A Women’s World, Erased
If you think this is accidental, you’re not paying attention.
→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED
Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.
Here’s the part we’re not supposed to say out loud: When things built by and for women disappear, they’re almost never treated as a loss.
They’re framed as a fix.
A modernization.
A market correction.
Progress, apparently, just happens to look like women losing places, rituals, and power—again.
We’re told to adapt. To pivot. To streamline our needs into something more palatable, more profitable, less … emotional. And if we feel something about it? That’s just nostalgia talking. Sentimentality. Weakness. The price of staying relevant.
This piece came from anger disguised as grief.
Yes, there’s nostalgia in it. But nostalgia isn’t the disease. It’s the symptom. What we’re actually responding to is the slow, relentless dismantling of women’s spaces, followed by the cultural gaslighting that insists nothing important was lost.
There’s a pattern here, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Anything rooted in care, relationship, or ritual is labeled inefficient the moment it can’t be endlessly scaled or monetized. Finance doesn’t know what to do with human emotion. Or with spaces designed for connection rather than conquest. So it strips them for parts, declares the remains obsolete, and moves on—leaving women to absorb the loss quietly, like we always have.
This isn’t about retail.
Or the internet “changing things.”
What’s being erased is permission, and too many people still believe these losses are accidental.
They’re not. They’re structural. And they hit women first, hardest, and with the least cultural outrage every single time.
If you’re not outraged yet?
You will be.