desire.
SCREWS LOOSE, THE CAGE IS HOLDING
And although the situation in some parts of the world is better today, I write about this topic, among other things, because we, even in our best editions, still don't know how to talk about it, to hear each other and eradicate prejudice and abuse. On the one hand, it is necessary for a man to recognize this as a phenomenon, especially since it is almost completely absent from his immediate experience and from educational programs. I will confess to you that I only started to understand this in the psychiatric hospital, when most of the female patients talked about abuse and that no one ever asked them about it. That's when I realized how easy and harmless my life is when the worst thing that can happen to me in a dark street is someone taking my wallet. On the other hand, women talk about this either not enough or, in my opinion, too abstractly. There are plenty of internal reasons for this, such as retraumatization, but also hopelessness and despair. There are also systematic practices of silencing – from the intimidation that the fight is futile, which comes from older women, to the disdain that is the guaranteed response of men, to the absence of a developed language to describe the female experience (and, again, especially, a language for female sexuality, which seems like a "scientific discovery" from the middle of the last century).
I am particularly discouraged by the fact that it seems to me that the women who write and speak about this are incomparably smarter than me, and yet, in everyday life, at work, at home, in front of kindergarten, in line at the post office, they live dramatically similar to how their great-grandmothers lived. Behind all the deep thoughts, Beauvoir, in their personal relationship, was completely subordinated to Sartre, Arendt may never have completely separated from her brilliant former professor and defended him to the end against accusations of anti-Semitism, which he himself never renounced, those female poets cut their own lives or could not allow themselves to be happy... It's as if some screw has been loosened, but the cage is basically still there.
Psychoanalysis clearly shows us that social structures strongly shape our inner worlds, and that victims begin to hate or despise themselves as their abusers did. The first book on this topic described how Jews hate themselves in the same way that their persecutors hated them, then it expanded to the question of the identity of homosexuals, Muhammad Ali started his revolution even before that, and the concept of self-stigmatization showed us that this also happens to people with mental disorders. If it works on all other levels, then the problem with patriarchy must also be that it is internalized, that it works in us and from us, and we do not (anymore?) recognize it as a foreign body. It's as if every woman has to tear down not only the cages that surround her, but also the internal ones, because of which she herself fails to fully believe that she is worthy of freedom, respect, equality... And as if psychotherapists, who daily encounter the fragility of women's self-esteem, are actually working on recovery from systematic, centuries-long humiliation.
And so. Maybe March 8th will become a day for roses and chocolates. Not yet. It is still a day for such difficult thoughts, painful memories and questioning of conscience.
The author is a psychologist
