If you have ever wondered how deeply patriarchy has influenced our daily lives as women, here is one example you might not immediately think of: the infantilisation of women.
There is a way society positions men as the default adults, people who are capable of being in control and making rational decisions. Women, even as grown adults, are portrayed as more vulnerable and in need of guidance from men. Theoretically, it may not seem like a big deal, but in reality, it shapes how women are seen, treated, and eventually, how they begin to see themselves.
Take something as basic as body hair for example. Hair is a biological marker of adulthood for both genders. As soon as you hit puberty, it begins to grow, yet for women, that marker is considered something to hide and feel ashamed of. By the early 20th century, companies like Gillette began marketing Milady Decolletée, a razor specifically for women, and, in doing so, linked hairlessness to cleanliness and femininity. Over time, we had other advertising, film, and later pornography, strengthening this idea until “desirable women” became “hairless women”.
Meanwhile, men’s body hair was left alone because it is considered natural. This cultural double standard is why men can walk around with bushy body hair and the world barely bats an eye until a woman does the same. These expectations would eventually go as far as men openly preferring women without pubic or underarm hair and reacting badly when they see otherwise. With time, some women began to internalise the idea of body hair on other women as dirty or unkempt. What beauty standards did in this case was pull women away from visible adulthood and allow men to fully inhabit it.
We can also see this pattern in our behaviour. There is a noticeable preference for women who appear less experienced and more dependent. Now, this association may not necessarily be because men consciously want control but because society itself has long associated femininity with softness and reduced autonomy. You see it in the way women describe themselves and in statements like “I don’t want to think when I am with my man” or “I am just a baby girl.” Although this may sound playful, even harmless, it reflects how a woman’s role is to step back from decision-making and allow the man to be in control.
That is also why exaggerated innocence or the use of soft, childlike voices are often considered cute, even though it shrinks a woman’s authority in her own life.
Language is another way that infantilisation shows up. Many people feel comfortable calling adult women “girls”, especially in professional settings, while men are rarely referred to as “boys” in the same context. Using the word “girl” for a grown woman makes it easier to question their authority because a girl is someone who is still learning and has not yet fully formed. And when you shrink the word, you shrink the person. It becomes easier to talk over her, dismiss her, and decide for her because the language has already positioned her as someone who is not quite there yet.
This same thinking plays out even in structural ways, especially in African societies. In some communities, women are discouraged from owning properties or are excluded from inheritance. They are often dissuaded from making financial decisions because of the belief that women cannot think for themselves. Historically, laws in many parts of the world restricted women from owning property or signing contracts without male approval. Even today, remnants of those beliefs persist in our society, and authority remains subtly gendered.
The media has always played a role in sustaining the status quo. The “damsel in distress” is one of the oldest and most repeated tropes in storytelling, and it has now become a cultural script. We have characters like Cinderella, who Prince Charming rescues, and that story has been told so often that it now feels normal. Somewhere along the line, some women begin to imagine the possibility of their prince charming coming to choose and rescue them.
This same social conditioning is present in our everyday interactions. A man and a woman would walk into a restaurant; the man would be greeted and hailed while the woman would be ignored. The servers would direct questions to the man at the table because he is assumed to decide for both of them. In conversations, we see men mansplain and interrupt women more frequently, a pattern that has been backed up by different communication studies. In many workplaces, people sometimes overlook women’s ideas until a man repeats or validates them. There have also been many cases where women’s intellectual contributions have been undervalued, hidden, or attributed to men, especially in times when women had limited access to recognition.
This dismissal appears in healthcare too. Research has shown that women’s pain is more likely to be dismissed or underestimated. Studies on medical bias have found that women are less likely to receive adequate treatment compared to men, partly because of the lingering stereotype that women are more emotional or exaggerate discomfort. This assumption also feeds into the idea that women cannot reliably describe their symptoms or experiences when it comes to their bodies. The same doubt that follows a woman into a hospital room follows her into every space where she is expected to know herself.
Even emotions are treated differently. When a woman expresses anger, it is often labelled as irrational or excessive, but when a man does the same, it is interpreted as authority or a necessity to put things in place. His anger has weight and direction, while hers is a problem that needs to be managed. This is how women’s emotions, judgements, testimonies, and sense of what is happening are constantly questioned.
Then there is protection, which is perhaps the deceptive layer of all. Policies and attitudes that claim to “protect” women in most cases end up limiting them. It is why women are often told to stay indoors, be careful, don’t go out alone, and don’t do too much. One may think that these statements sound caring, but they are not. It depicts women as people who cannot navigate the world without guidance from men. Yet global data on violence show that women are more at risk from men, the same group that claims to protect them. This logic also explains the many restrictions around reproductive rights, where women are treated as though they cannot be trusted to make decisions about their bodies.
The reason infantilisation does not always appear oppressive is that it does not present itself in that way. You may not even recognise it immediately. It is always disguised as preference or culture. You see it in the way the razor was marketed and taught women to be ashamed of their bodies, in the fairy tale of Prince Charming that was handed to us as children, in the doctor who didn’t believe you, in the man who talked over you in a meeting, in the back-handed compliments, and in the need to shrink yourself to be accepted. All these form a pattern that moves women away from themselves.
And a woman who has been taught, in a hundred small ways, that she is still becoming may spend her whole life waiting for permission that was never needed in the first place.
