The Dilemma Of It All

reflection — Friday, August 22nd 2025

I have a problem. Her real name is I Can’t Stand My Own Thoughts In Silence but she’ll answer to Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. So yes, I am writing this on my computer while my phone sits next to me on the ground, playing s20 e7, with the Lieutenant’s gentle voice over an unsettling backing track.

This summer, I spent too much money on clothes, wore a lot of different sunglasses, swam in the lake, realized I won’t miss most of the people I knew in high school, fainted, nearly fainted, didn’t drink enough water for a month and then did drink enough water since then, cried much less than usual, missed the vegetarian days, found the correct bra size, ran exactly once, and regained control of myself. I have Olivia Benson to thank.

I used to desperately claw at any opportunity to feel in control of myself, to rule with an iron fist over my own body and mind. I feared the day I would stop undereating, for in my mind it was the day I would lose all my worth. Isn’t that sick? Isn’t that horribly sick?

It didn’t come from within me. I was obsessed with being the thinnest girl in sight, not because I have some deep and true connection to the image of gauntness, or because I felt called by a supernatural force to look up celebrities’ heights and weights and calculate whether I was skinnier than them. It was because I am ambitious. I am disciplined. I am eager to earn everyone’s approval, validation, and praise. Almost indiscriminately.

I mean, for most of my life it didn’t matter to me that the standards I was judging myself by were probably both invented and enforced by some older Italian man who designed women’s clothing and was on par with Picasso in terms of looks, height, and treatment of women. Since the day I first opened my eyes, I have not stopped taking in everything around me. The overt messaging, sure, but also the subliminal. I am great at rhetorical analysis, because it’s how I’ve been thinking for as long as I can remember. The expectations I’ve carried and the judgments I’ve absorbed have worked for years and years to wear down my sense of self, my intrinsic value that did not depend on whether I lived up to the perfect image of a girl. It still gnaws at me now, and it’s still the image of a girl, not a woman. Because to him, the perfect woman is a girl.

Internalized misogyny and insecurity are a killer pair. The stability of the patriarchy is jeopardized by a woman who knows her worth, and chooses to help herself and other women before she worries about how it looks to observing men, to the voyeur in her head. So of course, discouragement toward other women is encouraged. Because if you’re blonde and wear fake eyelashes to anchor Fox News, the men are nicer to you. You can’t be a threat if you’re an object. You know that your value as a person is inextricable from your appearance, and you know that guys like when you put another woman down with them. It shows you’re not one of those pesky feminists.

And god damn it, that cultural psychological programming is so effective that even women who want to support other women will still, more often than not, carry with them some hatred for themselves and their gender. And there are plenty of covert ways for them to express it — a little slut shaming here, a little victim blaming there…I’m all for women in politics, except this one just seems a little too ambitious (with a knowing head tilt)…I like this woman’s music but I just don’t approve of her personal life…this girl must be lying when she says my friend assaulted her, because he’s never done anything to me…it never. fucking. ends.

And I was guilty of that, too. My first year of high school was when I really started to see what was wrong with the way I was socialized to think and speak about women. But I’d still decide some girl was a bitch for saying one thing I didn’t like. I’d silently listen to some guy’s fucked up jokes if I wanted him to like me. I never do that anymore. Not since I realized that they’re never really joking. Not since I realized you can call a woman a million things to say that you hate her, and you hate her because she’s a woman. But you call a guy a dick? That’s not that bad. You call him a son of a bitch? You’re not even insulting him. You’re insulting his mother.

Olivia Benson is the only person in the world who has never disappointed me in this particular way. Maybe in earlier seasons there was something questionable, or anachronistic that I didn’t catch when I watched it or I don’t remember now. But the Olivia Benson in my heart could say the same words every episode and they’d still be profound.

None of this is your fault.

If you didn’t want it, if you didn’t say yes, then that’s rape.

The only person to blame is the man who did this to you.

I believe you.

I believe you.

I believe you.

I have one last thing to say. I am filled with anger, yes, at the world and at the patriarchy, and at a lot of people I know and even some people I don’t. I am pessimistic, misanthropic at times. But I am hopeful. I have nothing in my soul if not hope.

Realizing how deeply entrenched this bias against women is in our society was sickening. Horrifying. Unbelievable.

But I am here.

So is Olivia Benson.

And even if I feel like I’m one of two people in the world who sees what’s going on, and actually supports and defends women at all costs, at least the other person is Olivia. She’s fictional, and I am imperfect. But I am inspired. And hopeful. And I am not alone in this fight. I am not its leader. But I am my own.

I belong not to my father, not to a lover, but to myself. Thank you, Liv.