"Most of the time you like to get a hug or a kiss, but sometimes you don't want to be touched. At these times, it's OK to say 'no,' because your body belongs to you."
I work in a library and while shelving books, I came across one by Cornelia Spelman. Her book, Your Body Belongs to You, is a juvenile fiction that is meant to reassure children that it's OK to decline a friendly hug or kiss, even when it's from someone they love, and "even if you don't want a hug or kiss right now, you can still be friends." This book gives a little insight on how to teach children that their consent matters. Always. This book inspired me this week to write about something that I care about, something that I have spent countless hours of the past year reading about.
This is an article about, as an anonymous writer said, "a culture that doesn’t respect women's boundaries, a culture that can’t take 'no' for an answer, a culture that buries women’s sexuality in guilt and shame. This is about a culture that, imperceptibly, seeps its values into the minds and hearts of well-meaning parents until that culture’s most awful beliefs about women come flying out of the mouths of the ones that love us most."
There are not just parents, but relatives and friends, who inadvertently teach children to accept rape culture. These relatives and friends teach children that rape culture is simply a part of our culture because that's what has been taught to them. When you're taught that, as a woman, there will be verbal and physical violations of your body that are just a part of life, I understand how it could be hard to teach anything different. We too often say "here's how to do better" than we say "here's how we messed up." We have to recognize mistakes in order to change what and how we're teaching children. Making kids hug or kiss each other because you think it's "soo adorable" is not OK. Shrugging off unacceptable behavior because "boys will be boys" is not OK. Telling girls that men are going to yell at you on the sidewalk but that you should just ignore them because "this is what it means to be a woman" is not OK. Your body moving in public space does not make your body public property.
When I was in high school, my sister taught me that I'm allowed to throw a "fuck you" over my shoulder if I want to. She taught me through her "raging feminist" rhetoric that no one's body is an object of play, that "no" is a viable answer and that we have all the right to be angry when we are not taken seriously.
From childhood, we are shaped and taught how to navigate and exist in rape culture. We are taught to not say the wrong thing, to not react the wrong way and to not be in the wrong situation. We are not taught "how to resist, how to heal, how to revolt." The most important thing we can teach those who look up to us is that their body is theirs and should be respected. Always.
