You think there’s been progress. Things aren’t ideal, but they’re better than they were.

Until they’re not. Until there’s a slow slip that turns into a full-on mudslide.

For me, it started with the overturn of Roe v. Wade. I’ve never had an abortion. Never even had to consider one. (Thankfully.) Long ago, I worked in a medical office where they were occasionally performed. Most of the time it was a heartbreaking decision carrying enormous emotional weight. Even then, my younger self wished these women – these girls – had access to better birth control rather than having to face that choice at all. Though a professionally performed medical procedure was clearly better than the bicycle spokes and knitting needles of earlier times.

But the overturn of Roe was just the beginning. Limits on birth control availability. Alarm that the birth rates for teenagers have declined. Alarm! “Advice” that young people should marry early and have more babies than they can afford, before they feel ready. Each of these, underneath the “policy,” carries the same message: a woman’s choices about her body or her life are not quite her own to make. Slip, slip, slip.

Disgusting deluge

Then came the reports of a website hosting videos of men drugging and raping their unconscious wives and partners. Recording the rapes. Instructions for other men on how to do the same. Over 60 million views in a single month.

I went from sickened to enraged to shocked and back again, spinning at the horror of it. The slow slip had become the mudslide. Disgusting. Vile. Evil. And somehow, in an adjacent conversation, we are being told that men are lonely. And that women are the problem.

So I ask – what is a woman’s worth? Does she matter? And perhaps more importantly: does she believe she does?

Because here’s what I know. We are steeped in messages from the world. They seep into our psyches, into our homes, into our most intimate relationships. When society says women’s needs don’t really count, that message doesn’t stay “out there.” It comes home. It sits down at the table. It shows up in who gets to take up space, whose discomfort gets addressed, whose pain is treated as inconvenient or unimportant.

We are not separate from this mudslide. We are living inside it. We just haven’t recognized it.

And some of us are deciding – quietly, fiercely, imperfectly – that the answer to “does she matter?” starts with what we tell ourselves.