Women and cats

We are so entirely confident that we would be on the “right side” of history in every well-known catastrophic scenario, failing to acknowledge that the times we live in are not so different and most of us are far from the heroes that we think we would be.

Extremists, falsely attributed to Islamic terrorists, assassinate the president with a bomb, creating a state of emergency. The military temporarily assumes control of the government, citing safety concerns. However, things never return to normal. Civil liberties, including free speech, the right to assemble and freedom of the press, are gradually revoked. One day, women discover they need legal documents with their husband’s consent to obtain birth control. Another day, they go to the bank to withdraw money and find their accounts linked to their husbands or closest male relatives, rendering them financially dependent. Dress codes are enforced first in workplaces, then in public. Eventually, women are dismissed from their jobs, prohibited from working outside the home and reduced to servitude within households. They are forced to wear concealing clothing, at their own home and banned from venturing outdoors alone.

This is how events unfold and an oppressive regime takes over in the dystopian and cautionary book and TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. This is unfortunately not very different from what is experienced in Iran or Afghanistan. Minor policy shifts, disguised as measures for national security or morality, coupled with fear, can snowball into a culture of oppression. People only recognize this when it has become too deeply entrenched to resist. Laws are enforced with the implication that there is something innately wrong with women, that their natural state is sinful and their abilities are inconsequential to the world. Women’s clothing is controlled to symbolize their roles in society, it is not that they are taught to cover for religious reasons, but that they are denied the choice. The worst part is the system cycles back on itself, the uneducated become incapable, the oppressed begin to oppress their kind pursuing acceptance but fail to see that the root of the issue is the lack of acceptance in the first place. In both fiction and reality, oppression becomes normalized, public compliance grows as resistance is quashed, and people adapt to new norms out of fear or the necessity of survival.

It is nothing but absurd how parts of the world are discussing mars colonies, chakras, higher consciousness and the sanctity of the female genitals, while in other parts oppressive societal systems continue to exist, and how these can often overlap. Primitive dogmas that perpetuate inequality cease to exist only because people lacking any other sense of value feel threatened by global progress and cling excessively to extreme ideologies to maintain their self worth. Meanwhile, the rest of the world remains unbothered, having grown accustomed to such systems from their own history. They are quick to label it as “others culture”, quieting their conscience and ignoring the cruel ideology behind. They fail to see how aspects of their own lives are shaped by the same ideas, and how, with a mere shift in political winds, they could find themselves in a similar situation within just the span of a few years. 

This is not about religion or culture, but patriarchy, a centuries-old system of subjugation across different nations and belief systems. How can any society achieve balance or develop if half its population is suppressed and denied its potential? Perhaps we should start with our mothers, who, after also working all day, come home to cook, clean and do laundry, only to collapse into bed and do it all again the next day.

In Switzerland, women were unable to vote in federal elections until 1971, and some regions only granted local voting rights by 1991.

In the United States, women needed their husband’s permission to apply for a credit card until 1974, and marital sexual assault wasn’t criminalized nationwide until 1993.

In China and India, illegal yet still common practices like female-selective abortions have skewed gender ratios.

In Saudi Arabia, the driving ban for women was only lifted in 2018, yet societal and legal challenges persist.

In the continent of Africa in 2023, an average of 140 women and girls were killed daily by intimate partners or family members.

Children come to the world with a “tabula rasa”, a “blank slate” as John Locke would put it. They then learn about the world from occurrences and patterns statistically, not much different from artificial intelligence models that we are all very familiar with. The parent’s behavior pattern and attitudes are adopted by the child even if it is not always obvious. This link can be traced all the way back to our earliest relatives that you can imagine, their actions determined our faith and their thoughts became our culture. We carry the implicit beliefs and trauma of many generations, not only behaviorally but also chemically. A study in 2013 demonstrated that male mice conditioned to fear cherry blossom scent through electric shocks passed this fear response to multiple generations through epigenetic changes despite the descendants never experiencing the scent or shocks themselves. You can listen to the song written by artist Nemahsis inspired by this observation. The same way a mother’s breast milk can be chemically changed by what she eats, it can be changed by what she feels and fears. 

Have you ever thought about why most women around you have autoimmune disorders? That is the centuries long accumulation of not being accepted and not being able to accept themselves. After generations full of bottled-up emotion and silenced thoughts, women’s stress mechanisms are compromised, and their immune systems are attacking their own bodies. Anything that is suppressed will manifest in one way or another, this is true for physics but also physiology, psychology and sociology. In the physiological and psychological case, the generational suppression is coming out in the form of immune system disorders and mental illness in women, and once again harming women themselves. However, I wonder how the built-up conscience, wisdom and potential will come out sociologically. 

It is beautiful how we resist the system in small but meaningful ways. From the Irani singer Parastoo Ahmadi who was arrested for giving an online concert without a hijab, to the Afghan professor Ismail Mashal who tore up his diplomas on live TV crying in protest of a ban on womens education. This is my form of resistance. 

I believe that women, and cats, have much to reclaim from the world, it owes them a great deal. 

“All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, ended up developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time accepting as part of our society.”

  Paulo Coelho

(These poems were compiled by Necla Ece Yilmaz from selections of Merve Leblebici)