The Game Is Rigged

Deep Brew: A Millennial Reckoning

The game is rigged.

And I feel foolish for saying it out loud. I’m almost 40.

I knew this intellectually, of course. I knew the statistics, the history, the patterns. I knew that women have forever been paid less, promoted less, believed less. I knew the names of the ones who fought anyway and the names of the ones who were swallowed whole. I knew the rules were never made for us, by us.

And yet—somewhere deep inside me, I still believed.

I sincerely believed that my experience would be different. I know. How naive.

But, this is what I was told. That my generation would be the exception. That if we worked hard enough, if we proved ourselves enough, if we played the game well enough, we could win. We would win.

Because that’s what packaged feminism sold me.

Recently, I took some time to revisit the words of the past.

Friedan. Lorde. hooks. Chisholm. Gay. Williams. Murray. Crenshaw.

And I realized—I wasn’t reading about them.

I was reading about me. My life. My choices. My exhaustion. The same story, repackaged. A different decade, the same design.

Every generation, they rename it.
Every generation, they dress it up as something new.

But it is always the same story.

And, alas, here we are again.

Instead, today… they don’t medicate us with tranquilizers. They medicate us with hustle culture. With girlboss feminism. With endless discourse about balancing it all—but only if we work harder, optimize better, manifest more. Or conversely, they tell us to surrender. To step back. To embrace the natural order of things. The rise of trad-wife influencers, of white patriarchal nostalgia wrapped in aesthetic minimalism, of sermons about submission dressed up as choice.

The tools change—laws, culture, expectations—but the goal remains the same. Keep women in service. Keep us grateful for less. Keep us too exhausted to ask for more.

Be the boss, or be the helpmate.
Grind yourself to the bone, or lay yourself at the feet of a man and call it peace.

Either way, the monopoly board stays the same.

Because power never planned to share.
Because when women pushed forward, the system pushed back.
Because when the old rules stopped working, they stacked the courts or simply wrote new ones.

So, here we are.

We work full-time but still do most of the caregiving.
We make 83 cents to a man’s dollar, and even less if we’re Black or brown.
We take on the mental load, the invisible labor, the constant negotiations of safety, ambition, and expectation.

And we’re still told we should be grateful.

Well, I’m not grateful.

And, if I’m being honest—I’m pissed off.

I’m pissed because we were told the fight was over—only to realize the finish line was a mirage.
Because we were promised progress but handed resistance.
Because for every right gained, there is a movement to strip it away.
For every woman who rises, there is a chorus calling her too much.
Because we are still here, still fighting for what should have been settled generations ago.
Because I have seen progress, tasted it, touched it—only to watch it be clawed back.

I’m pissed because I refuse. I will not go back.

The women before us did not fail. They were never the problem.

But my generation must accept that the progress we seek was never a straight line.
It has swung between hope and backlash, between movement and resistance, between might and fight.

And now, that progress is in our hands.

So, here we are. Sitting with history in one hand and our future in another.

Do we rattle the bars until they break?
Do we sing, like the caged bird, and hope they finally listen?
Or do we bare our teeth and get in the damn ring?

Because here’s the part no one tells you—knowing the truth doesn’t set you free.

It just makes you see the cage.

And now, we can’t unsee it.