Hey,

Girls learn to be lovable before they’re taught to be honest.
Boys learn to be strong before they’re even held.
And, then we wonder why grown people struggle to love each other without the performance.

#Edition71 is about that tragedy of being trained into a role, then punished for wanting to be human outside it.

Inside this Edition:
👉 What We Lost Trying To Be “Real” Men And Women…
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

Women are one of patriarchy’s biggest casualties, but not because men are free. 

Nobody calls out conditional training when it is happening.
We call it manners, discipline, growing up, “boys will be boys.” or “good girls behave better.” But slowly, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, people stop becoming themselves and start becoming acceptable.

Season 3 of the House of the Dragon feels just… so sharp right now. 

Behind all the dragons, crowns, wars, and bloodlines, it is a story about people trapped inside inherited roles. Rhaenyra cannot simply hold power. She has to prove she deserves what men are born assuming. Alicent is swallowed by duty, sacrifice, religion, motherhood, and the performance of being “a good wife.” And the men are not exactly free either. So many of them are raised to confuse violence with strength, inheritance with identity, and emotional silence with control.

Tragedy is not just that everyone wants the throne.
Tragedy is… that nobody knows who they would be without the script.

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” And, that line still stuck with me because so much of gender is taught before it is chosen. We’re taught to become emotionally useful, be kind, beautiful, but not vain.

And the world does not just expect this care emotionally. It organizes life around it. UN Women says women do 2.5 times more unpaid care work than men. That is a system pretending to be nature.

Men are handed another script.
Be strong. Be in control. Provide. Win. Do not fold. Do not ask too much. Do not say too much. Do not feel too visibly. Or loudly.

Research on children’s emotional expression shows that biology and socialization both shape how boys and girls learn to express emotion, with girls often encouraged into more visible emotional expression while boys are pushed toward less of it. The APA has also written about how restrictive definitions of masculinity can limit boys and men from building their own healthier ideas of identity and emotional life.

So years later, two people meet in love, friendship, family, work, marriage, and everywhere else.
One has been taught that being needed makes them valuable.
The other has been taught that needing anyone makes them weak.
One over-explains. One shuts down.
One carries the mood. One says “I’m fine.”
One cares. One feels pressured.
And, eventually, both are lonely.

Patriarchy’s quietest trick is that it does not only divide men and women, it teaches them to misunderstand each other.

A “real woman” is often just an exhausted woman with good manners.
A “real man” is often just a lonely man who learned to make silence look like strength.

And maybe healing begins when we stop associating conditional training with gender, care as just women’s work, and vulnerability as weakness.

Before society called us real men or good women, we were just people.
Wanting to be understood without auditioning for love.

I wonder: who would we become if we were finally allowed to be human inside it?

💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.

🌿 Explore: @wildandfreenaturecrafts
Women having some Me-time in the midst of nature, making things with their hands, learning old skills, and managing anger with curiosity-filled ways – healing does not always look like skincare and candles. Know more at wildandfreenaturecrafts.co.uk
🧶 Shop: @poisonappleknits by @volkameniia
These tops feel like they refuse to explain themselves.
What I love is that they don’t tell you how to be worn. They leave room. Anyone could pull them into their own world — masc, femme, messy, delicate, sharp, soft, whatever.
🎬 Watch: Thirteen (2003)
This movie follows a teenage girl who is not “bad” so much as desperate to become someone worth noticing. She later finds girlhood that feels like freedom until it starts looking like self-destruction. It is not an easy watch, but it understands that sometimes the performance starts before a girl even knows she is performing.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

🌸 Endometriosis Tests Get Faster: Two rapid endometriosis tests are set to roll out on the NHS in England and Wales, aiming to cut years-long diagnosis delays for women whose pain has too often been dismissed.
🤰 The C-Section Choice Gets Personal: A new essay pushes back on the judgment women face for choosing caesarean birth, especially after UK maternity scandals exposed failures around safety, consent, and being heard.
🩸 Violence May Move Menopause Earlier: New research links lifelong violence against women to significantly earlier menopause, showing how trauma can live in the body long after the violence ends.
🏀 WNBA Abuse Crosses A Line: Caitlin Clark condemned death threats against Alyssa Thomas and called on the WNBA to do more, after online fandom again turned women’s sport into a site of harassment.
📱 Dating Apps Are Hitting Body Image: A new review found swipe-based dating apps have strong links to compulsive use and body dissatisfaction, raising questions about what modern dating is training people to perform.

💡 Her Spotlight

Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.

Eleonore Buschinger (@eleonorebuschinger), founder of Vitamin Color – She made curiosity her compass.

She builds food experiences that feel less like catering and more like edible storytelling. Raised in Paris, trained across mathematics, social sciences, food studies, hospitality, marketing, and food systems, her path never really behaved like one clean label. She thought she might become a diplomat, but eventually landed up creating Vitamin Color – a world where vegetables are desired, color becomes language, and food becomes a way to understand how people live.

Some women do not follow one “correct” script. They observe and detour.
They trust the strange pull of their own attention.
And sometimes, the life that makes the least sense from the outside is the one that finally feels honest from the inside.

✨ Follow her world at @vitamin___color or explore Vitamin Color.

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to hear this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚