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Trapped Within Sexism

(Trigger Warning)

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze,” (Atwood, p.165).
-The Handmaid's Tale

            When a rat is in a maze it believes it is free. It thinks because it can move around it is no longer in a cage, when in reality it is still trapped. Sexism has been a continuous maze in our society, and folks, it is still here. We are still holding up those elaborate walls to the kingdom patriarchy and just because we almost had a female president doesn’t mean woman are equal, it means women are just now being allowed to move around. Pharr (2001), “Sexism, that system by which women are kept subordinate to men, is kept in place by three powerful weapons designed to cause or threaten women with pain and loss,” (p. 143). These weapons include economics, violence, and homophobia, (Pharr, 2001).
Holding up Sexism
Keep wages, education, and training opportunities scarce and withhold adequate paying jobs with the excuse that women are just not capable of filling them. Reinforce the illusion of equality and scarcity, explain there simply just isn’t enough to go around.
             “Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some,” (Atwood, p.211). 
-The Handmaid's Tale

“Blame the economic victim and keep the victim’s self-esteem low through invisibility and distortion within the media and education, (Pharr, 2001). Continue the threat of mental and physical violence lurking around every corner to keep fear in the back of her mind, and the conformation of dominance and superiority in his. Demand irony, and demand that a woman must protect herself from the violence of men, with a man of her own, and if she rejects this, label her as a refusal of man and normality, as inferior, a bitch, as abnormal, as a freak, as a lesbian. One prisoner to another. 
References
Atwood, M. (1985). New York: Anchor Books.

Pharr, S. (2001). Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism. In Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (5th ed.,      pp. 143-152). New York: Worth.

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