Enlightened

[shady]

Long hair, long nails
Makeup every day, all day
I'm satisfied
I appease others

Catcall me
Look at me
Please want to hurt me
Please break me down
Then please, for the love of God, pull me back up
With your words
Your staring
Your compliments

I'm supposed to hate it
I'm supposed to be enraged
But I've been conditioned to be self-loathing
I've been conditioned to need you

Other women somehow escaped
Grew up slow
Not hollowed out and weak
They bask in strength and freedom
They are long emancipated from the chains of the male gaze

I'm slowly being enlightened
Enlightened to the mold I fit
I stretch myself thin, trying to break free
I'm slowly changing,
Recognizing patterns of sickness and self-destruction

I don't need you
I don't want you
I don't seek you

I am bruised from the shackles
But they slowly heal
Sore and sensitive
I roll my wrists out
Recognizing the pain and insanity of my past

I am changing
I am grateful for that
I feel empowered
Independent
United
Yet alone, in a good way

I hope to one day
Be the woman who once prompted jealousy and hatred to seethe within me
To be enlightened.

[RiverNotch]

Sadly, this reads like a collection of self-help screeds, occasionally broken up into lines but most often just left alone, rather than an actual poem. I think such a mode can work if it builds to something, if it describes something that's actually dramatic, or if it's entirely ironic, but I don't detect any of those here. The mode never changes across the work, there is not enough specificity for drama ("emancipated from the chains of the male gaze" is something one should expect from the critic, not the poet), and there is no indication that anything here wasn't meant in earnest.

A good start on revising this would be to focus on what specifics there are here, or rather what specifics presumably drew the speaker into uttering this, since there are not many specifics here that don't read as tired (those first two lines, "catcall me", "chains....shackles"): maybe describe an episode where the speaker is subjected to catcalling. Another potential start is to choose one of the tired specifics and really run with it: describe how one can roll out one's wrists, tying in your head---not in your text!---every detail to an aspect of liberation from the male gaze, then only at the end adding some hint as to what the speaker actually spoke about. Either way, this sorely needs revision, or really some rethinking.

[tun]

What I notice here is the story - the destiny depicted. In this story the teller accepts the limits imposed by 'society' (by identifying the limits and struggling, but identification is also an act of creativity and participation) - and by their own choices regarding conformity and aspiration inside their residency of the 'box'. But the problem for me is that the story teller doesn't recognize the 'box' itself as artificial, arbitrary conditions imposed/accepted/self created - they take the 'box' as inevitably the only possibility given in existence and the 'box' is not identified or questioned or situated in a larger set of accessible potentials. What is depicted is a 'struggle' for liberation, but liberation only as defined in relation to the original conditions which are treated as compulsory when they are finally not.