For as long as I can remember, I have always been degraded by men regarding my intelligence. In my opinion, I am a knowledgeable person who can retain a great deal of information. Yet it seems like people—specifically men—like to be very condescending to me and speak to me as if I were 5 years old.
I am confused. I am very educated on politics, and have been slowly educating myself more and more ever since 2020. I've always been smart, I've always been exceptional for my age, and I've always been an overachiever. I know school smarts isn't everything, but from what I've just said, anyone would say I am a smart person. I don't want to brag, but for anyone who doesn't know me, to gauge my intelligence, I’m just going to say—as of right now—my match schools for college, according to my stats, would be considered “new ivies.” I know I am smart—so why do men like to treat me like I don't know anything at all? Perhaps it's because of my bubbly personality, or my audacity to have humor, or because I am a woman. Men just always assume that they are smarter than me, and it pisses me off, especially when I know they aren't.
I won’t sugarcoat it; I know the exact vibe I give off. I give off a bubbly, ditzy girl at first glance. That's exactly what I want to give off. I'd love to be seen as a real-life doll or just a bubbly girl, but the last thing I want to give off is stupid, because I am not. I know I laugh at stupid jokes sometimes, but at the end of the day, I am indeed a 16-year-old girl, god forbid I laugh!?
But despite this ditzy girl I seem to be on a surface level, anyone who's ever had an educational talk with me can obviously tell that I know my stuff. One of the issues I have is putting my thoughts into words: I will stutter a bit, pause to think of the correct words, and try my hardest to understand someone's learning style when explaining something to them, but I don't think that makes me seem unintelligent. I know I need to work on my explanations; I've always been aware of that. However, plenty of men stutter and stammer when they speak, and they are never seen as stupid by other men. So why am I always getting talked to like I'm the dumbest person in the room when I know for a fact I'm not?
I've realized that when I try to talk about politics with a man, he talks to me like I don't understand what I'm talking about. And what irks me the most is the way they will speak with full-on confidence that I start to question everything I know in the moment. In May of this year, I was chatting it up with a boy. He had very much “centrist” views on politics, a “both sides are bad” view on the 2024 election. I remember thinking I could educate him to see my very leftist views on things, and why the “both sides are bad’ argument does not work here, and you cannot be neutral in a situation like this. The way he spoke to me made it seem like he was treating me as if I were stupid and was just talking to talk. The way men will dumb you down to make it seem like they know more than you is honestly just appalling. Any girl I've been around knows that I'm very well educated on the political world and how it all works, so I really don't understand why men can't see the same.
Another example of this is me talking to my Trump-supporting brother about Trump’s policies. He spoke to me as if what the current president was doing was good for the country, and the certainty he had in his voice honestly had me wondering if I was wrong. Looking back on these two conversations I've had with men, I realize that I've never been incorrect about what I was saying. I'm not saying I'm the smartest girl in the world and I know everything—because I am well aware that I am not—but can men not have a civil conversation with me where they speak to me like the age I am?
In AP Lang, the day I am writing this, we were all just talking about pretty much anything that came to mind, and politics came up. A girl in my class asked Mr. Wilde about what would happen if we got Trump out of office, and he responded something along the lines of JD Vance taking office and the way he doesn't have as much power over people as Trump does. No one argued, no one doubted him, and everyone listening to the conversation just took exactly what he said with no hesitation. And of course, Mr. Wilde is a very educated person and also a teacher, which in turn makes him trustworthy to talk about this kind of stuff, but all I could think of at that moment was the fact that I've said those same words before, and I was doubted immediately, making me doubt myself even. I know he's a grown man and a teacher, and I am just some teenage girl, but it's just like WOW! No one could believe me when I said it, though, like damn?! It's just like no one can believe that I know what I'm talking about at all. It's all just so incredibly frustrating that I can never talk without being treated like I don't know what I'm talking about.
This reminded me of a video I saw on Instagram a few days ago of this woman in a room full of men talking about why all billionaires are unethical. One of the men in the video kept calling her sweetheart and wouldn't listen to a word she was saying, yet would listen when a man pitched in and agreed with her. From the one to two-minute clip I saw on Instagram, she seemed like the smartest person in the room. She knew exactly what she was talking about, and yet she was dismissed simply because she was a woman. I hate that men don't believe that women can be smart, and I hate how they talk to us. It's heartbreaking, honestly, and it dwindles the excitement I have to even talk about these kinds of things. I just want to be heard for once.
I don't mean to sound whiny about this at all, or blow this completely out of proportion, because maybe it's something else about me and not because I am female, but because of the way I speak or act. I would seriously hope that it's one of those since I can change that, but I cannot change the fact that I am a woman. This isn’t something written for me to hate on men, because I do not hate men. I don't hate anyone. The only thing I hate is the fact that they won't listen to me, no matter how educated I am. Why won't they listen to me?
