Women have it harder.

There, I said it.

And no, this is not a man-hating manifesto. I love men. In fact, parts of my romantic history would suggest I may have loved them a little too enthusiastically. This conversation is not about blaming men. It is about refusing to lie about what women experience in order to make anyone more comfortable.

In this solo episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy explores the cumulative cost of moving through the world as a woman: the expectation of self-sacrifice in motherhood and family life, the invisible labor women carry, the gender pay gap, sexual violence, impossible beauty and behavior standards, and the conditioning that teaches women to prioritize everyone else’s needs before their own.

Lisa also digs into the medical dismissal women experience, particularly during perimenopause and menopause, when profound physical, emotional and cognitive changes are still too often minimized, misunderstood or written off as anxiety.

This is also a conversation about the ways women participate in their own conditioning. The pressure to be the good mother, the easy wife, the competent employee, the caretaker, the attractive woman, the strong woman and the woman who somehow needs absolutely nothing.

Because sometimes the performance that earns women the most praise is the very performance that causes them to disappear.

Men suffer too. Men carry their own painful expectations around strength, provision, emotion and masculinity. We do not have to deny that truth in order to acknowledge another one:

Good men don’t need women to lie about women’s experiences in order to protect men’s feelings. And good women don’t need to demonize men in order to tell the truth about being female.

Maybe the goal isn’t for women to become even stronger.

Maybe it is finally asking why strength, sacrifice and resilience have been demanded of us for so long.

lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

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Notes from the Edge with Lisa Lacy

Human conversations about trauma, identity, recovery, reinvention, relationships, leadership, and the lives we build after survival. 

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