I’d like to think of myself as someone with a decent amount of self-control. I tend to keep to myself when I overhear a debate even if the topic is one I have strong opinions on. For instance, I can be assertive when talking about my rights as a woman and human being. But, unless I’m particularly annoyed, I can usually restrain my displeasure over the other person’s views before I go too far off the deep end and get stuck in an argument I can’t get out of.

However, I just find it funny how men claim to find it so easy to get distracted by women, especially in high school. We’re given strict dress codes to go by so as to not divert the boys’ attention from their school work. It’s almost as if people believe a 15-year-old girl’s shoulders are the reason why the boy sitting behind her is getting a C in English rather than the fact that the boy may just be lacking in the intellect to exceed in the class. Wouldn’t that be preposterous? Of course, we always follow the dress codes that require us to at least wear Bermuda shorts, t-shirts that cover our shoulders and go up to our necks, and a sweater to cover the rest of our arms.

I find it funny that people perceive women as weak. The phrase “you throw like a girl” is the full embodiment of that view. It nearly feels like everyone who applies said expression to their daily lives wants us to feel ashamed of our strength. Is it physically possible for the strongest woman to become as strong as the strongest man without some sort of hormone injection? Unfortunately, no. But, is strength only measured physically? Again, no. The hilarity in it all is that the phrase doesn’t just degrade women.

I also find it funny that the entire world population has decided to avoid the topic of the gap between the average wages of men and women like it’s the plague. In the United States alone, the average income for women is 77.5 percent of the average income of men. In Michigan, women make less than 73.4 percent of the average man’s salary. This, of course, can be slightly inaccurate due to the difference in the job positions that the opposite genders hold. The fact that women, as of 2017, only hold 6.4 percent of the CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies may have altered the statistics just slightly. But, this is just a mere observation.

What I find to be the funniest is that women are bound by some sort of unspoken law stating we can’t be too much of something. We can be smart but not too smart. We can have a little meat on our bones but not too much. We should be skinny but not so skinny that we’re only skin and bones. We can be unintelligent but not totally dense. We can have ambitions, but those ambitions can’t be too big. We can wear makeup, but not too much makeup. It’s a never-ending list of scales we have to hit right in the middle of.

But mostly, I find it funny that people think I care.