Breaking the Rules: Can't Fight the Patriarchy on an Empty Stomach

From the moment a girl enters the world, she begins absorbing the unspoken rules that govern how women are expected to behave. These rules rarely appear in writing, yet their presence is unmistakable. They are embedded in magazine headlines, social media trends, school dress codes, fitness culture, workplace dynamics, and even the tone of casual conversations. Be polite. Be thin. Be accommodating. Don’t be too loud, too opinionated, too confident, too hungry...in any sense of the word.

Modern womanhood is shaped by a system that rewards compliance and punishes autonomy. Women are praised for being self-disciplined, quiet, emotionally contained, and physically small. We are conditioned to conflate our worth with how little space we take up. This is not coincidence. It is a deeply entrenched sociocultural framework designed to maintain power dynamics that benefit from women being distracted, undernourished, and overextended.

To rebel against this conditioning is not simply a matter of personality or preference, but is a political act. It is about choosing to live in a way that honors one’s full humanity in a society that often demands self-erasure. And unlike the stylized depictions of rebellion we see in movies or advertisements, real-life rebellion is far more personal and far less glamorous.

It looks like eating enough food to fuel your body in a culture obsessed with restriction. It looks like raising your voice in a room that prefers you stay silent, or declining to perform likeability at the expense of your integrity.

This kind of rebellion is uncomfortable, because it challenges the implicit social contracts women are expected to uphold. When you stop shrinking yourself (physically, emotionally, professionally, relationally, and so on and so on) you become harder to control. You stop being the version of womanhood that makes others feel comfortable. And that, for many people, is threatening. But the discomfort of other people is not a valid reason to remain small.

The pressure to shrink is compounded by race, class, disability, sexuality, and body size. White, thin, cisgender women are often held up as the default and are most rewarded for adhering to these cultural scripts. Women of color, fat women, disabled women, and queer women face additional layers of surveillance, dehumanization and exclusion.

Understanding the full weight of this system requires acknowledging that the rules were never neutral. They were constructed within a cultural framework that privileges whiteness, thinness, able-bodiedness, heteronormativity and wealth. Women who do not or cannot conform to these dominant ideals are not just pressured to shrink butthey are penalized for existing outside the mold. For them, visibility often comes with a cost: greater scrutiny, reduced access to care, economic marginalization, and increased exposure to violence or systemic neglect. And so being small, invisible or shrinking becomes a survival skill.

This is why any conversation about rebellion must move beyond individual empowerment and into a collective effort that champions ALL women. When women begin to see the water they've been swimming in, they can begin to question why they were taught to fear hunger, ambition, or rest in the first place. They can start to recognize that what they have been told is “self-discipline” may, in fact, be self-denial. That “confidence” often comes only when it doesn’t make others uncomfortable. That “professionalism” too often means deference to male authority. Once we see through the depths of insanity that is diet culture, we realize we have the ability to stop playing the game...And we can then stop "treading water", put our feet down and simply walk out.

Education plays a critical role in this awakening. Understanding the mechanisms of gender socialization, body surveillance, and the commodification of femininity allows women to disentangle personal struggles from moral failings. You are not weak for struggling with body image in a society that profits from your insecurity. You are not dramatic for feeling unseen in healthcare settings that dismiss women’s pain. You are not broken, you are reacting to systems that were built without you in mind.

To rebel is to name these dynamics out loud. It is to opt out of performative perfection. It is to define success, health, and power on your own terms, not the ones handed to you by industries that thrive on your dissatisfaction.

And we MUST create safe spaces for women to discuss and explore these topics.

Rebellion doesn’t always begin with grand gestures. Often, it starts quietly, with a shift in internal dialogue: choosing nourishment over restriction, curiosity over shame, kindness over punishment, truth over appeasement. These are small, radical acts of refusal that, when repeated and shared, begin to unravel the culture of control from the inside out.

When women stop measuring their value by how much they can endure, and instead begin to ask what it means to truly live in alignment with their values, something shifts. Not just within the individual, but across communities. Because one woman’s rebellion against silence, against shrinking, gives others permission to do the same.

And that is how change begins.

So eat up! We can't fight the patriarchy on an empty stomach.