Gender equality: A Power Struggle That Never Ends

When I was in my early twenties, I went from living with a controlling father to being trapped in a malignant narcissistic relationship. Back then, I didn’t even know verbal abuse was a thing. It took me 15–20 years to fully understand what I had gone through, despite being in and out of a psych unit and receiving every kind of help I could.

It blows my mind how many men genuinely believe that women abuse men more than the other way around. I’m no psychologist, but from what I’ve seen, that belief usually stems from one of two places: either a narcissistic tendency to twist reality,

or a flat-out misogynistic outlook that paints women as the villains by default.

I don’t know what it’s like where you are from, but according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Personal Safety Survey (PSS): one in four women (23%) and one in fourteen men (7.3%) have experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner since the age of 15. According to the 2021–22 PSS, an estimated 3.6 million Australian adults (19% of the population) have experienced emotional abuse from a partner at least once since the age of 15. The proportion of women (23% or 2.3 million) was significantly higher than men (14% or 1.3 million).

Even though these stats prove that belief wrong, many men still refuse to face what’s really going on — and that refusal itself reflects a deeper pattern of control and manipulation. At its core, it’s about power, and the lengths some men will go to in order to hold onto it.

I personally don’t believe there will ever be a true balance in the so-called battle of the sexes. It always seems to play out like a relentless tug of war: women push forward, breaking barriers and demanding recognition, only for men to push back in an attempt to regain ground and hold onto their dominance. Then women respond by pushing forward even harder, determined not to be silenced or shoved back into old roles. It’s an ongoing cycle of progress met with resistance, followed by an even stronger surge of progress. The dynamic feels less like balance and more like a constant power struggle, where equality is dangled in front of us but never fully shared.

At the end of the day, progress between men and women rarely moves in a straight line — it’s a constant cycle of push and pull, forward steps and backward resistance. True balance may never exist, because power has always been something fiercely protected and fiercely fought for. What we can do, however, is keep pushing forward with awareness, truth, and resilience, even when the resistance is loud. Because every push, no matter how small, shifts the ground beneath us.

Why can't we all just get along?