When I was in a biology lesson in Year 11, we sat down to discuss hormones in females and males; what they do to the body and the behaviours they influence.

Our teacher divided the board into two sections:

Female hormones:
Mood swings. Periods. Fertility. Emotion.

Male hormones:
Aggression. Muscle growth. Libido.

As she listed the effects on the male side, I noticed something strange. Unlike the female side, the male section explicitly included the word “libido.”

Slightly awkwardly, I raised my hand and asked:

“Why doesn’t the female side mention libido?”

A few boys laughed and whispered amongst themselves. My biology teacher, young, female, and visibly uncomfortable, responded:

“It’s not on the syllabus. The textbook doesn’t recognise libido for women.”

Even then, I knew something about that answer was wrong.

Because this is the problem.

From childhood, women are taught to suppress sexuality while men are taught to expect it from themselves. Female desire becomes invisible, denied, or shameful. Male desire becomes natural, inevitable, even excusable.

And when a society teaches that women are not supposed to want sex, it creates a dangerous idea about how sex happens at all.

From as early as the playground, we begin conditioning boys and girls into roles that quietly feed rape culture.

A six-year-old boy pulls a girl’s hair. He teases her. Pushes her. Makes her cry.

Upset, she goes to an adult because she already understands something simple:

People should not hurt each other.

But instead of being told his behaviour is unacceptable, she hears:

“Sweetie, that just means he likes you.”

He likes you.

In that single sentence, boys are taught to express affection through aggression, and girls are taught to reinterpret discomfort as attention. Violence becomes romanticised before children are even old enough to understand romance.

Girls learn to tolerate mistreatment. Boys learn that causing distress can be flirtation.

By adolescence, these lessons evolve into something more sinister.

Teenage boys absorb ideas about masculinity from the internet, pornography, social media, and “locker room talk.” The language surrounding sex becomes deeply violent.

“Smash.”
“Bang.”
“Crack.”
“Fuck.”

Pay attention to the semantic field: domination, impact, force.

Sex is discussed less like intimacy and more like conquest.

At the same time, pornography increasingly normalises aggression towards women; choking, slapping, tying up, humiliation; often presenting women’s pain as desirable or performative. Repeated exposure can desensitise viewers to female discomfort, teaching them that violence is not only normal during sex, but expected.

Then comes the contradiction boys are handed about women themselves.

They are taught to desire women sexually while simultaneously devaluing women who openly express sexuality.

You see it play out constantly:

“I really like that girl. I’m going to ask her out.”

“Nah bro, I heard she’s easy.”

“Yeah, she’s ran through.”

Easy.

A word used to shame a woman for being as enthusiastic about sex as the men pursuing her.

The woman’s consent is not celebrated; it becomes the problem.

If the object of your desire is not supposed to have desire, then what kind of relationship with women are boys being taught to build?

Girls, meanwhile, are raised on the language of purity.

Virginity. Modesty. Innocence.

Not just as abstract ideas, but as something physical; embodied in concepts like the hymen, as though morality itself can be anatomically measured.

Young women are told to “save themselves” for their future husbands, reinforcing the idea that sex is something women give away. A piece of themselves. Something valuable that can be lost, ruined, or stolen.

Teaching women to self-enforce all their value and tie it to their sexuality.

And if a woman becomes “impure,” society rarely blames the man she had sex with.

It blames her.

So “good” women are taught not to want sex. The women who do express desire are labelled sluts, whores, easy, attention-seeking, damaged.

Then men are simultaneously taught to pursue women sexually while losing respect for the women who say yes.

The result is a deeply warped message:

Men should want sex.
Women should resist it.

Which means sex becomes framed not as something mutually desired, but as something men persuade, pressure, or take from women.

Because if women are not supposed to want sex, then enthusiastic consent stops making sense within the logic society has taught boys.

And that is where rape culture begins.

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSxScpL3Y/

My mother calls my name,
and I hoard the silence
that lives before my reply.

Between barking dogs,
restless lawnmowers,
and my brothers rushing the house awake,
I sit perfectly still,
wearing the shape of someone
who did not hear.

But I hear her.
I always do.

I let my name linger a little longer
in the crowded air,hanging there unanswered stretching those few stolen seconds

for as long as I can,

Because peace is brief,

and sometimes

the only way to keep it

is to take it quietly for myself

before I finally break the stillness
with a weary,
“Yes mama,”
and reluctantly join the noise myself.

There is something quietly revealing in the way language distinguishes between men and women in sport. The unqualified term, “basketball,” for instance, defaults to the male game, while its counterpart must be linguistically marked as “women’s basketball,” as though it exists as a derivative rather than a parallel. This is not merely a semantic habit; it reflects a deeper cultural assumption about what is considered standard and what is treated as deviation.

In this framework, men’s participation is rendered universal, neutral, and implicitly authoritative, while women’s participation is framed as a variation, an appendix that requires clarification. The prefix “women’s” does more than specify gender; it subtly diminishes status, positioning the women’s game as a secondary category rather than an equal expression of the sport.

This pattern extends far beyond sport. Men are permitted to occupy roles as though those roles are sufficient in themselves: a doctor, a writer, a leader. Their gender is incidental, almost invisible. Women, by contrast, are rarely afforded that same conceptual autonomy. They are “female doctors,” “women writers,” “female leaders,” their gender preceding and qualifying their participation, as though it is the most salient fact about them.

In this way, language insists that a woman is a woman first and a professional second, whereas a man is simply the role he inhabits. The distinction is subtle but powerful. It shapes perception before performance is even considered, framing women as representatives of a category rather than as individuals within a field.

Even more revealing is how deeply this logic is embedded in the titles we use from childhood. A man, regardless of age or marital status, is granted the stable dignity of “Mr” or “Sir,” titles that denote respect without inquiry. A woman, however, moves through a sequence: “Miss” to “Mrs,” a linguistic transition that does not simply mark age, but marital attachment. Respect, in this structure, appears conditional, something that is formalized, even elevated, through association with a husband.

The implication is difficult to ignore. A woman’s identity is rendered legible through her relationship to a man; her name becomes a site of disclosure. Where a man’s title preserves privacy and autonomy, a woman’s title can signal availability, attachment, even social positioning at a glance. In professional spaces, this asymmetry is particularly striking: a man’s name reveals nothing beyond himself, while a woman’s can inadvertently communicate personal information that has little to do with her competence.

This convention extends further still in the expectation that a woman will adopt her husband’s surname, another quiet absorption of identity into a male lineage. The cumulative effect is not simply tradition, but a system of language that repeatedly situates women in relation to men, rather than as self contained subjects.

What appears, on the surface, to be harmless differentiation is in fact a linguistic hierarchy. Language here does not just describe reality, it organizes it. By reserving neutrality for men and qualification for women, whether in sport, profession, or even forms of address, we reinforce the idea that male experience is the default, and that women exist in relation to it.

To interrogate this habit, then, is not pedantic, it is necessary. Because until language allows women to simply be, to occupy roles, titles, and identities without qualification or relational framing, the promise of equality will remain constrained not only by institutions, but by the very words we use to describe them.

want to preface this poem by saying I’m completely fine wanted to write something quite sad I spent the day with my boyfriend and all my friends

Happy birthday to me

As I sit here and write this, I’m the lowest I have ever been. I try to cry so I can feel, but if I feel, I may feel too much, and that will be my demise.

I lie awake in a body that won’t power down. The dark doesn’t dim anything; it just makes the clock and emptiness louder.

I pretend to be asleep so the night will leave me alone. It never works.

My body doesn’t want the tears anymore. They are now hot and strenuous, and as each of them fall, my head bangs.

I am utterly alone in the Cardiff dawn of my 19th birthday,

yet somehow, in this silence and tranquillity, my brain finds noise.

My thoughts are like a stain I keep throwing in the wash.

My mind is the water in the wash, seeping through every thread, carrying soap into the smallest seams. It studies the fabric too closely every crease, every weak stitch, every possible way it could tear.

Turning them over and over for peace.

I wait for them to come out clean.

I don’t just think about what happened. I soak in what might, until even clean things feel worn through.

As though my effort equals erasure. But sometimes the damage is done. Some marks remain, despite how much you don’t deserve that, despite how much you want them to be clean.

A weight that feels like it will drag me to my end.

A breath that feels like a waste to take.

A life that no longer feels worth the living.

Hopeless and numb.

Happy Birthday to me.

(I am okay just felt like writing something emotionally evoking to the realities of how some people may feel in their birthdays)

There is something quietly revealing in the way language distinguishes between men and women in sport. The unqualified term, “basketball,” for instance, defaults to the male game, while its counterpart must be linguistically marked as “women’s basketball,” as though it exists as a derivative rather than a parallel. This is not merely a semantic habit; it reflects a deeper cultural assumption about what is considered standard and what is treated as deviation.

In this framework, men’s participation is rendered universal, neutral, and implicitly authoritative, while women’s participation is framed as a variation, an appendix that requires clarification. The prefix “women’s” does more than specify gender; it subtly diminishes status, positioning the women’s game as a secondary category rather than an equal expression of the sport.

This pattern extends far beyond sport. Men are permitted to occupy roles as though those roles are sufficient in themselves: a doctor, a writer, a leader. Their gender is incidental, almost invisible. Women, by contrast, are rarely afforded that same conceptual autonomy. They are “female doctors,” “women writers,” “female leaders,” their gender preceding and qualifying their participation, as though it is the most salient fact about them.

In this way, language insists that a woman is a woman first and a professional second, whereas a man is simply the role he inhabits. The distinction is subtle but powerful. It shapes perception before performance is even considered, framing women as representatives of a category rather than as individuals within a field.

Even more revealing is how deeply this logic is embedded in the titles we use from childhood. A man, regardless of age or marital status, is granted the stable dignity of “Mr” or “Sir,” titles that denote respect without inquiry. A woman, however, moves through a sequence: “Miss” to “Mrs,” a linguistic transition that does not simply mark age, but marital attachment. Respect, in this structure, appears conditional, something that is formalized, even elevated, through association with a husband.

The implication is difficult to ignore. A woman’s identity is rendered legible through her relationship to a man; her name becomes a site of disclosure. Where a man’s title preserves privacy and autonomy, a woman’s title can signal availability, attachment, even social positioning at a glance. In professional spaces, this asymmetry is particularly striking: a man’s name reveals nothing beyond himself, while a woman’s can inadvertently communicate personal information that has little to do with her competence.

This convention extends further still in the expectation that a woman will adopt her husband’s surname, another quiet absorption of identity into a male lineage. The cumulative effect is not simply tradition, but a system of language that repeatedly situates women in relation to men, rather than as self contained subjects.

What appears, on the surface, to be harmless differentiation is in fact a linguistic hierarchy. Language here does not just describe reality, it organizes it. By reserving neutrality for men and qualification for women, whether in sport, profession, or even forms of address, we reinforce the idea that male experience is the default, and that women exist in relation to it.

To interrogate this habit, then, is not pedantic, it is necessary. Because until language allows women to simply be, to occupy roles, titles, and identities without qualification or relational framing, the promise of equality will remain constrained not only by institutions, but by the very words we use to describe them.