She's someone's daughter.

There’s a meme that makes the rounds every so often that goes something like this:

She’s someone’s daughter. Someone’s aunt. Someone’s mother. Someone’s wife. Someone’s sister. Etc.

And there’s another version where all the qualifiers are crossed out so it reads: She’s someone.

I have no idea who started these memes, but they are both true. Women, like everyone else, are part of a community, and part of a family, and their communities and families are important.

Women are also independent, autonomous humans that have value as single entities.

But what’s interesting to me is that the second meme, the “she’s someone” meme, is operating under the assumption that the first meme is only about her relationship to men. It’s never, EVER assumed that “she’s someone’s daughter” could be referring to her mother or “she’s someone wife,” could be referring to her queerness. Matrilineal or queer relationships are not assumed here. When the gender of the “someone” is left unclear, we assume it’s a man.

When I was growing up, and learning language and learning how to write, I learned that the default pronoun for someone was “he,” and that “he” meant “everyone.” And this kind of thinking, that the default is male, is probably why we think that the someone is a male someone. To take it a step further, the someone in this meme is possessive (it’s “someone’s”), and women have historically been thought of, or treated as, property (heterosexual marriage is a good example of this). So we have another semantic arrow, pointing us towards making the inference that the someone is a male someone.

But the meme never explicitly says that. It just says “She’s someone’s daughter.”

These are the sorts of things, I think, that we need to start considering when we think about how we can support women. Ideology is controlling. (Think of Ideological State Apparatuses and Louis Althusser. These are systems that are oppress, and systems that are reiterated again and again). And we need to re-write the narratives of these ideologies.

And we do that by asking ourselves why we think what we think. It’s hard. This is a practice that comes out of coping with trauma (and oppression certainly qualifies as trauma). With trauma, behavior and patterns of thinking become ingrained, and the important thing to do is pause (which is difficult in and of itself, Reader), and then use that space to ask WHY we respond the way we do. WHY do we make the assumption that the someone is a male? How can we envision a different response?

It’s not terribly conventional to suggest using a trauma recovery practice as a way to dismantle the patriarchy. But when we look at how ideological processes become repeated and ingrained, it’s not that different from how unhealthy thought processes and reactions become repeated and ingrained. And if we can recover from trauma by practicing and creating new patterns, I don’t think it’s too much of stretch to recover from controlling ideologies in similar ways. After all, what is patriarchy but an unhealthy thought process?

Obviously, this isn’t enough. But as I struggle to wrap my head around the enormity of the consequences of this election, this is one small, actionable thing, one tiny piece in a much larger system of sexism. Pause. Challenge the underlying thinking of how we think of women. Of who our mental default is.

It’s a good practice, too, for whiteness defaults, or straight defaults, or cis-gender defaults. When the subject is left unclear, who do we think it is? Why? How can we change that?

It doesn’t sound like much, but challenging ideology and the way we think is hard and necessary work. I’m making “fuck sexism” bead bracelets and I’m probably going to sell that and donate the money to a women’s shelter or Planned Parenthood. That’s not much either. But it’s something. It’s a place to start. And I’m so fucking angry that I really need places to start right now. Actionable places, theoretical places, all the places.

It’s a place to start thinking about the things that you were told you had to do, based on your gender, and questioning them. This work we should all be doing, men, women, gender-fluid folks, non-binary folks, everyone. And we should be thinking of intersecting spaces, too—race, sexuality, disability, everything.

And those spaces that we make when we question why we do things, and why we assume things, and start thinking about how we can do things differently—those spaces are magic. I love those spaces, as uncomfortable as they can be, because that’s where change happens. When we make that space, we make room to grow.

I also want to add, just to be clear, that I’m not saying that “she’s someone” or “she’s someone’s daughter” are good or bad memes. Either of them. They are reductive and simplistic, but memes are ways we try to communicate in the tiny bites of attention we use. Maybe expending our attention is another place to start, too.