On the surface, International Women’s Day isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s harmless at heart: it’s meant to be a day where women celebrate being a woman and maybe share their experiences with others. There’s one for men as well and I would imagine its goals are the same.

Unfortunately, we live in a world fueled by social media and its initial intent has been massively redirected. International Women’s Day is being largely co-opted as a way to express frustration at simply being the gender and share concerns that things are supposedly worse than ever — as well as convey the idea that women need a man’s help to get out of this terrible situation, that they need allies to talk for them. Ironically, the majority of people expressing this frustration are men who are here to save the day by standing with women.

Somehow this seemingly backwards approach is feminist and I should be thankful for their help.

Fuck that. I don’t need anyone’s help.

In case the people celebrating this way have forgotten, women have done just as much as men since the dawn of time. We’ve stood next to men and been there every step of the way through humanity’s timeline. Women have been action movie stars, they have been strong rulers, they have been best-selling video game characters, and they have been amazing mothers as well as excellent bosses. As a whole, women do a lot of things and they do them well just like their counterpart men do. The idea that a day meant for celebrating them has become nothing but a lengthy litany of how bad women have it to me is the opposite of equality. It’s suppressing women by denying all their great moments in history and all the beautiful things the gender has done to support themselves as well the world around them.

It’s the opposite of a celebration. It’s an erasure to fit a narrative that women aren’t equal in 2017— and never will be.

At E3 in 2015, there were a lot of video game articles about how women protagonists didn’t exist much until 2015’s upcoming games where they suddenly, as many wrote, “dominated the landscape.” A lot of journalists were excited that leading ladies like Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy were coming out. I, too, was utterly thrilled for the Nora heroine. However, I wasn’t thrilled for her at the expense of other women who came before her; I was simply happy that we had a new IP coming to gaming and that Aloy looked cool. At no point did I preface any of my elation at the cost of video gaming’s history, which often had many women at ground zero.

But almost every major website did. It was like they instantly forgot Aya Brea, Claire Redfield, Joanna Dark, Chun-li, and any woman who came decades before in favor of the idea that women didn’t exist in gaming until this more progressive climate. It got reworded and reworked, until nothing at E3 2015 was about how cool Aloy was, and instead was mostly about how Aloy was a woman and that was good since they were rare until now.

Like I said earlier, fuck that. (I even tweeted as much back then.)

This is inherently the problem with modern feminism and social media mixing into an echo chamber. A lot of the times people want to express something they call solidarity without realizing how demeaning or how unnecessary it can be. It’s fine to want women to be in arenas more and more, especially if they aren’t an equal demographic like in gaming, but it’s misleading and also tiresome to imply they never existed in the first place or will never get there on their own. These ladies (and, in the case of fictional ones, their creators) fought to earn their place in history and it’s being erased. They already fought the battle and won the war.

We saw the same with Ghostbusters’ recent remake. It was sold as an empowering movie: finally, the critics often wrote, there was an action movie with a strong set of women in it fighting things. But again, this perspective completely erases the cultural zeitgeist that consisted of Sarah Connor and Ripley from Terminator and Alien respectively. It ignores the existence of Charmed, a popular WB series that ran in the early 00’s starring three sisters who kicked ass and took names. It fails to mention Xena and Gabrielle as well as the strides they made. It puts Buffy Summers away in a box and mumbles that she wasn’t strong enough. It says Clarice Starling didn’t do anything for the FBI or that Scully wasn’t every bit as much of an agent as Mulder was in The X-Files.

It‘s fine to theoretically like Ghostbusters. I didn’t like it, but everything is subjective. The issue comes with denying the path others paved decades prior to act as if what Ghostbusters is doing is groundbreaking — or even relevant. Worse, this rewritten narrative was then used to give the movie a “get out of jail free” card. If it sucked — which by most accounts, it was lukewarm in the best of lights — anyone who said so was immediately a sexist at best and a monster at worst. In a cynical way, this false narrative was almost used to justify going to the movie and blindly supporting it even if it wasn’t up to many film goer's standards.

For the third time, fuck that.

For International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate being a woman and I intend to. I don’t want a handout or any apologies. I want to earn my place like billions of women have done before me and will continue to do after me, with or without hashtag heroes coming to our rescue.

Today is another day and, just like the one before it, I won’t need any hand holding during it. To imply my gender does simply ignores the progress we have made in the first world and continue to make. Strong women are here, they’re everywhere, and they don’t need blind support to be strong.

We just need ourselves.

Thanks for reading. If you like my thoughts, please be sure to follow me on Twitter where I post as @ashelia.