A note on systems that ask women to earn gentleness.
There are systems that do not announce themselves as violent. They wear the language of order, tradition, and purpose. They promise belonging, protection, and meaning—but only after the body proves itself useful.
I have learned that many structures are not interested in who you are. They are interested in what your body can do: what it can produce, what it can endure, what it can be reshaped into.
Affection, in these systems, is conditional. Attention is provisional. Safety is something you are allowed only as long as you remain palatable. The rules are unwritten but absolute.
When a woman’s body is positioned as evidence rather than self, intimacy becomes transactional. Care becomes something that can be withdrawn without explanation. Silence becomes a survival skill mistaken for grace.
The Crack in the System
What unsettles these systems most is not refusal, but authorship. The moment a woman begins to act in quiet alignment with herself—without asking permission or announcing her intentions—the rules begin to crack. This is the kind of reckoning that cannot be undone.
Researchers studying gender and power dynamics have documented how institutional structures often depend on women’s self-surveillance and compliance. The psychological weight of conditional belonging creates what scholars call “the performance of acceptability”—a constant negotiation between authentic selfhood and prescribed roles.
There is a difference between transformation imposed and transformation chosen. One demands compliance. The other restores agency.
Reclaiming Authorship
I am no longer interested in belonging that requires self-erasure. I am not negotiating my worth with anyone who only sees me after they have taken what they wanted.
This shift, from proving worthiness to claiming inherent value, is what bell hooks described as “moving from object to subject.” It’s the work of feminist consciousness that happens both collectively and in profound solitude.
What I am becoming does not ask to be evaluated. It exists with or without witnesses. And that, I have learned, is where real power lives.
The journey toward this realization is rarely linear. It involves recognizing patterns, questioning inherited beliefs about what we owe to systems that never truly protected us, and ultimately trusting that our inner knowing deserves more authority than external validation ever could.
On Building New Systems
Once you see how conditional belonging operates, you cannot unsee it. You begin to notice it everywhere: in relationships that only value you when you’re useful, in spaces that demand you shrink to fit, in ideologies that promise community but require conformity.
The alternative is not isolation, but intentionality. It’s building connections based on mutual recognition rather than transaction, creating spaces where bodies are not asked to prove anything before they are granted dignity.
This is the work I’m exploring here at Theory in Velvet—how we move through the world when we stop performing for systems that were never designed to hold us whole. If you’re navigating similar questions about identity, autonomy, and resistance, I invite you to explore more essays throughout the blog.
If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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