Celebrating International Womens Day
THE BLOOD MOON
In the early hours of March 3, 2026, the sky above Barcelona glowed in strange colors—orange, pink, and deep red stretching across the darkness.
It was three in the morning.
March third.
Above the city, a lunar eclipse had turned the moon the color of blood.
At the top of the hill overlooking Barcelona stood Montjuïc Castle, a seventeenth-century fortress that has watched centuries of violence unfold beneath its walls. Over the years it has served as a military stronghold, a prison, and a place where political prisoners were executed during some of Spain’s most turbulent periods.
Locals will tell you the place carries a reputation after dark.
There are stories of visitors hearing footsteps echo through the stone corridors when no one else is there. Others claim to have seen movement near the ramparts long after the gates have closed for the night. Rumors circulate about people wandering the fortress after midnight and leaving quickly, unsettled by the feeling that the hill remembers more than it reveals.
It is the kind of place that feels different in the middle of the night.
That night, Sultana had climbed to the peak with a man she had met only hours earlier.
The next day she told me the story while we were getting ready for a girls’ night out. She stood in front of the mirror applying mascara, still half amused by the whole experience.
“Girl,” she said, eyes wide, “was it stupid to go to a haunted castle at three in the morning with a stranger?”
I laughed.
“You do realize what night that was, right?” I told her.
She paused.
“Three in the morning. March third. Under a blood moon. And exactly three hundred and thirty-three years ago tonight the Salem witch trials were beginning.”
She stared at me for a second before breaking into a grin.
“Well,” she said jokingly, leaning closer to the mirror as she finished her mascara, “maybe I’m a witch.”
We both laughed.
But the coincidence lingered longer than the joke.
Because in 1692, in the Puritan settlement of Salem, Massachusetts, accusations of witchcraft erupted into one of the most infamous moral panics in American history: the Salem Witch Trials.
The punishments were brutal.
Nineteen people were hanged from wooden gallows on Gallows Hill. One man, Giles Corey, was slowly crushed to death beneath heavy stones after refusing to enter a plea in court. Prisoners were locked in dark, freezing cells for months while awaiting trial, often chained to the walls or floor. Several died before their cases were ever heard.
The majority of the accused were women.
And the reasons they were accused could be astonishingly arbitrary.
A woman might be accused for owning property, for living alone as a widow, for assisting childbirth as a midwife, for practicing herbal medicine as a healer, for arguing with her neighbors, for speaking too freely, for refusing a man’s advances, or simply for intimidating the men around her. A woman could be targeted for not attending church regularly, for having too many children—or for not having children at all. Poverty could make a woman vulnerable to accusation, but wealth and independence could also invite suspicion. Even beauty itself could become dangerous if men believed a woman’s body was too enticing or too powerful.
Sometimes the accusation came from nothing more than a bad harvest, a sick child, or a dream someone claimed to have had the night before.
In other words, almost any woman could become a witch.
The word did not simply describe supernatural power.
It became a label for women who lived outside the expectations placed upon them—women who possessed knowledge, independence, sexuality, influence, or simply the wrong kind of presence.
Salem was only one moment in a much longer pattern.
Across centuries and cultures, women who stepped outside the narrow roles assigned to them have often been labeled dangerous, immoral, unstable, or unnatural.
And few aspects of womanhood have been more heavily misunderstood or stigmatized than the realities of the female body.
It begins to reveal a troubling pattern.
In Salem, the qualifications for being accused of witchcraft often seemed remarkably simple: possess a uterus and become inconvenient.
A woman who spoke too freely. A woman who owned property. A woman who refused a man’s advances. A woman who simply existed outside the narrow expectations placed upon her.
In many ways, being a woman itself could become the accusation.
As if the female body carried an original suspicion—something powerful, unpredictable, and therefore something that needed to be controlled.
Few parts of the female body have carried that suspicion more persistently than menstrual blood.
RECLAIMING THE TABOO
If menstruation has long been treated as something to hide, artists like Jasmine are doing the opposite.
They are placing it directly in front of us.
Jasmine creates paintings using her own menstrual blood as a medium. The work is intimate, personal, and intentionally confrontational. For some viewers, the reaction is immediate fascination. For others, it is discomfort—sometimes even disgust.
The reaction itself reveals something important.
Menstrual blood is not foreign to the human experience. Half the population experiences it for decades of their lives. And yet the sight of it—outside the context of medical diagrams or discreetly packaged hygiene products—can still provoke a powerful emotional response.
Today is International Women’s Day, a moment dedicated to celebrating women’s achievements while also confronting the systems that have shaped their lives. Jasmine’s work arrives directly within that conversation, challenging one of the oldest cultural taboos surrounding the female body.
Her art asks a simple but unsettling question: why has something so biologically fundamental been treated with so much discomfort?
For Jasmine, the answer begins with reframing what menstruation actually represents.
“The womb literally prepares every month to create life,” she explained. “The blood is the physical evidence of that creative capacity. Even when no child is conceived, the body still moves through this powerful cycle of preparation, release, and renewal.”
Using that blood in art, she says, is a way of acknowledging that creative force instead of discarding it.
“It’s a way of saying this is not waste. This is part of the creative intelligence of the body.”
When she said it, the idea landed like a light switching on in a dark room.
Menstrual blood is often framed as something inconvenient—something to manage, conceal, and dispose of quickly.
But biologically, it represents the opposite.
It is the body preparing itself for creation.
“The womb prepares every month to create life. The blood is the physical evidence of that creative capacity”.
Jasmine
For centuries, however, many cultures moved in the opposite direction, framing menstruation as something impure or shameful. The female cycle became something to conceal rather than something to understand.
Historically, that was not always the case.
In some cultures, menstruating women gathered together during their cycles in communal spaces often referred to as the Red Tent. These spaces functioned as temporary retreats where women rested, cared for their bodies, groomed one another, and shared stories.
Anthropologists have observed that when women lived closely together in community, their cycles often synchronized over time. Entire groups of women would menstruate around the same period of the lunar month.
The Red Tent became a time of pause.
Women were not expected to labor, work, or carry the responsibilities of daily life. Instead, they rested, tended to their bodies, shared food, exchanged stories, and basked in a kind of sisterhood that modern society rarely makes space for.
It was a rhythm of life built around the female body rather than in opposition to it.
When people first encounter Jasmine’s work, however, the reaction is often complicated.
Some women feel immediate fascination. Others instinctively recoil. Many hover somewhere between curiosity and discomfort.
Jasmine recognizes that tension immediately.
“I think many women are absolutely caught between those two polarities,” she told me. “Curiosity and conditioning.”
On one hand, there is something deeply instinctive about the reaction.
“There’s something in us that recognizes menstrual blood as meaningful,” she explained. “Even if we can’t articulate it, there’s a part of the body that knows it’s connected to fertility, cycles, and creation.”
On the other hand, many women have spent their entire lives being taught to hide it.
“We grow up in cultures where menstruation is treated as embarrassing or taboo,” she said. “We’re taught very early to hide it, to clean it quickly, to never let anyone see it.”
When those two forces meet—instinct and conditioning—the response can feel conflicted.
Fascination.
Discomfort.
Curiosity.
For Jasmine, the process of working with menstrual blood eventually dissolved much of that tension.
“In a strange way, working with it in art has actually made me feel more grounded in my body,” she said. “It removes a layer of shame that many of us carry without even realizing it.”
And when women see that reflection somewhere—whether in art, conversation, or community—it can open a door.
A door to questioning the narratives they’ve inherited about their own bodies.
A door to recognizing that the instinct to look closer may not be something to suppress at all.
It may be something biological.
Something the body already understands.
THE BODY
The discomfort surrounding menstrual blood runs deeper than cultural taboo. It extends into how society has understood — and misunderstood — the female body itself.
For something so biologically ordinary, menstruation has carried an astonishing amount of cultural discomfort.
Across centuries and cultures, menstrual blood has been treated as impure, dangerous, or shameful. Women have been instructed to hide it, manage it discreetly, and pretend that a fundamental biological rhythm does not exist.
The irony is difficult to miss.
Menstrual blood is not a wound.
It is evidence that the body is capable of creating life.
Yet in many modern societies, girls are introduced to menstruation not through
education about the complexity of their bodies, but through embarrassment. A quiet conversation in a bathroom. A box of pads handed over discreetly. Instructions to make sure no one notices.
What is rarely explained is what the menstrual cycle actually represents.
Roughly every twenty-eight days, the female body moves through a complex hormonal sequence that prepares the uterus for the possibility of pregnancy. When fertilization does not occur, the uterine lining sheds and the cycle begins again.
That twenty-eight-day rhythm closely mirrors another natural cycle humans have observed for thousands of years.
The moon.
The lunar cycle, from new moon to full moon and back again, lasts approximately twenty-eight days. Long before modern endocrinology mapped hormonal shifts in the body, cultures around the world noticed the resemblance between the rhythms of the sky and the rhythms of women’s bodies.
And yet today, many women are taught remarkably little about how these cycles function.
Gynecologist, women’s health advocate, and author Karen Tang says the most common issue she encounters is surprisingly simple: many women do not know what is normal.
“The one thing that I hear so often,” Tang told me, “is that it’s unclear what’s normal and what’s not.”
She says this confusion is especially common when it comes to pain.
“It’s been so normalized for people to think that everyone has terrible periods,” she explained. “That everyone experiences excruciating pain or heavy bleeding. But that’s absolutely not the case.”
Dr. karen tang
Because of this normalization of suffering, many women delay seeking medical care for serious conditions such as endometriosis, uterine fibroids, and polycystic ovary syndrome.
“They assume it’s just part of being a woman,” Tang said.
The knowledge gap extends beyond menstruation.
In her work, Tang frequently encounters patients who reach their late thirties or forties without understanding the basics of fertility.
Karen Tang, MD, author of It’s Not Hysteria: The Truth About Pelvic Pain, Period Problems, and Your Gynaecologic Health.
“I’ve had women come in who didn’t realize that egg number and quality decline with age,” she said. “They tell me they wish someone had explained these things earlier.”
The reason, she believes, lies in how reproductive health is taught.
When students learn about pregnancy in school, the focus is almost always on prevention.
“Sex education tends to focus on how not to get pregnant,” Tang said. “But there’s very little education about how pregnancy actually happens, how fertility works, or what happens to our reproductive health as we age.”
Basic biological facts—such as the small window in which conception can occur—often remain poorly understood.
“Many people don’t realize there are only one or two days in a cycle when pregnancy can occur,” Tang explained. “Or that sperm can live inside the body for up to five days.”
These gaps in knowledge can have profound consequences for how women understand their own bodies.
And when that understanding is missing, the menstrual cycle itself becomes easier to dismiss as an inconvenience rather than recognize as a complex biological rhythm.
In recent years, some women have begun reexamining their relationship with their cycles. Instead of ignoring hormonal fluctuations, they pay closer attention to how their energy, creativity, and focus shift throughout the month.
Personally, I began structuring parts of my life around my cycle about eight months ago.
During the week of my period, I intentionally rest. I step away from work where possible and allow my body to slow down. Throughout the rest of the month, I adjust my diet and physical activity depending on which phase of my cycle I am in—leaning into lighter movement and nourishment during certain weeks and more intense activity during others.
The shift has been surprisingly noticeable.
I am far more aware of my cycle than I used to be. My periods have become gentler. I feel mentally clearer, more connected to my body, and over the past several months I’ve also shed roughly twenty pounds of excess weight.
More importantly, my relationship with my body has changed.
It feels less like something I need to manage or push through and more like something I am learning to work with.
At the same time, I recognize that this kind of adjustment is not a reality for many women.
My schedule is unusually flexible. I work for myself as a writer and artist, and my work currently allows me to live in Europe with a degree of autonomy over my time. For many women—especially those working fixed schedules, raising children, or navigating economic pressures—structuring life around the menstrual cycle simply isn’t possible.
Even in medical discussions of “cycle syncing,” gynecologist and women’s health advocate Karen Tang notes that the concept can sometimes be unrealistic in practice.
Modern work systems were not built around the rhythms of the female body.
For most women, the expectation remains the same: perform consistently every day of the month, regardless of the hormonal and physiological shifts taking place internally.
Which raises a deeper question.
What might society look like if the rhythms of women’s bodies were understood rather than ignored?
And what might change if girls grew up learning not only how to avoid pregnancy, but how their reproductive biology actually works?
Those questions sit at the center of many new conversations surrounding women’s health.
For centuries, societies have attempted to regulate the female body while understanding remarkably little about it.
Menstruation, pregnancy, sexuality, and menopause have all been framed through lenses of superstition, fear, religion, and later medical misunderstanding. The female body was studied, categorized, and often controlled by institutions that were almost entirely male.
The result was a strange contradiction.
The biological process responsible for creating human life was simultaneously revered, feared, and silenced.
Even today, the lingering discomfort surrounding menstruation reveals how deeply those cultural narratives still shape the way women experience their own bodies.
And it is precisely within that tension—between biology and cultural conditioning—that artists like Jasmine begin asking new questions.
That misunderstanding did not remain confined to cultural taboos or social expectations. It eventually became embedded in the institutions that claimed to study and treat the female body.
For much of modern history, medicine itself became one of the primary places where those misunderstandings were formalized.
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When Medicine Called Women Hysterical
For centuries, when women complained about their bodies, they were not believed.
They were dismissed.
Overreacting.
Emotional.
Or perhaps the most infamous diagnosis in medical history: hysterical.
The word itself reveals the bias embedded in early medicine. It comes from the Greek word hystera, meaning uterus — the same root that appears in the modern medical term hysterectomy.
Gynecologic surgeon, women’s health educator, and author Karen Tang explains that the connection is not accidental.
“The word hysteria comes from the word for uterus,” Tang told me.
“For so much of human history, women’s physical health and their mental and emotional health have all been tied together.”
Tang explores this history in her book It’s Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told), which examines how centuries of misunderstanding surrounding gynecological health have shaped the way medicine treats women today.
If a woman reported pain, exhaustion, mood changes, or discomfort in her body, those symptoms were rarely treated as medical problems.
Instead, they were often interpreted as emotional instability.
“If women complain about problems with their bodies and their health,” Tang explained, “it gets chalked up to anxiety or overreaction.”
The theories that followed would be almost comical if they had not shaped real medical practice for hundreds of years.
Ancient Greek and Egyptian physicians believed the uterus could literally wander through the body. This theory, known as the “wandering womb,” blamed the uterus for fainting, nervousness, insomnia, anxiety, and nearly any symptom a physician could not otherwise explain.
The idea was that the uterus, deprived of pregnancy, would begin roaming through the body like a restless animal.
For centuries, men who had never experienced a menstrual cycle confidently constructed elaborate theories about how women’s bodies worked.
Treatments were equally strange.
Doctors recommended fragrant oils placed near the vagina to lure the uterus downward while foul odors were placed near the nose to repel it away from the chest — an attempt to guide the wandering organ back into position.
Medicine built not on evidence, but imagination.
By the nineteenth century, the theories had only become stranger.
Victorian physicians began diagnosing hysteria as a catch-all disorder applied to women experiencing everything from fatigue to sadness to sexual frustration. Even behaviors that simply challenged social norms could be labeled pathological.
Women who were outspoken.
Women who were depressed.
Women who were sexually expressive.
Women who were simply tired.
All could be diagnosed as hysterical.
And the treatments were invasive, humiliating, and often bizarre.
One of the most common medical “treatments” involved physicians manually stimulating female patients to induce what doctors described as a “hysterical paroxysm.”
Victorian physicians believed hysteria was caused by a build-up of nervous energy or fluids in the female reproductive system — a kind of internal pressure that supposedly needed to be released.
Doctors referred to the result as a “hysterical paroxysm” — a conveniently clinical phrase that allowed them to avoid using the far simpler word: orgasm.
By describing the response as a medical reflex rather than a sexual one, the entire practice could be framed as legitimate treatment.
We can probably guess what that supposed “build-up of fluid” actually was.
Ironically, the treatment became so common that physicians began complaining about the physical labor involved. Performing the procedure manually could take significant time and effort, particularly when doctors treated multiple patients in a day.
In the 1880s, British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville developed one of the first electromechanical vibrators, originally intended to assist doctors in performing these treatments more efficiently.
What began as a medical tool meant to relieve physicians of the labor involved in inducing “hysterical paroxysms” would eventually become one of the most recognizable devices associated with female pleasure.
But the strange medical theater surrounding women’s bodies did not stop there.
Another technological innovation was quietly emerging alongside these practices.
Photography.
During the nineteenth century, as cameras were initially used in scientific and medical research, physicians began photographing women diagnosed with hysteria. Patients were staged in dramatic poses meant to visually capture the supposed symptoms of the disorder.
These images circulated among doctors and medical students as teaching material.
Women’s bodies became visual evidence.
Cataloged.
Studied.
Displayed.
As a photographer myself — someone who has worked both under modeling agencies and as a photographer for brand campaigns — this history creates an unsettling kind of lightbulb moment.
It raises a difficult question about where our visual culture began.
Why are advertisements so often obsessed with beauty, youth, sexuality, and the female body? Why has the female form become such a central subject in visual storytelling?
And it made me wonder something else as well.
Whether the roots of photography being such a historically male-dominated field might also trace back to these early scientific traditions — where men controlled the lens, and women were placed in front of it as subjects to be observed, studied, and interpreted.
During my philosophy and critical thinking coursework in university, I wrote an academic paper exploring this exact question — examining the early history of photography and its relationship to the objectification of women, pornography, and the advertising industry’s enduring fixation on beauty and youth.
It remains a theory.
But the parallels are difficult to ignore.
If nineteenth-century medicine turned women’s bodies into objects of study and spectacle, modern culture has simply found new ways to display them.
And some women are refusing to play that role quietly.
One of them is Sultana.
REFUSING TO SHRINK
For most of history, the female body has rarely been allowed to simply exist. Instead, it has been treated as something dangerous — something to regulate, conceal, and control. Women were taught to feel shame about their bodies, to see them as objects of sin rather than sources of life. They have been studied, diagnosed, photographed, judged, and often punished for stepping outside the narrow roles society assigned to them.
Which is exactly why the story of Tana Habibi — or more personally known as Sultana — feels so radical.
Sultana is a plus-size model, content creator, and cultural disruptor who has built a following by doing something surprisingly simple: refusing to shrink. Today she walks runways, travels the world creating content, and models for fashion brands — including working as an official model for Fashion Nova.
But her story begins somewhere very different.
Miami Swim Week , Getty images
Sultana grew up in Saudi Arabia, where girls are expected to begin covering their bodies once they reach puberty. For her, that moment came when she was only ten years old.
“I hit puberty really early,” she told me. “And once that happened I had to start covering from head to toe.”
The shift was abrupt. One day she was a child, and the next she was being told her body needed to be hidden.
“Why as a child do I have to cover up and be ashamed of my body?” she remembered thinking.
The explanation she was given was protection. But reality complicated that narrative almost immediately.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten sexually assaulted in Saudi,” she said. “Completely covered. Wearing a hijab and the abaya. It doesn’t matter.”
Sultana
Men would grab private parts of her body — often in public spaces, and often while she was still a developing girl. Being fully covered did not stop it.
The experience shattered one of the most persistent myths used to police women’s bodies: that modesty prevents harassment.
It didn’t.
The problem had never been what women wore. The problem was men who felt entitled to women’s bodies.
Sultana’s story also complicates another stereotype often repeated in Western conversations about Islam. The religion itself, she explained, actually places enormous value on women.
In the Quran and Islamic teachings, mothers are revered with extraordinary emphasis. One well-known teaching repeats the honor of the mother three times before even mentioning the father:
First your mother.
Then your mother.
Then your mother.
Then your father.
The message is clear: women — particularly mothers — are to be honored, protected, and respected. The reverence exists within the religion itself.
What often distorts that message, Sultana says, is culture — specifically patriarchal interpretations shaped and enforced by men. The problem is not Islam. The problem is what happens when male-dominated societies reshape religion into a system of control over women’s bodies.
And when that happens, the burden of men’s behavior is placed onto women.
What they wear.
How they move.
How they exist.
Sultana’s experience exposes the flaw in that logic. Even when she was fully covered from head to toe, men still felt entitled to her body.
The reality she describes is not unusual. Globally, data from the World Health Organization estimates that nearly one in three women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. In the United States, research compiled by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center shows that more than 80 percent of women report experiencing some form of sexual harassment or assault during their lives.
And yet the cultural conversation still so often centers on women’s behavior: what she was wearing, where she was walking, why she was alone.
The scrutiny rarely begins with men.
The imbalance reveals something deeper than individual behavior. It reveals a system — a patriarchal framework that has historically placed responsibility for male actions onto women’s bodies while simultaneously shaping the standards those bodies are expected to meet.
Even the industries defining modern beauty have not been immune to that contradiction.
One of the most powerful figures behind some of the world’s most influential beauty and lingerie brands — including Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works — was billionaire retail magnate Leslie Wexner, whose long and controversial association with Jeffrey Epstein later became part of the broader investigation into Epstein’s network of power and influence.
The irony is difficult to ignore. For decades, companies like Victoria’s Secret helped construct the visual blueprint of modern femininity — marketing hypersexualized images of women while society simultaneously demanded that women remain modest, pure, and respectable.
A contradiction psychologists have long described as the Madonna–whore complex.
Women are expected to exist in two incompatible roles at once: pure, nurturing, respectable — but also beautiful, seductive, and endlessly desirable.
The moment a woman steps outside the narrow space between those expectations, the system reacts.
Sultana experienced that reaction firsthand.
For years she tried to conform to the beauty standards she believed the world would accept. She straightened her naturally curly hair. She forced her body into a smaller frame. She followed the aesthetic dominating social media — long hair, sculpted makeup, a tightly controlled body.
And she was miserable.
“I was the most insecure I had ever been,” she said.
At the time she was surviving on roughly five hundred calories a day while exercising nearly three hours daily — cardio, dance, weight training — everything required to maintain the body she believed she needed to become.
But something inside her kept resisting.
It didn’t feel natural. It felt like pretending.
“I felt like I was cosplaying someone that I wasn’t.”
Before modeling, Sultana had trained as an engineer — a disciplined and demanding career path. At the time she was also a size six, fitting neatly within the beauty standards society tends to reward.
Yet she had never felt more disconnected from herself.
The turning point came when she stopped forcing her body to become something it wasn’t. Instead of fighting it, she allowed it to settle into its natural form — curvaceous, full, expressive.
The result was unexpected.
The confidence she had been chasing for years finally arrived.
So did the opportunities: runways, brand campaigns, and a rapidly growing audience.
The blessings in her career appeared only after she stopped abusing her body and began honoring it.
Today Sultana carries herself with the energy of someone completely at home in her own skin. She has a bubbly, almost theatrical personality — the kind of person who might suddenly burst into song, twirl in a dress, clap her hands together and laugh.
“Oh my God, I’m so hot!”
She giggles as she says it, delighted with herself.
But the confidence is not universally welcomed.
Sultana is criticized constantly — for her fullness, for her confidence, for the way she dresses, and for the fact that she is an Arab woman refusing to hide herself. Online she receives death threats nearly every day.
In public, the harassment can be just as blatant.
Men will openly record her walking down the street. Others feel entitled to touch her body. On one recent night walking together, when she calmly rejected a man’s advances, his reaction was immediate: he insulted her body, calling her fat and ugly — moments after trying to pursue her.
Women react differently. Some approach her with excitement, celebrating her style and confidence. Others look at her with visible discomfort — caught somewhere between admiration, curiosity, and rejection.
Perhaps because a woman who refuses to shrink forces people to confront something uncomfortable.
The rules they have always believed about women’s bodies might not actually be true.
And perhaps the most radical part of Sultana’s story is not her career.
It is her relationship with herself.
Her body is no longer something she fights.
It is something she listens to.
Something she celebrates.
And in a world that has spent centuries trying to control women’s bodies, that kind of self-trust can feel revolutionary.
THE MATRIARCH
Sultana’s story may feel personal — one woman reclaiming her body, her confidence, and her place in the world.
But stories like hers rarely exist in isolation. They exist inside systems. And to understand why a woman refusing to shrink can feel so disruptive, we have to look at the structures that have shaped expectations around women for centuries.
At its core, patriarchy is not just one single system.
It can look like a political structure, a religious institution, a workplace hierarchy, a cultural expectation, or even a beauty standard. It can exist in laws, traditions, economic systems, and social norms. But it can also live within us — in the beliefs we hold about ourselves, the way we allow bosses, partners, family members, or friends to treat us, and the expectations we internalize about how women should behave, age, or exist.
Patriarchy is not simply a political theory or a modern ideological talking point. It is an invisible structure that has shaped societies for centuries — one that has repeatedly attempted to regulate the feminine.
At its core, patriarchy has always revolved around control: control over women’s bodies, control over reproduction, and control over knowledge. Because if women fully understood the power of their own biology, the balance of power in society might look very different.
In the most literal sense, women are the bridge between worlds. Every human being who has ever existed entered this planet through the same portal — the female body. Life passes through it. Generations pass through it. It is the threshold between spirit and earth, between potential and existence.
In provocative terms, the portal is between our legs.
And perhaps that is precisely why societies have spent centuries trying to regulate it.
Because if the female body is the gateway through which humanity continues, then women are not simply participants in creation.
They are the creators.
Nature itself offers striking examples of what happens when societies organize around the feminine. In many animal systems — from elephant herds to certain primate groups to honeybee colonies — matriarchs guide the community. Bee societies, for example, revolve around a queen and an entire network of female workers who build, protect, and sustain the hive. These leadership structures often prioritize cooperation, collective memory, survival, and the protection of younger generations.
The logic is simple: those who bring life into the world tend to value its preservation.
Women are biologically wired to protect the next generation. Our bodies prepare for creation every month. Our instincts prioritize safety, nourishment, and continuity. Yet human societies have often moved in the opposite direction, constructing systems that remove authority from the very bodies responsible for creating life.
Religion has often played a role in shaping that narrative. In the story of Eve, humanity’s downfall is blamed on a woman who dared to eat from the tree of knowledge. But what if that moment was never about sin? What if it was about awakening? What if the story was not meant to shame curiosity, but to warn about what happens when knowledge disrupts existing power structures?
Crowning by artist Esther Strauss, displayed at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz, Austria, sparked controversy for portraying the Virgin Mary experiencing the physical realities of childbirth. Some critics argued that, according to certain theological interpretations, Mary would not have experienced labor pain because she was free from orginal sin. The sculpture was later vandalized, its head removed.
Throughout history, women who held spiritual or political authority were often discredited through accusations about their sexuality. Jezebel, a queen and religious figure in the Hebrew Bible, later became synonymous with promiscuity despite the text itself focusing primarily on her political and religious influence. Mary Magdalene was labeled a prostitute for centuries even though the New Testament never actually describes her that way. Cleopatra, one of the most powerful political leaders of the ancient world, was reframed by Roman propaganda as a seductress rather than a strategist. Even figures like the temple priestess Shamhat in the Epic of Gilgamesh are often mistranslated in modern retellings as prostitutes when their roles were likely sacred or ceremonial.
Again and again, when women step into positions of influence, their authority is not simply challenged — it is sexualized, discredited, and reduced.
Today, women are once again disrupting those structures — not only politically or economically, but personally.
Across the world, more women are pursuing higher education than ever before. Women are stepping into leadership roles, building companies, shaping culture, and defining their lives outside the traditional expectations that once positioned marriage as the central goal of womanhood.
Many are also redefining motherhood itself.
Some are freezing their eggs, choosing to delay pregnancy until they are ready. Others are choosing to become mothers independently, using sperm donors instead of tying the decision to marriage or long-term partnership. For the first time in modern history, large numbers of women are able to separate motherhood from the expectation of being partnered with a man.
It raises an uncomfortable question for systems that have historically depended on controlling women’s reproductive timelines.
If women fully understand their biology — if they know when they are fertile, how their cycles work, and that motherhood no longer has to be tied to marriage or male partnership — the traditional structures built around controlling women’s bodies begin to weaken.
Perhaps the deeper fear has never been women’s sexuality.
Perhaps it has been women realizing how much autonomy their biology actually gives them.
There is another pattern that appears throughout history as well. Systems built around patriarchy have often favored women who appear young, naïve, compliant, and sexually inexperienced. Youthfulness, virginity, and innocence become the most socially acceptable forms of femininity — because they are the easiest to control.
A woman who has not yet lived enough life to question authority is easier to guide. Easier to influence. Easier to mold.
But maturity changes things.
An educated woman begins to question what she has been told. A woman who understands her body begins to recognize manipulation. A woman who has lived long enough to see patterns begins to develop boundaries.
The veil begins to lift.
And once that veil lifts, the illusion becomes harder to maintain.
Women begin to question systems that once felt unquestionable. They begin to claim authority over their own lives. They begin to lead, influence, and shape the world around them.
Which may explain why so many cultural narratives are obsessed with keeping women forever young.
Because youth can be guided.
But wisdom cannot.
When women begin reconnecting with their bodies, something profound begins to shift. When we treat our cycles with tenderness instead of shame, when we protect our sexual energy instead of offering it cheaply, when we allow our bodies to mature without apology, the mirror begins to reflect something entirely different.
Grey hairs appear. Lines gather around the eyes — traces of laughter, experience, and understanding. Bodies soften and change. Breasts grow fuller, hips widen, bellies curve with warmth and life.
And instead of hiding these changes, we begin to recognize them for what they truly are.
Not flaws.
Not something to erase.
But visible proof of a life lived deeply.
The physical evidence of wisdom we have earned.
We look at our reflection and realize that every line, every grey hair, every change in our body carries something that was not given lightly.
We earned this wisdom.
And once a woman sees herself this way, something shifts that systems of control have always feared.
A woman who knows herself is very difficult to control.
Human societies have long assumed men are the natural leaders of families and communities. But when we examine the environments where men most often operate, a different pattern emerges. The most traditionally “macho” spaces — military units, corporate hierarchies, fraternities, religious institutions, competitive sports — are environments built around approval structures, ranks, and validation from other men.
Men often thrive in systems where leadership must be recognized and reinforced within hierarchical groups.
Biologically and historically, men have been hunters, builders, and protectors.
Women, on the other hand, have traditionally shaped the environments those efforts support. Women create the home. Women cultivate harmony. Women nourish communities. Women raise the next generation.
Leadership in human society has never been as simple as domination.
It has always required balance.
Authority does not mean women should dominate men. It means women should be honored. Admired. Protected. Treated with reverence — the way something sacred is treated. It can look like chivalry: doors opened, flowers given, gestures of care, admiration, romance, and protection.
At its healthiest, it looks like honoring the feminine and allowing her to exist fully in her sovereign place — however she chooses to live it. Whether that is as a leader, a creator, a mother, an artist, a scholar, or something entirely her own, the role itself should be hers to define.
A healthy masculine understands this instinctively. A grounded masculine does not feel threatened by feminine power. He respects it. He protects it. He provides for it.
But when masculinity becomes wounded or disconnected from its purpose, something else begins to happen.
A man who feels unable to fulfill his instinct to protect, build, or provide can begin searching for masculinity in other places. Sometimes that search manifests as domination, aggression, or control. Sometimes it appears as the pursuit of endless validation through conquest, status, or meaningless sex.
History has shown us this pattern repeatedly.
When masculine identity becomes insecure, the feminine is often the first thing that gets suppressed.
Biology itself quietly reminds us of another truth.
In the earliest stages of development in the womb, all human embryos begin from the same fundamental biological blueprint. Only later in development, if certain genetic signals are triggered, does that blueprint shift and develop male characteristics.
In other words, life begins from a female template.
And long before a woman is born, the eggs she will carry already exist inside her mother’s womb. When a grandmother is pregnant with her daughter, the cellular beginnings of her future grandchildren are already present.
Three generations — grandmother, mother, and future child — existing simultaneously within the female body.
A living lineage carried through women.
Perhaps that is why knowledge of the female body has so often been suppressed.
Because knowledge leads to recognition.
And recognition leads to power.
Before you assume this article is a call for man-hating feminism, let me clarify something.
I am not a feminist.
Feminism fought for equality between men and women — and every woman today should honor the generations who fought for those rights.
But perhaps that was only the first step.
Perhaps the next step is remembering something older.
Something deeper.
Something written into biology itself.
I am not a feminist.
I am the matriarch.
Perhaps the women society has called witches — and still calls witches — are simply women in touch with their God-given gifts.
Because the future of humanity has always begun in the same place.
With women.
And perhaps that is why the feminine has been feared, suppressed, and misunderstood for so long.
What if the divine does not look like a father watching from above?
What if the divine looks like a mother creating from within?
What if God is the Mother?
Interviews
Jasmine Alicia Carter
Artist exploring menstruation and the female body as creative mediums
Instagram: @jasminealiciacarter
Dr. Karen Tang, MD
Gynecologic surgeon, women’s health educator, and author of It’s Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told)
Instagram: @karentangmd
Tana Habibi (Sultana)
Model, content creator, and body-positivity advocate
Instagram: @queenofhabibiss
Sources & Further Reading
Historical Context — Witch Trials and Women’s Persecution
• Schiff, Stacy. The Witches: Salem, 1692. Little, Brown and Company, 2015.
• Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. W.W. Norton & Company, 1987.
• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.
Women’s Health and Reproductive Medicine
• Tang, Karen. It’s Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told). Flatiron Books, 2023.
• American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). Research and public education on menstrual health and reproductive biology.
• National Institutes of Health (NIH). Research on reproductive health and menstrual cycles.
Medical History — Hysteria and the Female Body
• Maines, Rachel P. The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
• Scull, Andrew. Hysteria: The Biography. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Visual Culture, Photography, and the Female Body
• Sekula, Allan. The Body and the Archive. MIT Press.
• Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. University of Minnesota Press.
Gender, Beauty, and Cultural Narratives
• Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. HarperCollins, 1991.
• Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press, 1986.
Religion and Women in Islamic Tradition
• The Qur’an.
• Sahih al-Bukhari. Hadith literature emphasizing the honor of mothers in Islamic teachings.
• Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam. Yale University Press, 1992.
Global Data on Violence Against Women
• World Health Organization (WHO). Violence Against Women Prevalence Estimates.
• National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC). U.S. data on sexual violence and harassment.
About the writer
Nessa Apostol is a journalist, photographer, and painter whose work explores culture, history, and the evolving narratives of womanhood. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Forbes, and Elle, and she currently serves as ItchySilk’s Global Feature Editor, covering stories around the world through documentary storytelling and long-form feature writing.
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