A piece
The Women Who Carry the World
If you asked me what being a woman means to me I’d start with the truth. I’m a man. So I do not know what it feels like to move through this world inside a woman’s body with a woman’s history with a woman’s danger. But I have been watching.
Ten pictures and a poem, made at the same time and meant to be read together. It ends where No Permission Needed starts.
I grew up surrounded by women
stronger than the world ever gave them credit for.
My mom.
My friends’ moms.
And the girls who were my best friends growing up.
Jen.
Stacy.
Faeth.
Kelly.
Quintette.
We were just kids.
Running around the neighborhood.
Talking about music.
Talking about life.
Dreaming like the world might open
the same way for all of us.
Looking back
I know better.
Even then
the rules were already different.
Girls learning early
to shrink their anger
their ambition
their voices.
Smile more.
Talk softer.
Be nice.
Be grateful for attention
even when it felt wrong.
And I need to say this too.
There were times
I did not see what I should have seen.
Times I stayed quiet.
Times I missed the weight
a girl or a woman in front of me was carrying.
If I ever helped make that weight heavier
I’m sorry.
Because too many women
have had to carry the hurt
and then carry the silence around the hurt too.
From where I stand
being a woman looks like contradiction.
Be beautiful
but do not invite attention.
Be ambitious
but not threatening.
Be strong
but never angry.
Lead
but smile while doing it
so the room stays comfortable.
And still
women show up.
Still lead.
Still build families
communities
movements
entire futures.
History is full of men who led loudly
and women who held everything together quietly.
And sometimes the mask slips.
A powerful man stands on a stage
and says the ugly part out loud.
The room laughs.
The country argues.
Millions shrug.
And suddenly
something women have been saying for generations
is impossible to ignore.
A lot of women learned early
the world would debate their humanity
before it believed their pain.
That line alone
should break us.
Because what kind of world
keeps asking women
to prove the hurt
prove the danger
prove the exhaustion
prove the talent
prove the strength
while men are handed the benefit of the doubt
like it belongs to them?
And still
women rise.
Again
and again
and again.
Holding families together.
Holding communities together.
Holding truth together
even when that truth makes people uncomfortable.
Holding hope together
when the world keeps trying
to drag them backward.
Dress it up however you want.
Call it tradition.
Call it values.
Call it softness.
Call it the good old days.
Paint it with pretty colors
and smiling little pictures
and talk about submission
like it is beauty.
A prettier cage
is still a cage.
And women know that.
My wife has helped me know that more deeply.
My daughter is growing up in that truth.
My sons are watching too.
Watching how I speak.
Watching how I listen.
Watching whether I teach them
to dominate
or to respect.
Because boys do not become good men by accident.
But good men do exist.
Love exists.
Tenderness exists.
Men who listen exist.
Men who are learning
to stand beside women
without needing to stand over them
exist.
And maybe that is where I land.
Not with an answer.
With an understanding.
That women have been carrying this world
for a very long time.
Carrying its children.
Carrying its grief.
Carrying its beauty.
Carrying its memory.
Carrying its hope.
So maybe the next step is simple.
Listen to women.
Believe women.
Trust women.
Raise boys who do not need women to become smaller
for them to feel like men.
Raise girls who know
they never needed permission
to be powerful in the first place.
Because the people who have carried the world the longest
might be the very people
who know how to heal it.
So to the women who kept going
when the world made that hard,
to the women who told the truth
when truth came with a cost,
to the women who raised us
loved us
challenged us
and kept showing us
what strength actually looks like
thank you.