It happens when the first thing people comment on when you’re the topic of conversation is your appearance.

It happens when a stranger eyes you like a piece of meat to be devoured.

It happens when someone else feels entitled to your body.

It happens when I stop becoming Andria, my own individual person with my own personal experiences, goals, needs, and wants and morph into just a girl, generic and blank, with her only value being her face and body.

All too often, society strips women of their identity and sense of worth by presenting them as objects to the rest of the world.

Something to change, fix, judge, evaluate. In more extreme cases, some women’s private lives become fodder for the public forum. Something that should be intimate and personal, like one’s sex life, becomes open for all to pick and prod and dissect until all the beauty is drained out and what’s left are bare, vulgar bones.

Rewatching "Thirteen Reasons Why" felt like a blow to the gut — even though the show was heavily dramatized, Hannah’s plight is not unique in the realm of a teenage girl experience and is something every woman must go through at some point.

While most women could thankfully say they did not suffer through what Hannah did, everyone has their experience where they were sexualized, humiliated, or dehumanized like she was up until her demise. I have my own fair share of uncomfortable encounters where I felt less like myself and more like an object — inevitable catcalling while walking down the street, hearing salacious rumors about myself that had no basis in truth, random strangers feeling the need to comment on my body and how I presented myself.

I felt confined, like everything I did was being monitored. I was stripped of my freedom.

Hannah’s story is particularly important because it provides a perspective that is too often overlooked or neglected. Exposure to more stories such as hers not only entertains but informs the audience about unspoken problems girls face every day.

The graphic nature of the show helps reiterate just how powerful actions are and the toll they take on people. The bullying is an old trope, but the fact that this particular case centers around sexuality and alleged promiscuity is interesting, simply because it's a facet not often explored in the teenage experience in popular media but is extremely prevalent in this society that promotes harmful double standards for women.

What happened to Hannah Baker would never happen to a boy her age because men are seen as people, whereas Hannah was simply a punchline — erased of her humanity and demonized due to provocative rumors that tore her down into nothing in the eyes of others.

This type of story-telling is particularly powerful. By bringing a topic that is hardly spoken about into the light on a large scale, the subject is open for deeper and further discussion (even though there was none in the first place). Popular media has paved the way for widespread conversation that probably wouldn’t have taken place otherwise - the golden age of television has changed the way we communicate for the better.