“ Can strong, independent women really be disempowered by the utterance of a few words? That will be a useful thing to know the next time I want to disempower a woman.”
Just wondering why you would ever want to disempower a woman?
However, yes, a few words (also known as micro-aggressions) can absolutely disempower women. It might be temporary, as many are intended to throw a woman off in a specific situation. The cumulative effect however, is to chip away and wear women down, keep them in their place, as it were. This is why it’s important to shut down micro-aggressions as they happen. It might be only once instance to the perpetrator, but to the woman on the receiving end, it’s one in a constant barrage.