I read an article this week written by a woman, titled “To my fellow women, this is how you deserve to be treated”, and the first thing that came to my mind was ‘stop’. I’m tired of women telling other women what they deserve and how they should be treated, especially when it comes to romance. As if there is one universal criteria for every woman, as if we all want the same thing. If that’s not bad enough, if a woman partakes in an activity that isn’t ‘deserving’ of her, it is seen as degrading, beneath her and lacking in self-respect.

I think you deserve the right to make whatever choices you want to make, and to do whatever makes you happy. If what you want is a boy to bring you roses and chocolate then you deserve to have that, because it is what you want. But if what you want is a one night stand from a random guy you met at a bar, then you deserve to have that too. The worst part is, all these articles are the same. ‘To my fellow women, you deserve to have a guy who doesn’t just spend a night, but spends a morning’. ’To my fellow women, you deserve a guy who cooks your favourite waffles for breakfast. Please, don’t settle for the man who texts you at 3am, you are more than a body’. Well what if I just want to be a body? It’s the idea that all the other women in the world think that they know some hidden worth of yours, and they are trying to get you to see it. The notion that you are worth more than you think is a nice one, but the idea that you diminish your worth if you make decisions that are ‘beneath you’ is not exactly empowering. We talk about how something like slut-shaming has no place in our modern society, but this is shaming in another form. You are propagating the idea that the decisions we make affect our worth, and saying that if we do something that’s not on the list of things we deserve, then we are diminishing our worth because we are not acting in accordance with it.

If there needs to be a list of things that women deserve, I don’t think any of them have to do with how a guy should treat them. It bothers me that someone writing ‘an open letter to my fellow women’ only talks about what we seemingly deserve in regards to men. Whereas there are so many other, more pressing rights to be talked about. Here’s my list: women deserve equal wages, women deserve a right to their own body, whether that be a right to an abortion or a right to sleep with as many people as she wants without judgement. Women deserve to be treated equally to men, and at a basic level, the only thing women, or anyone truly deserves is a right to live their life exactly the way they want to.