“All women are victims of deception.” – Nawal Al-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

I think women are raised with a set of rules long before they are old enough to question them. I’d personally always preferred calling them cage bars.

Most of these rules are never actually said out loud. They are rather just ideas floating all around, until they start being absorbed, by most women, as facts. You notice what gets praised in women and what gets criticized; which girls are called “well-mannered” and which ones are called difficult. You watch the women around you and understand, without anyone having to explain it, what you are supposed to become.

The cage is built slowly. That is what makes it so effective. One bar at a time. A warning here, a comment there, a look of disappointment, a comparison with another girl, and a reminder that perfect girls do not behave that way. Nobody has to hand you a blueprint; because you grow up watching the women around you adjust themselves to the shape of the cage, and eventually you learn that shape by heart too.

You learn that a good woman is agreeable. She should be kind, but not so kind that people take advantage of her. Confident, but not intimidating. Ambitious, but not threatening. Beautiful, but not vain. Independent, but not so independent that nobody is needed. She should have opinions, as long as they are expressed politely enough to remain harmless. There is always a limit, and somehow women are expected to know exactly where it is.

And then the bars become so familiar that you stop seeing them.

That is probably the most disturbing part. A cage does not always feel like confinement when you have never experienced spreading your wings and moving freely. Sometimes it feels like protection. Sometimes it feels like tradition. Sometimes it feels like being a “good daughter,” a “good wife,” a “good mother,” or simply a respectable woman. The cage gets renamed so many times that eventually you forget what it actually is.

The most disturbing part is that some women spend their whole lives inside of it. They learn how far they are allowed to go and they stop themselves before they reach the edge. They choose the safer career, the quieter opinion, the more acceptable relationship, the life that causes the least amount of conflict. As if it’s a competition of who can shrink their identity better, they become experts at making themselves smaller all the time.

And society, as it’s always been, praises and rewards them for it. In fact, that is how cages have survived over the years. The woman who tolerates everything is called patient. The woman who sacrifices everything is called selfless. The woman who never complains is called strong. The woman who makes everyone comfortable is called good.

Meanwhile, the woman who starts pushing against the bars suddenly becomes the problem.

She is difficult. Selfish. Cold. Disrespectful. Too ambitious. Too independent. Too much.

It is remarkable how quickly a cage becomes invisible when the woman inside it is obedient, and how quickly it becomes obvious when she starts trying to leave.

And leaving is rarely dramatic. Sometimes it begins with noticing the bars. You start asking why the rules exist in the first place. Why is his anger strength while hers is instability? Why is his ambition admirable while hers is intimidating? Why is his independence attractive while hers is threatening? Why does she need to explain why she does not want marriage or children, while he is allowed to simply state that he does not? Why is a woman's refusal treated as a personal insult?

The more questions you ask, the more bars you notice.

Then comes the uncomfortable realization that some of the things you thought were simply your personality may have been just adaptations you developed in order to survive the cage without going insane. Maybe that girl was loud and opinionated when she was young. Maybe she just learned that speaking too much had consequences. Maybe she wasn’t naturally selfless. Maybe she learned over time that her needs were less important. Maybe she wasn’t naturally patient, not before they taught her that anger made women unattractive.

The trick is that the cage does not only control what women do, it teaches them to control themselves.

And this is why I do not think the answer is simply to tell women to “be themselves.” That sounds nice, but how are you supposed to know who you are when so much of your identity was built around being acceptable? Before a woman can decide what she wants, sometimes she has to figure out which desires are actually hers and which ones were installed in her by everyone around her.

Because a cage can be beautiful. It can be decorated with family photographs, traditions, compliments, religious language, expectations, and good intentions. It can be warm. It can be familiar. Everyone around you can tell you that you are lucky to have it.

Yet, it’s still a cage. And the most dangerous thing you can do to a caged person is to teach them to decorate their cage so beautifully that they can no longer recognize the door.

The idea behind this article was born, in part, from the books that first taught me to look at women’s lives through the image of this cage: Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. They are very different books, written in very different circumstances, but they all left me with the same uncomfortable question: how much of a woman’s life is actually hers to choose? I believe every woman should read at least one of them in her lifetime, not because they offer answers, but because they make you question the answers you were given.