A tiny disclaimer:
I write this from a place of relative privilege. Fortunately, I have the space, support, and resources to break through these cycles of misogyny and oppression. I recognise that not everyone has had, or has, this opportunity. This is not a universal experience, nor is it meant to be. This is a letter for all of us to question the “normal,” to start difficult conversations, and to take small but meaningful steps toward change. Wherever you are in your journey, you are not alone. We need each other to dismantle these systems and build something freer, kinder, and more just.
Misogyny is all around us. If you’re born female or identify as a woman, I’m sure you’re familiar with it. You might even face it in your daily lives. Even if you’re not, you’d probably normalise it by accident because we’re socialised that way. It is taught and embedded within every social structure. It is viewed as something that is “normal”; therefore, it shouldn’t be questioned.
Have I always thought that it’d be something generational as well? I sure as hell didn’t think so at the time.
Growing up as the youngest child in my family, I have always been the observer. I have always connected the Xs and the Ys. As and Bs. whatnot. I grew up being a curious cat, of course, I had to look for answers. It began when I discovered popular and liberal feminism during my teenage years, and my activism and growing interest in gender equality during my undergraduate studies. Until the present time, which has led to my current stance and positionality, as a person who does not in any way want to conform to the binary or any other oppressive structures.
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I’ve written about this before in a personal essay dedicated to my mom to commemorate Mother’s Day, where I reflected on how my mom’s love and resilience shaped me. I also explored her struggles with misogyny, passed down from my grandmother and great-grandmother, thus helping me see how misogyny is taught and inherited across generations.
As a Javanese person, I was taught how to properly act as a woman: how to dress, speak, sit, and serve. I tried to tick the boxes. Tried to meet the standards of what a Javanese, patriarchal ideal of “womanhood” looks like. Until I couldn’t anymore.
I always thought I’d at least avoid the critiques about my voice, such as in how I speak. I was socialised and raised to be firm, direct, and expressive. But in this system, that’s not “womanly”. I figured I’d eventually grow out of my “tomboy” phase. But the more I resisted, the more I realised I was never meant to become what they expected.
Hitting the “Breaking Point” in My Family
Coming to such realisation of how I’ve never been what the heteronormative standards expect me to be, I think often about my grandmother, how she prioritised my uncle over my mom and aunt. It wasn’t because she loved them less. It was because she was taught that women are supposed to serve men. That men are the providers. That their value is in being upheld, while women’s value is in how much they can endure.
My mom grew up with that pain. She wasn’t chosen. Also, she was sacrificed. She never really had the space to talk about it. Not the grief of being overlooked. Not the unfairness of having to carry the emotional weight of her family while her brother was given the benefit of the doubt, over and over. And maybe she thought that silence and avoiding unnecessary “backlash” was just how things had to be.
Until one day, I called her out.
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I noticed she was doing the same thing to my brother. Not on purpose. But it was happening. He was given the easier path, the softer expectations. She didn’t realise she was repeating what had once broken her. That she was passing on a hierarchy she never chose, but internalised. We had tough, honest, difficult conversations. Like how her father had failed her mother and all their children. How survival sometimes makes people forget themselves. And how, just because it was passed down to her, doesn’t mean she has to pass it to me.
That’s the thing about misogyny, because it doesn’t always look loud. Sometimes it’s quiet, subtle, even maternal. Sometimes it wears the face of love. But love without reflection can still hurt. And breaking those cycles takes more than awareness—it takes unlearning. It takes confrontation. It takes love that’s willing to look in the mirror.
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There were moments when I called her out that I could see the surprise in her eyes, not out of defiance, but out of unfamiliarity. She told me once that she didn’t know how to be my mom in the way I needed her to be. That her upbringing had taught her to be nonchalant, to keep things moving, to survive by not making a fuss.
It wasn’t until I said it out loud: “I need you to be my mom, for once, and please don’t be distant”— that something shifted. That she realised emotional closeness wasn’t a luxury. It was something I was asking for. Something I was missing. And something she had been denied herself. That conversation alone didn’t fix everything, but at the very least, it cracked something open.
It made space for a different kind of love. One that wasn’t handed down but actively chosen. One that meant we both had to look at our wounds; hers shaped by silence, mine shaped by wanting more, and decide that the cycle could stop here.
The Everyday Face of Misogyny
Studying psychology and embracing the practice of radical love taught me that to be loved is to be seen, and to be seen is to be changed. I used to think being “too emotional” was a flaw, but it’s actually what cracked my family open. Through my feelings: messy, honest, and insistent, I’ve shown my parents that I will never fit into what’s considered “normal.”
What matters is: they know I must break through these traditions that once buried my mother’s voice and boxed her into silence. In a way, I live the life she couldn’t, and she gets to witness that. That, to me, is a quiet revolution. That, to me, is ungrowth; not about shedding love, but about outgrowing what love was once confined to be.
But it doesn’t end there. Misogyny doesn’t only live in institutions or get passed down from our mothers. It lingers in side-eyes, in backhanded compliments, in the quiet competitiveness among women conditioned to see each other as threats instead of kin.
I’ve received nasty comments about my independence, my achievements, my confidence—from people too insecure to confront what they lacked, so they chose to resent what I had. When I told people that I studied at a top university in Indonesia, one of my ex’s friends smirked and said, “You must be so smart,” not out of admiration, but bitterness disguised as small talk.
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I didn’t clock it then, but it stayed with me. That same pattern reappeared when I realised an old close friend in high school had been jealous of me the whole time, not because I had everything, but because I had been given the space to be myself. That’s all it took to threaten her. And that’s what internalised misogyny does: it makes people think someone else’s freedom is a personal attack.
Insecurity and misogyny go hand in hand. They feed off each other like a vicious cycle — the more insecure someone feels in a world that constantly pits us against one another, the more likely they are to lash out, to project, to belittle. But the real question is: Why? Why does someone else’s self-assurance make you feel small? Why does someone’s ability to take up space feel like an attack?
These are uncomfortable questions, and that discomfort is exactly the point. We cannot dismantle misogyny if we refuse to sit with the feelings it provokes. Tackling this horrifying system doesn’t begin with blaming others — it begins with turning inward. With unlearning the habits we’ve inherited. With radical honesty. By choosing not to pass down the pain.
Questioning What Is Deemed “Normal”
We need to start asking harder questions. What gets to be called “normal”? Who does it serve? Who gets left behind in the name of tradition, politeness, or “just the way things are”?
If we want to break free from cycles of harm — from internalised misogyny, from gendered expectations, from inherited silence — then we need to make it a habit to question the things we’re taught to accept. That means refusing to water ourselves down to be more palatable. That means calling out patterns in our families, in our friendships, in ourselves.
It’s not enough to just know something is wrong — we have to name it. Critique it. Challenge it. Because only when we actively unlearn what is handed down to us can we begin to imagine something more free.
I have lingering regrets and feelings of how I wish I had known better, but the truth is, there’s no such thing as “too late” when it comes to learning. We all have to start somewhere. What matters is that we start. And that we keep going, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable. Because the systems we’re up against — misogyny, patriarchy, generational trauma — they rely on our silence, our politeness, our fear of disrupting the so-called “normal.”
Small Things Lead to Bigger Harm
As Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch, “The witch was not only the midwife, the woman who avoided maternity, or the beggar who eked out a living by stealing some wood or butter from her neighbors. She was also the loose, promiscuous woman—the prostitute or adulteress, and generally, the woman who exercised her sexuality outside of the bonds of marriage and procreation. Thus, in the witchcraft trials, ‘ill repute’ was evidence of guilt.”
This historical context reminds us that the policing of women’s bodies and behaviors has deep roots, and the subtle forms of misogyny we encounter today are extensions of these long-standing systems of control. Misogyny doesn’t only manifest in violent outbursts, it seeps into the everyday. It’s in the way we’re taught to obsess over our appearances, how we monitor each other and ourselves. These small things, such as the comments, the jealousy, the internalised shame, are not in any way trivial. They are socialised rehearsals. They are how the system grooms us for compliance.
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And if we do not interrupt these patterns — the ones we inherit, the ones we repeat — they can escalate. As Nada Elia in Greater Than The Sum of Our Parts reminds us, “We are coming together, beyond boundaries, and together, we are greater than the sum of our parts.” Misogyny may come in many forms — overt or quiet, generational or systemic — but we are not powerless. Each act of questioning, each refusal to conform, each uncomfortable conversation is a crack in the foundation of oppression.
So we must ask: who benefits from these norms we’re told not to question? Who gains when we turn our pain inward or weaponise it against each other? It is not enough to heal quietly. We must be willing to confront the ways we’ve been conditioned. We must be willing to make others uncomfortable — and ourselves, too. Gendered violence doesn’t begin with the strike of a fist. It begins in language. In silence. In the slow grind of dehumanisation that renders women and queer people disposable. These are the stakes.
Liberation starts with that refusal. It starts with you, with me, with all of us choosing to do things differently.
