The bus seats were green vinyl, sticky against the backs of our legs, smelling of floor cleaner, sweaty kids, and diesel from the engine. We had been in Jefferson City for the boys’ state basketball competition and were headed home to St. Louis. I was in eighth grade, a basketball cheerleader at a small Lutheran school where most of the kids had been together since kindergarten.
I was in the back, where the cool kids sat, with one of my best friends at the time, a boy. We sprawled in that casual teenage way: knees up on the seat in front, leaning close, talking in low voices. I knew he had a crush on me, but I wasn’t “leading him on.” By that age, I’d already lived and traveled abroad, gone to school with strangers, seen a dick or two, and had late-night slumber party make-out sessions. In a small Christian school, those details travel fast. I was cute, I knew it, and I suspect the teachers had already decided what kind of girl I was.
Somewhere on that ride, my name was called from the front. Two male teachers and a younger, female teacher were watching me. The bus was moving, but it was the 80s and no one thought twice about me walking the aisle. My classmates turned to watch.
The men stayed silent. The young teacher spoke quietly, almost like advice, but loud enough for the front rows, the “good” kids, to hear: I should not sit in the back with a boy like that, because it made me look like a whore. Like Mary Magdalene.
The word “whore” was bad enough. “Mary Magdalene” gave it a biblical frame that marked me as morally suspect. It told me that my body and choices were public property.
I returned to my seat humiliated. The point wasn’t what I was doing in that moment; it was about a narrative they had already built around me. The female teacher’s role wasn’t to protect me. It was to deliver the judgment in a way that performed like care, while the men watched.
Patriarchy works best when women deliver its messages. A rule enforced by a man can be questioned as sexist or aggressive. The same rule, voiced by a woman, slips past that first line of resistance. It feels legitimate, even protective, because it comes from someone who shares your gender. That’s the sleight of hand. Women lend credibility to male-defined orders, often believing they are helping.
On that bus, the decision for the woman to speak while the men watched wasn’t accidental. Her voice carried the optics they needed: softer than a man’s, harder to accuse of overstepping, and able to frame the warning as guidance instead of discipline. That’s what made it sting.
Religious environments sharpen this pattern. In Protestant morality, female sexuality is treated as a public moral issue, not a private relationship between a girl and her body. Women are tasked with guarding it from the moment they have any authority, formal or informal. This becomes part of the job description in schools: monitor the girls’ clothes, posture, and proximity to boys.
Girls learn early that the approval of other women is conditional on aligning with male-coded rules. The consequence is not always formal punishment; sometimes it’s exclusion, whispered reputational damage, or a quiet public shaming like mine. Over time, we self-censor, self-surveil, and anticipate the rules before they’re spoken. And when we become women, many of us inherit the role of enforcing the rules because in a patriarchal system, survival often looks like loyalty.
The mechanics are the same in nearly every institution: men set the parameters, women enforce them, and legitimacy comes from the appearance that the enforcement is mutual rather than imposed. In workplaces, a female manager tells another woman her tone is “too aggressive,” not because it is, but because she’s been taught male comfort is the baseline for professionalism. In politics, women front for policies that restrict reproductive rights, delivering sound bites that make punitive laws sound protective.
What makes this system durable is that it rarely announces itself as cruel. It often wears the language of concern: “I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea.” “I’m looking out for you.” “I’ve been there and don’t want you to make the same mistakes.” “I just care about the unborn babies.” The underlying message is the same one I heard in 1988: Your body is not yours. Your reputation is not yours. And if you want to stay safe, you will follow the rules we’ve agreed to on behalf of men.
This is not just social conditioning in the present; it is survival coding passed down over generations, an epigenetic inheritance of caution and compliance. The cost is trust. Trust between women erodes when we become each other’s monitors instead of allies.
Feminism is not about replacing men with women in the same positions of control. It is about changing the architecture of power itself. In a feminist structure, authority is not built on surveillance or the capacity to shame, but on mutual respect, consent, and accountability. Rules are written to protect people from actual harm, not to preserve appearances.
Reimagining the bus scene through this lens is simple: two kids sitting together are just two kids sitting together. No leap to sexualize them. No assumption of impropriety. If an adult feels concern, the conversation happens privately, without labels that collapse a child into an archetype. The first question is not “How do I stop her from looking like a whore?” but “Why am I interpreting this as sexual? What have I been taught that makes me see this moment through that lens?” The burden shifts from the child to the adult, where it belongs.
In a feminist world, women in authority refuse to deliver male-authored judgments under the guise of care. Legitimacy comes from challenging harmful rules, not upholding them. Success is measured not by how well we keep women and girls in line, but by how much space we open for them to exist without constant correction and criticism.
This isn’t theory.
In classrooms, dress codes can be rewritten to focus on comfort, movement, and safety for all students. In workplaces, managers can refuse to translate male discomfort into performance critiques. In communities, we can interrupt public shaming with a simple: “We don’t talk to kids like that.”
On that bus in 1988, a feminist format would have meant nothing happened. I would have stayed in the back, talking to my friend. No one would have sexualized our posture or decided the whispers about me defined my morality. And maybe I would have learned much younger that my body is my own. This change in our societal structure is worth making, not just for me back then, but for every girl now and in the future. It’s time we all begin to view our world through a feminist lens.
Now, go read bell hooks The Will to Change this instant here:
Let’s chat when you’re done!
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