Life as a woman is, in plain words, a battlefield.
From a simple walk down the street to a casual evening gym sesh, girls need to be on the defensive. It’s as simple as the fact that women around the world can’t ever feel completely safe in public settings. Every couple weeks, a Rutgers Police Alert will send emails to the whole Rutgers community about yet another sexual assault on an unsuspecting victim or unwanted sexual advance. Each time, I get a text from my mom reminding me to keep my pepper spray on my keychain.
It’s unfortunate that she has to do that. And it’s unfortunate that safety for women in communities and places that they should be able to deem comfortable is still up in the air. A lot of the way women fend off unwanted sexual advances is in ways that will make any feminist stand up and go, excuse me?
Perhaps the most common way is: “I have a boyfriend.”
It’s unnerving that sometimes the only thing that could stop an intrusive individual is the claim that you have a significant other. It’s even more unnerving in cis-heterosexual scenarios when the affronting male won’t take “no” for an answer until he’s assured that you’re already off limits because you, in his eyes, essentially belong to another male.
You could almost say the hashtag, #MeToo started a revolution in social media. When it got trending on Twitter and other social media there was a strong influence from various powerful women to start an open and communicative conversation about women and unwanted sexual advances.
The conversation talks open about this climate of objectifying and turning women into property that we grow up in and adapt to and frankly, it’s wrong.
One of the most common places to experience these unwanted sexual advances is in frat party basements. The same frat guys that prey on drunk underage girls are the ones that grow up to be creepy men at bars and clubs that you need to cling to your girlfriends to avoid. Many drinking environments create a world where men feel entitled to a woman’s body. It’s toxic and downright perverse.
The bottom-line here is that, unless we start teaching our young kids and young boys about the value of each other as human beings, how are we supposed to ever change anything?
