At 16, I thought getting my first job meant finally growing up. I did not expect that it would be the moment I learned what it meant to be a girl in a man’s world. 

I was working as a children’s party planner at a bowling alley. During a closing shift one night, I was sexually harassed by a coworker. It was someone I saw almost every day and had once considered a friend. The incident caught me off guard, leaving me unsure of how to react. What unsettled me most was not just the act itself, but the sudden collapse of trust in someone I thought I could rely on. 

I began to question whether I was overreacting — which only deepened my silence. The weight of not knowing how to protect myself without causing a scene grew heavier, and each shift, I was forced to navigate a stream of suggestive comments I did not know how to confront. A few months later, during a staff check-in meeting, I gathered the confidence to acknowledge what had happened, but I wasn’t met with the support I needed. 

In essence, my manager said — Your privilege is showing — pointing out that my harasser was a minority as if that erased what he had done. My voice choked and my hands shook. I felt my confidence turn to anger, then the anger dissolving into a quiet sadness. 

She sided with him. I left the meeting humiliated and confused, and like so many girls before me, I blamed myself. 

When I later encountered Melissa Febos’s term “patriarchy panic,” I recognized it instantly. 

Febos describes this expression in her book, “Girlhood,”  as “a panic attack or a heart attack — but a patriarchy attack.” The definition gave a name to something I had already lived: The feelings of fear, shame and awareness that define so many girls’ first, but never last, encounters with power. The term has become a common phrase for living in a college house with four other 20-year-old women, in a world where this kind of panic is all too normal. 

The problem lies deeply in institutions that prioritize perpetrators over victims. Men’s power has a way of preserving itself, like an unspoken rule passed down through generations. Those who shape our political and cultural systems singlehandedly set the blueprint for denying women’s stories. 

President Donald Trump, for example, has faced at least 28 allegations of sexual misconduct since the 1970s. Yet, he serves as president of the United States and remains the most influential figure in American politics. His continued power is no exception, but a reflection of how deeply these structures are ingrained. 

Voices like our president’s, who lead young men to carry on detrimental rhetoric and minimize the effects of sexual assault, often hold the power to be the loudest in conversations about women’s bodily autonomy. Trump’s comments about women’s bodies, coupled with his control within the Supreme Court, make it clear that power and misogyny work hand in hand. 

The legal system that Trump has built has fortified conditions in which people with histories of sexual misconduct are the sole decision makers on millions of women’s bodies, while survivors are left fighting for their autonomy to be taken seriously. These experiences are not far from unusual, though. 

When Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network came to light, the stories confirmed a truth most people already knew but did not want to admit. One where powerful men often live in a world beyond the idea of accountability. 

Survivors of Epstein, who was a close friend of Trump’s, came forward to speak their truth and were met with an unbelievable amount of criticism. The question was never really whether Epstein had committed these crimes, but how many times he could get away with it. 

The case became just another example of a long history of power protecting itself, despite its effect on women’s advocacy as a whole. It was an assurance that the men who committed these unspeakable acts are the people who own the very institutions that are trying — and failing — to condemn them. Their money has proven to weigh more than the victims’ words. 

In the United States, according to the National Violence Resource Center, 81% of women have experienced sexual violence at some point in their lives. Sexual assault, however, is consistently underreported in the media despite its prevalence. 

According to a September 2025 news assessment organized by UN Women, violence against women received only 1.8 % of media coverage. The silence shapes public attitude towards the topic, creating a barrier against acknowledgement and solutions, influencing how we as women live in a world that does not support us. It teaches us that our lived experiences have expiration dates and can be dismissed.

To be taken seriously, a woman has to be perfect, while flawed men are forgiven and freed. Excuses and dismissals run rampant while women fear for their well-being. 

The question for girls my age is all too common. Was my work uniform really one button short of my safety? Could I have done something different? We grow up watching how the justice system fails survivors and we witness how men flawlessly rebound from these accusations. Time and time again, our reality is unavoidable. 

Patriarchy is a roof we all live under. A shared, broken home no one knows how to fix. These scenarios are not imagined; they’re reality for women everywhere. They are the direct result of systematic policies that have told women that their safety is negotiable.

As long as powerful men can be accused of sexual assault and still become president, as long as women are held accountable for their own assaults and justice is selective, the script remains the same. The world moves on like nothing happened. 

Alden Gates is a staff reporter at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at aldenrg@udel.edu.