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At nineteen years of age I have come to realize that we women no longer need men to oppress us or expect us to act in a certain manner as females. We no longer need them to stereotype or brand us as "whores" etc. because we seem to do most of that now ourselves.
Growing up in Ireland in a matriarchal family I was never persuaded into taking on any stereotypical female gender role. My mother is the head of our family, as was her mother, her grandmother and all of her sisters with their respective families. She is the decision maker and the provider. She goes to work and brings in the bigger paycheck, while my father stays home, cooks, cleans and takes care of my younger sisters and also works as an electronic technician from home. That's how it was when I was younger, so my male and female role models were not exactly typical.

Primary school was more or less the same. I attended a mixed school, we weren't separated by gender for anything including sports and PE, even in male dominated sports and it wasn't that we were "allowed" to participate with them; we just did as though there was no difference. We weren't given special treatment as females either, we went out there and played it as roughly as the boys did, if they hit us, we hit back and we were reprimanded and punished for fighting regardless of what gender was on the giving and/or receiving end of the attack.

So luckily I grew up with the mentality that I was always on a level playing field as men, that I was entitled to all the same things, had the same opportunities available to me and that I wasn't entitled to special treatment because I was a female. Special treatment is not "equality"; it's being treated as a second-class citizen. Treated as though you don't know any better or as though you can't handle it yourself. Some might say having such a belief would leave me unprepared for the real world' but on the contrary it ensured that any self esteem issues I developed later in life were not rooted from the knowledge that because I was born a female I shouldn't expect to succeed in life without a male at my side.

However, it was in secondary level education that I came to know the "real world". I observed that girls, not boys, are the primary users of words such as "slut", "whore", "bitch" and "harlot". It is, in fact, girls who promote low self-esteem in other girls, it is girls who make it unacceptable to enjoy sex as a female, girls who berate and degrade themselves and

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