Growing up in Northern California is an experience I wish everyone could have. I have yet to find another place with such an overwhelming amount of genuine encouragement and acceptance, whether it be for ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community or, in the case of this particular spiel, women.

I need to start off by saying that my high school never had any major problems with drama or bullying, so I hadn’t really experienced truly judgmental people (particularly those types of people who are overly critical of women) until I got to college. I was always told that people in college weren’t trying to be all up in everyone’s grill like people did in high school, but I realized very quickly that everyone who had ever told me that could not have been more wrong. College students are just as keen (if not more so) to meddle in the private lives and personal decisions of others, and on many occasions I have had the unfortunate experience of hearing comments made both to and about my fellow college women (by men and by other women) that are inconceivably more cruel than anything that I had ever heard before I got to college. Women who choose to live outside the scope of society’s norms are often lead to believe that they should be ashamed of who they are. These frequent and harsh criticisms have become a prevalent sociological issue among young women in recent years. As a college student who often experiences this problem firsthand, I feel that I must take this opportunity to let my somewhat closeted yet quite impassioned feminist persona out of her cage for a bit to speak on it.

Let’s start off with something that, at this point, we should all be aware of already. It is never, I repeat, never OK to slut-shame any female in any way at all. Not if she’s skinny, not if she’s curvy. Not if she wears black eyeliner and fake eyelashes or tight dresses and stilettos. Not if she dances like a stripper when she’s at the bar on a Friday night, and not even if she’s texting a lot of different guys at one time (read: sleeping around a bit more than other girls do). Not ever. The world has always had a very singular view of what a “proper” woman should and should not be. She must always be submissive because the man is the only one capable of being the boss. She must always keep her opinions to herself because the only ones that carry any value are those of a man. She must not have any visible tattoos, because people will think that she is a degenerate with failures for parents. She must always look and act demure and innocent, never provocative. And of course, my personal favorite: She must never, ever, ever engage in any kind of casual sex, because she’s supposed to be saving herself until marriage, or at the very least for someone she’s actually dating. Doesn’t it all sound a little bit silly when you say it out loud?

Perhaps the biggest disappointment surrounding this that it’s now 2016 (twenty-f***ing sixteen) and we still have such stringent expectations for how a woman should look, think and act, and we react with swift and sure negativity whenever someone dares to deviate from those expectations. If a woman is unreserved and brutally honest, people will say she's a bitch. If she’s slept with more men than she can count on one hand, she’s a whore. If she dates a man with a lot of money or status, she must be a gold-digger. If she wants to have her own career and her own money and not need to depend on a man, she no longer deserves any man’s time or love. Major reality check here: We claim to be a culture that places extremely high value on personal liberties, yet we turn a blind eye to the fact that young women are constantly being told that they are free to be themselves if and only if they fit a very precise, very unrealistic mold. Am I the only one who thinks this doesn't make any sense? Seriously, people, we need to open our eyes to these problems. Forget the scalding cups of coffee with extra shots of espresso that we drink every morning. A hot, steaming mug of the truth is what we really need to wake ourselves up, and I'm about to give you your first taste.

College women of planet Earth, I'm here to tell you there is absolutely nothing wrong with being open about your perspectives and opinions of the world. There is nothing wrong with putting on that short, tight dress and those 5-inch heels and showing off that body that you spend hours in the gym every week working for. There is nothing wrong with having tattoos. There is nothing wrong with being in touch with yourself physically and there is no right or wrong way to satisfy your sexual needs, whether it’s with one man, or multiple. It’s time for us as a society to stop putting women down for wanting to be themselves instead of trying to fit exactly into the accepted mold. If a man says what he’s thinking, shows off his body, or brags about sleeping with multiple women at a time, you can bet your life and everything you own that no one is going to give his actions a second thought.

To everyone out there who actually supports these ludicrous double standards: I think you and I both know it’s time for them to end, and it’s also time for us to realize that whether we're comfortable with the idea or not, women are our future. Not just the future of this country, but the future of our entire world. A century ago, women were not even allowed to vote. Now there are more women than men who are going to college and an extremely high percentage of those women are continuing on to graduate school and becoming doctors and lawyers and accountants and politicians. Women have made an unbelievable, almost impossible, amount of progress since the days of (and prior to) the suffrage movement. Though there is still plenty of progress left to be made, I find it hard to wrap my brain around the fact that there are some people in this world have seen how powerful of a force women are becoming and are still doing everything they can to try and take them down. Just because they would rather make their own choices than live by someone else's rules? Hmm.

And now another very important PSA for all my college ladies. We have to stop calling each other sluts and bitches and tearing each other down, because if we do not support each other, nobody will. We have to stop hiding who we really are or who we want to be simply because somebody thinks we should look or act a different way than we do. We have to stop being afraid to have our own individual voices. We have to stop letting society step all over us, and show the world that we have the strength to stand in solidarity and fight back against every wildly impractical benchmark of what people think a woman should be. And above all else, we have to remember this: Whether people are judging us for being curvy or thin, promiscuous or prude, shy or outspoken, the truth is that each one of us is in one way or another, absolutely beautiful, inside and out. We each have a right to feel confident about who we are, and we cannot allow anyone to make us feel self-conscious or guilty for being the person we want to be. Long overdue wake-up call here: Using tampons and wearing a bra do not make us any less of a person or any less deserving of someone’s respect. It’s 100 percent OK to speak up and stand out and not be the cookie-cutter woman that society expects you to be. There is absolutely no one on this planet that has the authority to tell you what being a woman does and does not entail, and we must not let anyone believe even for a second that they do.

So my darlings, I leave you now with a challenge. A challenge to keep standing tall and strong, and to keep building your empire with the stones that people throw at you. Regardless of every ridiculous standard that society tries to make us adhere to, we are all queens in our own right and as such, we must let the rest of the world know that we will not be restricted by any parameters that we did not create for ourselves. We deserve to live on our terms and our terms alone and anyone with the nerve to even try and tell us otherwise is the one who truly needs to be ashamed.