Your gender defines a lot of who you are. Gender is used as a divider between what clothes department to shop in, what bathroom to use, and what toys your child should be playing with. Gender is even used to divide between what color razor to use, what color pencil should be used, and what color binder to put your school supplies in. Gender is a great divider when it comes to what you should purchase and use, however these types of divisions are superficial compared to the division in variation in life experience that gender truly affects.
A woman is told at a very young age that her clothes are an advertisement for the world to know what type of woman she is. The thought goes along the lines like this: if the girl shows too much, she is promiscuous, and if the girl doesn’t show enough then she is a prude. This ideology is a fallacy. A fallacy that has defined court cases concerning sexual assault. It does not take a genius to tell you that clothes do not have a mouth, so therefore clothes cannot speak. In fact, I would even dare someone to ask “can clothes talk?” the next time they are in a court room, on the media, or even having a discussion with their friends about sexual assault, and someone mentions the type of clothes she was wearing. The answer is obvious: no. So why do we, as a society, teach young women that their clothes say a lot about who they are, or what they want? Clothes cannot give consent. If we did want to play into this ideology, I would argue that the only thing my clothes can say is the temperature it is outside. For example, if I am wearing shorts and a tank top there is a solid correlation between those two pieces of clothing and the fact the temperature outside is probably higher than 80 degrees. A tank top and shorts do not give consent.
Even if a woman bundles up, she still runs the risk of being treated as an object for her body. In fact, I remember seeing a post on Facebook with a picture of a woman in the dead of winter bundled up literally from her neck to her toes with just her hands and face to be revealed. Along with the picture was a very distressed post about her walk to work that day, which explained that while she was walking down the street, basically hidden from the world, there were men harassing her still. I remember her post said something along the lines of, “I was wearing a parka for goodness sake.” That quote truly speaks volumes about the society that we have built around how we treat a woman’s body. As if her body does not belong to her. To those men her body was a thing to be hollered at, objectified, and treated as if it was a piece of meat that they were fighting over to take home and have for dinner.
To further this disconnect between a woman and her own body, as a society, we teach women that they are an image on a magazine that needs to be plucked and poked at by an editor, and once that is done, then be plucked and poked at some more by the public. A woman’s body through this process no longer becomes her own physically or symbolically. Her body is transformed into a fictional sculpture that does not exist within this realm of reality. The woman’s body no longer looks like the reflection she sees in the mirror. Her body is then criticized by the media since it still does not match the perfection that we as a society have created for ourselves to achieve. The woman’s body is not her own. By this process, we as a society are teaching women that their body is the property of other’s to do what they will with it. As I write this, I see such irony even in my writing. I type the words “their/her/woman’s” to show ownership that the body is indeed hers, but in the same exact sentence explain why the body is not hers all in the same: as if Standard English Grammar can even see the contradictions within our society’s way of thinking about a woman’s body.
Women are told to protect their body from the evils of this world: To put her body under lock and key to make sure that nothing comes in that she doesn’t want in. Her body is held to such a high standard that she should take numerous precautions to protect her body. We contradict ourselves so much when it comes to a woman’s body. We teach women to take every precaution to protect her body, and to hold her body to such a high standard of modesty and innocents. However when the coin is flipped, as a society, we objectify her body to sell a pair of jeans, we constantly put pressure on her to be sexier, and she is belittled so far down that her voice, the only thing able to give consent, is not heard when her body is used without her approval.
I write this piece so, as a society, we understand the consequences for our actions. We have influence in how sexual assault is perceived within our society by our actions. This past semester, I attended a talk about sexual assault, how to prevent it, and how this crime is allowed to continue by us, a society. The speaker explained that sexual assault is a big effect out of a bunch of tiny actions. The foundation of belittling a woman starts with unequal wages, gender roles, and the pink tax. The effects then build from there to other actions, such as objectification by the media and advertisements. Then the roof to this abstract structure is to very real and serious crimes, such as sexual assault, domestic abuse, and other crimes against women. As a society, we are the foundation that in ways has inadvertently supported the abusers and predators that are out there against women. We have told women what shape their body should be in, how to dress their body, and what to do with their body, so our society on some level have taken away a woman’s right to ownership and choice over her body. We, as a society, need to give back women’s choice, ownership and worth as a human being so that women learn that they are valued within society, that their aspirations are important, and they are given back their voice so they can defend themselves against the evils of this world.
For more information on sexual assault concerning women and men check out these websites:
