My experience with internalized misogyny

Everyone, whether it be a woman or not, will have internally misogynistic thoughts. That doesn’t make you a bad person, but what’s important is that you recognize this internalized misogyny as you see it, and take steps to address it. I’ve personally come a long way with internalized misogyny. Growing up in strictly conservative and traditional Korean culture, misogynistic ideals were constantly being pushed down my throat. But as I started to think more independently and started to develop my own ideals, I told myself that I would try my best to address my internalized misogyny. Doing this was really hard, since I’ve been fed with misogynistic ideas my entire life. Every once in a while, quite often actually, I would find myself thinking misogynistic thoughts and would be very disappointed in myself for days. But one thing I’ve come to realize is that internalized misogyny is not something that will go away in a day. It takes a while. It takes time and effort.

One thing that’s helped me a lot with this is something that an instructor at summer camp told me about. Last summer, I attended Brown University’s Leadership Academy and took a Women in Leadership course. There, an instructor told me that the 1st voice in your head is what society has taught you and the 2nd voice is who you and what your ideals really are. Every once in a while I’ll see a girl and the 1st voice in my head will make a baseless misogynistic judgment of her. And the 2nd voice follows up, horrified by the first, correcting it and reminding myself that a girl can do whatever she wants and I have no right to judge her for it. We all have that 1st voice sometimes and that’s okay. We just need to keep working on it.

I just thought I’d share this for any of you guys that are struggling the way that I did. I still have misogynistic thoughts once in a while, but that doesn’t make me a bad feminist, it just makes me a feminist in progress.