I feel like it’s one of the slowest-swinging pendulums in history. Patriarchy came as a result of agriculture, when it became important to track progeny to determine land rights. From that point forward, women found their bodies regulated, through marriage, threats of bastardy placed on children born outside of marriage, and so on.

We’ve seen thousands of years of patriarchy. While there have been individual cases of women fighting this trend throughout this time, it hasn’t been succesfully systematically challenged until the last 300 years or so. Even as women fought to get the right to vote, and equivalent work (albeit without equivalent pay), it’s only been in the last 50 years that women have gotten significant gains towards body and financial autonomy. And that is under constant threat to this day.

That’s a loooong time to wait for things to get better.

I feel like what we’re seeing is the pressure after we just popped the cork off of a bottle of champagne. There’s years, generations, of pent up pain that is being released. I’d like to think that will be released through tears and comfort, but so much of that pain was unacknowledged and metastasized into anger.

Release isn’t pretty, especially when there’s still a sense that it isn’t safe to do so.

If we can channel this release towards safe avenues, it will be much healthier for all of us. In this “us vs them” world, the best we can do sometimes is keep the damage to a minimum.

Eventually the pendulum stops swinging. But it’s got to swing itself out.