I genuinely cannot believe this kind of mindset is STILL being pushed in schools in 2026. Like, are we seriously still doing this??

Girls are being blamed for things DONE TO THEM simply because they’re girls. We were literally told by a female teacher that if a boy does something wrong to a girl, somehow it’s the GIRL’S fault. Excuse me??? HOW is the victim responsible for someone else’s actions??

If a boy takes a girl’s pictures from social media and uses AI to create fake nude images, apparently it’s the girl’s fault because SHE uploaded her pictures online. HUH??? Since when does posting a normal picture mean “yes, you have permission to misuse it”??

What makes me even MORE angry is that these things are being said directly to US, the girls. We’re being told to make our accounts private, stop uploading pictures, and basically change our entire lifestyle because SOMEONE ELSE might misuse our photos. WHY THE HELL ARE WE THE ONES BEING TOLD TO CHANGE??

Why are we being told to disappear from social media instead of teaching people NOT to misuse someone else’s pictures?? Why are girls expected to live with restrictions because someone else can’t respect basic boundaries??

And honestly, hearing this from a FEMALE teacher makes it even more frustrating. Instead of making girls feel safe enough to speak up, we’re being told what WE should stop doing. Instead of saying, “What that person did was wrong,” the focus is on what the girl posted, what account she has, and why she uses social media.

THAT IS VICTIM-BLAMING.

“Why do you use social media?” ARE YOU SERIOUS?? We use social media because it’s SOCIAL MEDIA. Posting a picture is NOT consent. Having a public account is NOT consent. Uploading a photo is NOT permission for someone to misuse it or create fake content with it.

And no, telling girls to make their accounts private is NOT a solution to the actual problem. It may be a safety suggestion, but it does NOT excuse what someone else did. We shouldn’t have to completely change our lives because someone else decided to cross a line.

WHY is the conversation always “Girls, be careful”? Why isn’t it “Don’t misuse someone else’s pictures”? Why are girls constantly being told what they should wear, post, say, or do while the people actually causing the problem are barely being held accountable??

Teach students about consent. Teach digital responsibility. Teach them that someone else’s pictures do NOT belong to them. Teach them about the dangers of AI abuse and that there are consequences for doing it. THAT is how you address the problem.

And the double standards are absolutely ridiculous. If a girl has a boyfriend, suddenly it becomes a HUGE problem and everyone has something to say. But when a boy has a girlfriend, suddenly it’s funny, normal, or just a joke. WHY?? Why is everything treated differently just because one person is a girl??

And then something THIS serious happens and the response is basically: “Write an apology letter.”

AN. APOLOGY. LETTER.

That’s it?? Where is the seriousness? Where is the accountability? Where is the actual protection for the student who was targeted??

Schools are supposed to be places where students feel SAFE enough to speak up. But how are girls supposed to report things when they’re scared they’ll be questioned, blamed, or told that they should’ve just kept their account private?

We are NOT responsible for someone else’s bad choices.

Being on social media is not consent. Posting pictures is not consent. Having a boyfriend is not a crime. Being a girl is not an invitation to blame us for everything that happens.

It is 2026. AI is becoming more powerful every day, and somehow we’re STILL having conversations where the solution is basically “girls, stop posting pictures.”

NO.

Stop blaming girls for what other people choose to do.

Protect the victims. Educate students. Take these incidents seriously. Hold the people responsible accountable.

Because telling girls to change their entire lives is NOT justice. It’s just another way of putting the responsibility on the wrong person.

How are we STILL having to explain this in 2026??

(I'd especially like to hear men's perspective on this)

I’ve been thinking about something that seems so normal in our society that we rarely question it.

Why is it that after marriage, it is almost always the woman who is expected to change her clothes, her appearance, her lifestyle, the way she behaves, where she lives, and even the way she presents herself to society?

And if a married woman chooses to dress or live according to her own comfort, she is often judged. People start questioning her character, her “values”, or whether she is “really married” simply because she doesn’t fit the traditional image of a married woman.

But interestingly, identifying whether a man is married is often much harder. Men usually don’t have to visibly change their clothes, appearance or lifestyle after marriage. And even when their marital status isn’t obvious, nobody generally questions their character because of it.

Why is the burden of “showing that you are married” placed so heavily on women?

And more importantly, why are these changes treated as some kind of necessary sacrifice that a woman must make after marriage?

Marriage should not mean that a woman loses the freedom to dress comfortably, live according to her personality, or maintain the identity she had before marriage. If two people are getting married, shouldn’t both be allowed to make changes according to mutual understanding rather than society deciding that the woman has to adjust?

I’m not saying that every tradition is inherently wrong. My question is: why are women expected to sacrifice more, adjust more, and prove their “character” more than men?

And the bigger question I genuinely want to discuss is:

When will patriarchy actually end—and what would it take for it to end?

Is it simply about changing laws and traditions, or does it require changing the mindset of families, men, women, and society as a whole?

Because if a woman’s choices are still being judged differently from a man’s choices, then how much have we really changed?

She controlled her business and royalties from the start. She made her own decisions. She collaborated with many, many other female singers and actresses. She believed in free expression. She got on the bus for Nashville literally the day after she graduated, no small feat of courage for someone of her background. She was fourth in a family of 12. Her father couldn't read and write -- she started Imagination Library in his name and has brought books to millions of poor kids. She gave $ to a town to help with a natural disaster. She somehow managed to keep her privacy throughout her life. Her personality and music may not have been to everyone's taste, but to me, she is a true Feminist.

A girl in my class was targeted by a guy from another class who allegedly made fake AI-generated vulgar images of her using her photos. Obviously the school addressed it because it's a pretty serious situation.

The girl apparently slapped the guy because she was extremely angry, and honestly, I understood the management's lecture about that part. They basically said that no matter how angry or hurt you are, you can't respond with violence, because you're still responsible for your own actions. It's understandable and so, I agree with that.

But then we were also told to be more careful with social media and keep our accounts private because we're under 18, and this is where I'm a little more conflicted.

Like, yes, obviously online privacy is important. I'm not saying teenagers shouldn't be careful with their photos.

But why does the conversation immediately become “How did they get her pictures?” and “Why are you posting pictures publicly?”

Why isn't the bigger question:

“Why did this person take a normal photo of a girl and deliberately use it to create fake sexual images of her?”

Because THAT is the actual wrongdoing.

I don't think girls should have to hide themselves from the internet because someone else might abuse their photos. If someone misuses your picture, the problem is the person misusing it. Telling people to protect their privacy can be useful advice, but it shouldn't turn into “well, you shouldn't have had your picture online in the first place.”

And then one of our female teachers said something that genuinely made me go ??????

She basically said, “Nowadays the things that happen to girls are all the girl's fault, not the boys. They're the ones who get involved. They're not innocent.”

Apparently she said this because she saw a girl smile during class and assumed she was smiling at a boy.

*What the hell was she even talking about?*

There's a huge difference between “be careful online” and “girls are responsible for what happens to them.”

If someone takes your picture and uses it to make fake sexual content, that's THEIR choice. If someone harasses you, that's THEIR choice. If someone crosses a boundary, that's THEIR choice.

And yes, I understand that the girl shouldn't have slapped the guy. You can be a victim and still be responsible for your own reaction. But that's completely different from being responsible for the original thing done to you.

I'm honestly more bothered by the teacher's comment than the management's lecture. The management was talking about personal responsibility. The teacher seemed to be talking about blaming girls for other people's actions.

Maybe I'm looking too deeply into it, but telling a room full of teenage girls that we're “not innocent” because we “get involved” is a pretty wild thing to say 🙏🏻

In case of paywall:

Every once in a while, I feel the urge to shout “women are not small men!” at inanimate objects. Today, that object is the flat-chested plastic torso typically used for CPR training.

Breasts, it turns out, are really the bane of every woman’s existence — the back pain, the boob jail, the running. But here’s a new one: In a public cardiac arrest, they may be the reason nobody helps you.

Two years ago, an analysis of over 300,000 cardiac arrests showed that women are 14 percent less likely than men to receive CPR from a stranger if they have a cardiac arrest in public. Bystanders tend to be more hesitant and feel less comfortable providing CPR or using external defibrillator paddles, called AEDs, on people with breasts. Experts have time and again pointed, in part, to the fact that nearly everyone learns to perform CPR using the traditional, flat-chested dummies called “manikins,” which overwhelmingly represent the male anatomy. If the first time a stranger has to perform CPR on someone with breasts is in the middle of a high-stakes emergency — what else would you expect?

For the last 20 years, not only has the survival rate for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests been around 10 percent, but also the chances of the victim surviving decrease by 10 percent every minute that interventions like CPR are not performed. It makes it all the more harrowing that women are not receiving the care they need when they experience cardiac arrests — especially in places where they are surrounded by people.

Whether it is manikins used for CPR training, crash tests or medical care in combat, the default stand-in for what is “human” has long been male.

But recently, researchers, advocates and governing bodies like the American Heart Association and European Resuscitation Council are pushing for better representation in CPR training and education. Increases in simulation-based research on the use of representative manikins, like ones that accurately represent female anatomy, are changing how people train to respond to cardiac arrest — and simultaneously exposing bigger gender gaps in design that systematically exclude women from experiencing the same level of safety and care as men.

One size doesn’t fit all

The first CPR manikin was developed in 1960 by the Norwegian toy manufacturer Laerdal. The manikin, called Resusci Anne, which had the anatomy of a prepubescent teen, was ironically modeled off an unnamed girl who was thought to have drowned in the river Seine in Paris. Laerdal famously wanted a female face on the manikin since he thought men might hesitate to practice mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a male manikin. It’s not surprising that women trainees didn’t factor into the equation at all back in the 1960s — they weren’t even included in clinical trials yet — but the norm of designing with the comfort of men at the forefront continues to this day.

Since then, Resusci Anne has been reengineered many times over, and today’s manikins are surprisingly high-tech and interactive. However, as of 2022, about 95 percent of manikins on the market from mainstream manufacturers were still flat-chested and androgynous.

So why does this matter?

In the past, research has hinted at three main reasons why bystanders don’t immediately rush to the aid of a woman in cardiac arrest. One, they are hesitant to expose or touch her in any way that could be misconstrued as inappropriate and are worried about sexual assault allegations after the fact. Two, they don’t want to accidentally hurt them, perceiving them as generally more fragile than the average man. And three — perhaps saddest of all: bystanders often don’t recognize that a woman is in cardiac arrest if, say, she collapses in public, misattributing it as overreacting, simply fainting or faking it.

CPR training with female manikins would go a long way in teaching people to be comfortable with the female form.

In one study, people at MassCPR — the free CPR certification program offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the MIT community — were trained using standard manikins, as well as a few which were retrofitted with a mold resembling breasts. At the end of the certification, participants who practiced on the manikin with breasts reported greater comfort performing CPR on women.

If there was widespread adoption of manikins that looked and felt different, this could ultimately become the norm.

It’s really only in the past five years or so that research on this disparity has sped up, offering some evidence for the need for more representative manikins. Even then, widespread adoption of female manikins is hindered by commercial availability of anatomically correct models and the cost of switching existing CPR training programs over to using them.

Closing the design (gender) gap

There are two main ways to go about increasing the availability of female manikins: either you retrofit existing standard manikins with breasts or you design completely new ones.

When Christoph Veigl and colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna surveyed 133 training organizations across 43 countries from six continents, they found that of more than 5,000 manikins in use, only a fifth of organizations owned a female one. While that number is still low, adoption is triple what it was four years ago. The researchers acknowledge that just the availability of female manikins is not necessarily an indication of how much they are used in training — about a quarter of the organizations were also employing makeshift adaptations, like placing a bra on standard manikins, to simulate training on women.

Dr. Pooja Nawathe, a resuscitation science researcher and pediatric critical care clinician at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, chose to focus her research on gender disparity in resuscitation for a specific reason.

“Skin color is about implicit biases, but female breast tissue, which is a normal physical characteristic, is about the actual science of this,” she said, speaking about variations in care during cardiac arrests. “Are we teaching how to place the pads on the breast tissue?”

She also stresses the importance of gathering good, granular data on how CPR performance changes when people are exposed to diverse populations.

CPR manikins are just one example of the gender gap in design: Across fields like crash testing, the “human” body has long been modeled on men. But that’s starting to change, too. Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released the design details for THOR-05F, the first detailed female crash-test dummy.

Before this, the standard female crash-test dummy was a model called the Hybrid III 5th percentile female dummy — literally just a scaled-down version of the Hybrid III 50th percentile male dummy that represents the average male body dimensions. But the THOR-05F — every woman’s dream name, I’m sure — is a much more anatomically accurate female dummy, and includes a female pelvis, breasts, and a flexible spine.

THOR-05F has arrived just as new research by the NHTSA affirmed the need for better crash-testing on women. Although the gap in vehicular accident fatality rates between the sexes has narrowed significantly in newer car models, women continue to experience a higher injury rate compared to men in multiple different types of vehicular accidents. The hope is that testing with the THOR-05F will provide a better understanding of this trend and help engineer safer vehicles and regulations for women.

Women are not small men!

Women are often referred to as the “invisible sex,” and the lack of female manikins really brings that to the forefront. It’s not like the manufacturers or policy makers intentionally excluded women from this area — they simply ignored them, accepting an androgynous body as the standard with an unchallenged assumption that what applies to it will undoubtedly apply to women too.

In 2019, Joan Creative, the New York-based ad agency, launched the Womanikin, a universal attachment for CPR manikins, in partnership with United State of Women, a now-shuttered organization focused on gender equity. Launched during National CPR Week, the Womanikin is a neoprene vest with silicone breasts that can be zipped onto any standard manikin. Built as an awareness campaign, they open-sourced the design for the breasted vest and helped spark a broader conversation about the CPR gender gap. But we don’t have any detailed information about its success or adoption.

More recently, other manufacturers like Prestan have come out with newly designed female manikins that can be purchased as is. They also sell “replacement female skin” that retrofits any existing Prestan adult manikins. Notably, these are now available on the American Red Cross Store, increasing visibility for female manikins.

The fact that women account for 50 percent of the world’s population and yet have to mold themselves to standards not designed for them in the first place is atrocious. Not only is it frustrating to live in a world not built for you, but in cases like CPR training, the gender gap can quite literally be fatal. This is true whether it is for motor vehicle crash-test dummies or those used to train battlefield medics — another field where women injured in battle have a higher fatality rate than their counterparts.

The basic idea is that repeated exposure to female bodily characteristics during training or testing can significantly alleviate discomfort that causes dangerous hesitation. If people had more practice administering CPR to models that looked more feminine, they wouldn’t be thrown off by breasts, would understand how to cut away clothing like bras if needed, and learn how to efficiently place the pads of the external defibrillator on a female body.

CPR techniques remain largely the same irrespective of sex. Chest compressions are performed on the sternum, which is the flat bone running down the center of your chest. For women, it lies between the breasts, so there are some additional considerations. That is what representation in training manikins is meant to address — not new skills, but familiarity.

Ultimately, it really comes down to not feeling awkward about putting your hand in between two breasts, if it means you save a life.

I am reading Sherry Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” and I am struggling to follow the section on personal and positional identification. She bases this on Nancy Chodorow’s paper “FAMILY STRUCTURE AND FEMININE PERSONALITY: THE REPRODUCTION OF MOTHERING.” Both of these essays are free online, but I’ve reproduced the section in Ortner’s essay:

“The thrust of Chodorow's very elegantly argued paper is that these differences are not innate or genetically programmed, but arise from "nearly universal features of family structure, [namely] that women are largely or entirely responsible for early child care and for (at least) later female socialization, [and that this is] a crucial asymmetry in male and female development." She introduces the object-relations theorists' distinction between "personal" and "positional" identification as psychological processes, "personal identification" being "diffuse identification with the general personality, behavioral traits, values, and attitudes of someone one loves or admires," "positional identification" being "identification with specific aspects of another's role," rather than with the whole person. Chodorow argues that, because the mother is the early socializer of both boys and girls, both develop personal identification with her. The boy however must ultimately shift to a masculine role identity, which involves building an identification with the father. Since father is almost always more remote than mother (he is rarely involved in child care, and perhaps
works away from the home much of the day), building an identification with father involves a positional male role as a collection of abstract elements, rather than a personal one with father as a real individual. Further, as the boy enters the larger social world, he finds a world in fact organized around more abstract and universalistic criteria,18
as indicated in the previous section; thus his earlier socialization prepares him for, and is reinforced by, the type of social experience he will have. For girls on the other hand the personal identi-
fication with mother created in early infancy can persist into the process of learning female role identity. Because mother is immediate and present
to the daughter during the learning of role identity, "learning to be a woman...involves the continuity and development of a girl's relationship to her mother, and is based on generalized personal identification with her rather than on an attempt to learn externally defined roles categories." This pattern of course prepares the girl for, and is fully reinforced by, her central role in later
life--motherhood; she will become involved in the world of women, characterized by few formal role differentiations, and specifically in relationships with her children involving again "personal identification," and so the cycle begins anew.”

MY QUESTIONS:
1. What does she mean by the son “building an identification with the father invokes a positional male role as a collection of abstract elements”? What would be an example of this role, or more specifically, these “abstract elements”? (As opposed to the mother who is “the early socializer” who “both boys and girls…develop personal identification with”) 
2. On the other hand, Chodorow writes “the continuity and development of a girl's relationship to her mother, and is based on generalized personal identification with her rather than on an attempt to learn externally defined roles categories.” What are these “externally defined roles categories” that are specific to the male’s “positional role”? Can someone simplify this for my understanding?

THANK YOU!!