“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can. Wondering if I’d get there quicker If I was a man” (Swift 2019). a lyric that makes me wonder and think for hours on end about the women who have suffered because of inequality. I’m talking about the women who were not allowed to get educated, the women who were killed because of a man’s honor, and the women who were killed because they were smart. All this injustice makes me wonder.

The lyrics of The Man by famous pop artist Taylor Swift, in her Lover album, are in my opinion eye-opening. In the beginning of the song, she starts off with a catchy beat and describes what people thought her career would be like if she were a man, “I would be complex I would be cool, They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to And that would be ok For me to do Every conquest I had made would make me more of a boss to you” and this makes me notice that no matter how successful or powerful a woman is there are still going to be obstacles for her that envious men create.

“And I’m so sick of them coming at me again ‘Cause if I was a man Then I’d be the man” (Swift 2019). This lyric reminded me of a piece I had read in my history class about how when the scientific revolution had begun and scientists started drawing the male and female anatomy, they would draw female’s with a larger pelvic area and a smaller skull, “Drawings of female skeletons between 1730 and 1790 varied, but females tended to have a larger pelvic area, and, in some instances, female skulls were portrayed as smaller than those of males.” (page 492) This would make men justify the male dominance at that time and prove that women were not meant to find new scientific innovations but to instead bear children. 

Male dominance also led to something called ‘honor killing’ where male household members would kill female household members because the female had brought ‘dishonor’ to the family name. An example of this would be when Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII, was executed on charges including adultery, witchcraft, and conspiracy against the king, which shows how when there was any error in a woman she would be killed because of ‘dishonor’. In the tragic play of Othello by William Shakespeare, the main character Othello is an African general who is well respected and loved for his story-telling abilities but often I noticed he is treated as an outsider. He is then married to Desdemona, an honest, kind, and loveable woman. To sum it up the tragedy is when Othello suspects Desdemona is having an affair with another man, without even confirming it with her, he smothers Desdemona to death for his honor. Later on, when Othello finds out she was nothing but innocent he realizes it was too late and she is already dead. This brings me back to a quote I heard on the 99% Invisible podcast: the Mojave phone booth. According to the narrator, “By the time Doc [who originally found the booth] figured out what was happening it was too late.” What I’m trying to say is that humans almost always figure things out when it’s too late, just like with the Mojave phone booth and Othello, and in this instance, women have suffered the tremendous price of men realizing women are just as equal to them too late, after all the killing, silencing, burning, and destruction of ideas. This always makes me wonder what could’ve happened if we had equality sooner. What greater possibilities and innovations could’ve changed the world we know today. I just wonder.

Photo by Michelle Dang