The Serpent’s Own Scales: Women’s Complicated Dance with Patriarchy

Oh, the delicious irony of systemic oppression—where the oppressed become unwitting architects of their own constraints!

Women, those magnificent creatures simultaneously fighting and reinforcing patriarchal systems, have elevated self-contradiction to an art form.

Consider the Spanish mother critiquing men with vigorous passion while mollycoddling her son’s nascent toxic masculinity.

Or the celebrity feminist, brandishing empowerment hashtags while posing for photographs that objectify her own body.

These aren’t mere hypocrisies; they’re intricate societal blueprints woven with threads of internalized oppression.

Peace negotiations—those hallowed halls of global diplomacy—reveal another exquisite paradox.

Women, comprising a mere 13% of negotiators, are simultaneously proven to be more effective at crafting lasting agreements. Yet they remain politely seated at the margins, like decorative footnotes in humanity’s conflict resolution, a paradox that urgently needs to be addressed.

Religious and cultural structures provide the most delectable mechanisms of control. The Virgin Mother archetype—that pristine pedestal of feminine “dignity”—becomes a velvet-lined cage, restricting women’s movements with whispered expectations of purity and sacrifice.

Even feminist movements, those supposed bastions of liberation, cannot escape internal fragmentation.

Take Benoite Groult, the French feminist writer whose radical vision diverged sharply from institutional approaches.

Unlike Dutch pragmatism with its systemic equality frameworks, Groult championed sexual liberation as fundamental rebellion—women’s right to define desire beyond patriarchal judgment, transforming personal freedom into political statement.

Let’s be brutally honest: we are the nurturers, bearing biological resilience that defies masculine muscle.

We endure childbirth’s searing pain, navigate emotional landscapes men rarely comprehend, and hold civilizations together through our relentless capacity to survive and nurture.

This isn’t about equality—it’s about justice.

We don’t need to be recognised as identical but fairly recognised. This is not just a matter of equality, but a crucial aspect in our fight for justice.

Who ensures the next generation reaches adulthood? Who shapes human potential from its most vulnerable beginnings? It’s us Women.

Consider music—that universal language of human experience.

Most female anthems are mere complaints, oscillating between defiance and frustration.

But true power? That’s embodied by artists like Nina Simone, who don’t just sing about struggle but dissect it, transforming pain into profound, revolutionary art that reveals the deepest strengths of womanhood.

The path forward isn’t simple linear resistance but a complex, intersectional navigation.

Recognize complicity.

Challenge internalized biases.

Dismantle institutional barriers.

Rinse and repeat.

In this grand, tragicomic performance of gender dynamics, women are both protagonists and antagonists, writing and rewriting the script of their own liberation, one complicated act at a time.

A Withering Postscript: The Instagram Feminists

This generation of women is exposed to digital echo chambers, mistaking performative activism for revolution and reducing complex struggles to Instagram infographics.

They weaponize vulnerability, monetize trauma, and call it empowerment. Hashtag feminism without the fundamental understanding that true liberation demands more than curated self-portraiture and shallow online solidarity.

Screaming about patriarchy while perfectly filtering their selfies, they’ve transformed feminist resistance into a branding exercise—all aesthetics, no substance.

They’ll passionately repost about wage gaps between perfectly staged product placements, their activism as manufactured as their influencer personas.

Benoite Groult would weep, and Nina Simone would laugh—a cutting, knowing laugh that exposed their hollow performance.

Performative. Shallow. Commodified.

May Harmony find you

Irena Phaedra

P.S. Tough, crude yet honest.