It's 2017. It's not a joke, but no matter what year it is, women are always taken as a joke. The lack of respect put forth in society towards women is disgusting. In a lot of countries around the world, many women don't have the rights that we do. In this country, we've had rights for some odd years now and people just disregard them because of their lack of respect. Everyone was born from a woman, so there should be the utmost respect for women whether or not they're related to you in some sort of way.

In the past few years or so, there seems to have been a few highly publicized rape cases in which people are let off the hook or given a lot less time than they should have been given. The biggest outcry over this has definitely been Brock Turner, the former Stanford swimmer who raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster but was only given three months in jail. This may not have been the first case but it was publicized all over social media, all over the news; even to this day, people still talk about the Brock Turner case.

CNN tells us that this isn't uncommon; they found 52 cases of NCAA Division l athletes investigated for sexual violence. Speaking on that, they said, "Of those 52 cases, 33 led to criminal charges, resulting in 13 cases of prison or jail time, ranging from 20 years to three months. Eleven cases ended with no time, either through probation or suspended or deferred sentences; 9 ended in acquittals or charges being dropped." That being the NCAA Division l alone, I can't imagine how often this happens without being publicized.

There's a quote by Jessica Valenti from one of her books, "Frontal Feminism." She speaks on the fear of rape and something called a 'rape schedule.'

“When I was in college, a teacher once said that all women live by a ‘rape schedule.’ I was baffled by the term, but as she went on to explain, I got really freaked out. Because I realized that I knew exactly what she was talking about. And you do too. Because of their constant fear of rape (conscious or not), women do things throughout the day to protect themselves. Whether it’s carrying our keys in our hands as we walk home, locking our car doors as soon as we get in, or not walking down certain streets, we take precautions."

Until I saw this quote, I never really thought about it. Being someone that constantly works late, there are certain things I do. You diminish them to force of habit more than anything else. You never think anything of it, you just go about the situation and when you finally get inside your house, you just continue to think it's a normal thing. This is not human nature that we are born with, this is something that we have learned to do as life goes on. Something we do because we hear of the day to day horror stories that people go through. Is it really fair that we as women have to do something like that constantly for the fear of our safety? No, but until people notice that what they do hurts other people and how it instills fear in us, it will never end.