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Summary
Women's invisible labour sustains society while men systematically undermine and appropriate their contributions, surviving on sacrifices for which they claim credit and without which civilisation would collapse.
Judging by how uneducated and unaware men are about how different the world is for men and women, here are more facts for you to either acknowledge or be angry about. Men take more organs from women than they donate to us. They take more time, more labour, more health, more safety, and more opportunity.
Women lose education, income, and career progress every time men insist on children and then disappear from the physical and emotional labour that follows. Women lose years of lifespan managing male stress, male diets, male families, and male emotions. Women lose bone density, metabolic health, pelvic floor stability, earning potential, and sometimes their lives during pregnancy and yet men behave as if having children is a gift they give us.
Men police women’s clothing, bodies, mobility, fertility, sexuality and then have the audacity to claim women are “oppressive” for saying no. Meanwhile, over 90% of violent crime worldwide is committed by men, including intimate partner violence, homicide, sexual assault, mass shootings, war crimes, and terrorism. Women aren’t just victims; we’re the ones holding society together despite all this.
Men have excluded women from clinical trials for decades, and still under-represent us in medical research. Women’s heart attacks were written off as “anxiety.” Women’s autoimmune diseases are underfunded. Women’s chronic pain is dismissed. Endometriosis affects millions, yet has no cure and barely any research funding.
Meanwhile, men have viagra, penis-enhancement drugs, and an entire billion-dollar industry dedicated to ensuring male pleasure, while women can’t even get accurate diagnoses for conditions that cause organ damage, infertility, disability, and death. Male pleasure is more researched, funded, and accessible than female pain, female safety, or female survival. Men have performance drugs, but women can’t even get pain relief for childbirth without judgment.
Women built technologies, medicines, programming languages, agricultural systems, and scientific breakthroughs that men took credit for. Women discovered DNA structure, nuclear fission, pulsars, matrix algebra, computer programming, and what did men do about that? Men won the prizes.
In every pandemic, every war, every economic collapse, women kept families alive while men fought, fled, or fell apart. Gay men survived the AIDS crisis because lesbians donated blood, raised money, nursed dying men, marched, protested, and fought healthcare discrimination when the world abandoned them. Women protected gay men while straight men were calling for their imprisonment.
Women have raised sons, nursed husbands, supported brothers, carried fathers, stabilised communities, taught children, rationed food, and rebuilt society after every disaster men caused, from wars to recessions to environmental destruction.
Women are the reason humanity continues to exist at all. Women are the reason babies live, households function, communities survive, and societies rebuild. Women have been the caregivers, healers, teachers, protectors, mediators, innovators, and emotional shock-absorbers of human civilisation. And men still dare to ask what women contribute? “What do women bring to the table”?
Men wouldn’t last a single generation without the labour, intelligence, endurance, and sacrifice of women. They would not live, they would not thrive, and they would certainly not survive the chaos of the very world they think they built. But the truth is that this world was built as much by women, if not more, as it was by men. What men can take sole credit for is wrecking the world.
Women routinely keep men alive in a world that men break, and the funniest part is that men still think they’re the ones holding civilisation together.
Editor’s note: This article was first published by DipshikhaGhosh
