I’m like ladybird if she was filipina #mothersday #feminism #feminist #arthistory

What if everything we were taught to admire about her mothers was actually everything the world demanded they sacrifice? Hi, my name is Drea Chan, and this is episode three of "That's an Otaku Incidence," a series about patterns hiding in plain sight. There's a whispered inheritance passed between generations of women, across cultures, across continents. The belief that a good woman is measured by her capacity to endure. You've seen it, and the mother who eats last after everyone else is finished. In the woman who tucks her ambitions away, like something saved for an occasion that never arrives, the unspoken bargain of womanhood across so many cultures is that your pain is relevant if it serves someone else's comfort. The more visibly a woman diminished herself, the more she was venerated. Our stories glorify women who suffer beautifully, who give and give and give until there's nothing left. And then give that to, we call it virtue, we call it devotion, we call it love. And the woman who refused, the one who said, "I also have needs," was called selfish. As though self-preservation were a character flaw, rather than a human necessity. This damages everyone. Daughters learn to shrink, sons learn that love looks like a woman dissolving her boundaries, not their explicit instruction. They're osmosis. They're watching their fathers accept this as a natural law. The boys who grow into men often unconsciously seek this familiar dynamic. I think an insidious aspect of this is when women become the fiercest enforcers of this system. The mothers who demand from their daughters, the same sacrifices they endured. The women who judge other women for prioritizing themselves, the relatives who whisper warnings about being too independent, too ambitious, too much, perpetuating the cycle they themselves suffered under. So, today's Mother's Day, and we'll celebrate the women who gave everything. But maybe this year we also asked the harder question, who decided that a good woman is a woman who was suffered.