Discussing gender inequality always leaves me with an exhaustive feeling, like I’ve just come in dead-last in the race for my life.

This is true because gender and feminist topics are always complex and analytical, but also because there is so much opposition. Personal politics are met with life experience and socialization to make for increasingly difficult mixed-messages.

Although I usually expect to face stronger resistance with men, the most disheartening indifference comes from other women. Sadly, cultural narratives of women, or girls, being catty, manipulative, cruel and deceptive to each other are true. It seems we would rather hate the woman in the hallway because we envy an article of her clothing rather than judge her on the merit of her character.

Women are quick to “other” themselves from those they feel impose a risk to their social status because their sense of self is disturbingly intertwined with social-status. Just like men, women come into the world as clean slates, perfectly unscathed yet by the perils of American culture. However, because women are taught to invest their values and self-worth in anything other than themselves, they are thwarted into a constant competition to attain what they feel will make themselves whole, such as a man or Coach tennies.

This then serves as evidence that the stereotype is real.

Not only is this dangerous because it opens doors to the possibility that a slew of other female stereotypes are rooted in truth, but also because women generally do not recognize this phenomenon as a problem. Women, I find, typically do not feel they are oppressed or have to navigate their lives around the constraints of their chromosomes.

When we refuse to recognize our own oppression, we not only participate in it but allow others to do it as well. Our silence is our complicity, and American women have successfully internalized their disempowerment to the point of living in a false consciousness, a false reality altogether.

Until women demand, and I mean truly, vocally demand change, we will continue to be blind and the distortion of women in the media and in contemporary culture will perpetuate.

It is rarely, if ever, questioned when members of other marginalized groups of people, such as folks of color or those in low-income areas, organize and call for change because despite our personal feelings, there is no way to deny that there are gross disparities among those groups. However, when the topic of women’s rights or feminism is addressed, eyes are readily rolled and an outburst of exaggerated sighs nearly crack through the ozone by men and women alike.

Women, this is completely unacceptable. Although we are not to blame for our historical and even contemporary cultural abuses, we cannot escape partial blame for allowing the state of women to flourish so poorly for as long as it has.

It is imperative that we face topics about gender and the inevitable inequalities that are attached to it, or we will never be able to outlive the stereotypes that so heavily weigh us down.

Nice girl nonsense has helped to keep us under man’s thumb; it’s time to bite the hand that feeds us inequity.