If you know me, it probably won’t surprise you that I have a complicated relationship with anything I perceive as feminine. Although this is partially due to where my natural interests lie, it also has to do with cultural perceptions that make me deeply uncomfortable. As a girl, me being feminine cannot be subversive, because it is expected.

Even the word “girl” sometimes made me squirm as a child. Despite living in a household where I was allowed to simply be a kid and could express interests ranging from dinosaur fossils to princess dresses without judgment, the word felt weighted with definitions I wasn’t sure applied to me. Moreover, it didn’t feel like a word I was meant to use to describe an aspect of my identity, but a word I was meant to embody. It was going to define me.

I am reminded of a small comic I saw online a while back, in which a student incorrectly solves a math problem in front of his class. A speech bubble belonging to his classmate reads something to the effect of “gee, you’re bad at math.” In the next panel, another student, who is a girl, also solves the problem wrong. However, she is met with “gee, girls are bad at math.” Admittedly, this comic is rather pithy, but it demonstrates a real problem. Not only is the girl student defined by her gender, but seen as a representative of that gender, not an individual.

Unfortunately, I believe that we perpetuate this generalization daily with pointless, chronically online arguments about what the actions of singular women are saying about women as a whole. An excellent example of this is the Sabrina Carpenter album cover discourse of last summer. An Instagram user, quoted in an article by The Guardian, described the cover for Man’s Best Friend as “insanely misogynistic imagery,” echoing the sentiments of many. Yet like most internet discourse, the discussion is shallow, reductive, and goes in circles. Most people either say she is “setting feminism back 50 years” or “empowering women to own their sexuality,” and there appears to be no in-between. I say this is about one pop star making and selling pop music.

Instead of speaking out clearly, in favor of equality, we find ourselves reinforcing a no-win scenario and maintaining  the status quo. We dissect our own actions and those of other women, trying to establish which actions are definitively empowering and which are unfailingly indicative of internalized misogyny. I often find myself overanalyzing my own fashion taste: if I don’t want to perform femininity, am I looking upon it negatively and accepting masculinity as the default? If I do don a fancy dress, am I succumbing to something I think I am supposed to do? What really, truly makes me more comfortable? And will I ever know, if I cannot separate aesthetics from social constructs? Just like the world sees Carpenter, I see my choices as being, in a small way, representative of women, or as a treatise on what I believe is the most empowering, rather than an expression of myself as an individual.

These thought patterns distract us from the fact of the matter, the deeply ingrained misogyny of the real world, where in many cases, women are fundamentally not respected. Starting in childhood, small boys can be teased for using a pink marker to color an Easter egg because pink is a “girl color” and therefore shameful (a real example from when I was in kindergarten). In adolescence, girls are bombarded with pressure surrounding their appearances to the point where it’s hard to feel like you even pass as a girl if you haven’t taken 14 extra steps to getting ready in the morning. In adulthood, women receive unequal pay and must fight hard to be respected as an individual in virtually any field, and in some cases, just to be valued as people.

I recently saw the phrase “decorating our cage instead of tearing it down” used in a post about enjoying traditionally feminine things. This notion being presented as something empowering rubbed me the wrong way. In addition to some people who were similarly unsettled, I saw people getting defensive in the comments, asking what was wrong with embracing being feminine, but that wasn’t what disturbed me. It was the implication that enjoying femininity excuses a person from advocating against the inequalities and constructs that cage us; that these things cannot go hand in hand. Again, circular online discourse had avoided the real issue.

The concept of the cage as it pertains to girlhood takes me back to a favorite character of mine, Éowyn from Lord of the Rings, who explains in one of her most poignant moments that she does not fear “either pain or death.” When she is then asked what she does fear, she responds, “A cage…to stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.” It is not girlhood itself that she refers to here, but to the things that are expected of and enforced upon her because of it. Later on. her strength is derived not from rejecting her own identity, but from breaking down those barriers. In her time, she becomes both warrior and healer, and an admirable, well-rounded person. She would not have been able to do this—nor would she have been happy in her ultimate role as a healer—had she not torn down the cage.

While decorating may enhance the cage experience in the short-term, a pretty cage is still a cage. If we do not work together to break down the stereotypes and dynamics that oppress women—which does not mean rejecting feminine things—we will never be able to leave the cage. The word “girl” will continue to define us before we get a chance to define ourselves.