It's limiting to confine an individual to their gender. Men can have feminine energy and women can have masculine energy. Most, if not all, people have a mix of both, and those energies can even shift throughout the stages of their lives.

We start ascribing gender roles to children as a form of conditioning. Young minds receive choices limited to their gender, and this is how we tell people that the gender they are comes before their personhood. This is slowly changing in pockets of progressive thought, but in the majority of the world, there are still many battles to be fought.

Personally, I've been described as 60 % feminine and 40% masculine. This year, one of my goals is to start becoming more comfortable with those of my traits that have been traditionally defined as masculine qualities: leadership, assertiveness, and healthy competitiveness.

We still reward men for doing things that women are "supposed" to do. No joke, I once had a guy tell me that he didn't enjoy babysitting his own child. That's why he was okay with his wife scaling back her professional work, so the child would have someone to spend time with.

No, this isn't a one-off incident. As a first-generation South Asian woman, I was very clearly taught that kids and household responsibilities were a woman's job. Even if a woman and man did the same amount of professional work, it would be a bonus for a man to help out at home.

I would call this mindset outdated, but this would imply that the thought-process was okay in some moment of history. Just because oppression was more accepted at a certain time period in the past does not bequeath it historical justification. Many people have led unfulfilling lives throughout history for the terrible fact that they didn't receive community support when their human rights were trespassed against.

This mindset results in a disempowering separation between what is deemed men's work versus women's work. It needs to go.

The patriarchy normalizes the prevalence of the male gaze. Have you ever wondered what our culture would look like if it wasn't catered to men? Would we have a wider definition of beauty? Would women have increased access to self-worth? Could we walk down the street without fear that someone might sexualize us?

Women do not owe men a smile, or anything for that matter. We don't need to look a certain way in order to bring joy to a random dude's life. This is not a problem that should be ours.

One of my favorite things about entering my thirties was that I stopped contorting my features into a false, pleasant look. I don't exist to look beautiful to a man. I exist for me.

This doesn't solve all my problems. I still feel compelled to don a stoic facial expression and wear more modest clothing when I'm out of the house for my own physical and psychological safety.

We must make public spaces safer for women.