Herstory.

Baby girls barely old enough to walk are now being tempted to run, before they've even turned one.
Every day tells the same tired sex sells story, through magazine covers
and the media's attempt to make a woman feel as if she should be sorry.
Forced to apologize for her lack of feminine charms,
unless she has too much and becomes a target for masculine harm.
It cannot be unlearned once it's embedded in a child's tiny mind,
that beauty is all that matters, so one must never fall behind.

Plumpers and polishes, push-up bras and pearls
are just a sample of what is needed in order to be a real girl.
Despite all the advancements and steps taken in the fight for women's rights,
they are told it will all have been in vain without a man at home to warm her bed at night.
False standards and phony ideals result in eating disorders in the race for sex appeal.
Airbrushed models that are impossibly thin, lead so many teenage girls to strive for unattainable perfection.

As male counterparts are taught to hunt and provide,
women learn to cook and rear children but never how to survive.
Failed by a society that is sickly obsessed with looks,
no beauty pageant was ever won based on a contestant's love for books.
In developing nations, the birth of female progeny is considered a curse,
often leading to infanticide by parents ignorant to a woman's worth.
These same societies refuse to send their girls to school, afraid that knowledge is power that creates women that are impossible to control.

The wage gap in the west only succeeds to press the notion that men are truly best,
earning more on every dollar and often doing less.
Daughters of Eve are still being punished for her original sin,
kicked down more times than lifted up for having the misfortune of being born a woman.
Patriarchs and feudal lords alike always seem to forget,
the mothers who raised them that are now repaid with disrespect.
Misogyny has run rampant and is now an epidemic, the byproduct of years of oppression that has always been systemic.

History itself has focused on the victories of men,
even though there have been just as many triumphant, powerful women.
I pray for a world where gender roles cease to exist,
one in which discrimination between the sexes has been dismissed.
I still have hope that one day women are no strangers to equality
and are no longer victims of abuse or frivolity.
Female lives matter, a new generation of girls is on the rise, and they will not be silenced until the world has heard its cries.
What better time than now for mankind to realize
that the women we objectified for so long should only ever be prized.