‘Time’s Up’ on being afraid to be a woman

When I was a teenager, I was told a lot of things about how I should behave. ‘Never show too much skin, you don’t want to look like you’re asking for it.’ ‘Wear makeup, but not too much. You don’t want to give someone the wrong impression.’ The list goes on and on. We grow into adulthood knowing that one in six women get sexually assaulted and dread the thought that we might become one of those women that become part of a statistic.

 Now, all of those things are what make up our scars. As young adults, we hold so much anxiety over what can happen to us simply because we might be wearing something that is a little more revealing. We can’t let our guards down when we’re alone in public because we’re afraid that someone might do something to us. At night we walk in groups because we learned a long time ago that we are less likely to get attacked or kidnapped if there is more than one of us out. This is somethng myself and my fellow female editors do every night when walking home from the newsroom. Is something likely to happen to us if we go out alone? Maybe. That’s not a risk we’re willing to take.

I’m not asking for pity; I could care less about that. Women are tough in ways no one can imagine and if people had pity for what is happening to us things would have stopped a long time ago. What I’m asking for is change. 

I’m over the victim blaming that happens after women has been sexually assaulted. In no situation is it her fault. A women’s choice in clothing has nothing to do with the fact that a man decided to attack her. What we need to blame instead is the man’s inability to keep his hands to himself. 

Women shouldn’t have to be scared to report when something happens to them because they were drunk and are afraid they won’t be taken seriously. Again, that it is not their fault.  

To make things better though, we need to change some things. 

It’s time that we start teaching people to not take what they want regardless of if they are told no. Dress codes need to stop being tailored to keep girls covered for the sake of teenage boys. If I could handle seeing a shirtless boy when I was 15 years old, I think boys can do the same when they see a girl’s shoulder or a bit of her thigh. It really isn’t that hard to not sexualize someone’s body unless they want to be seen that way.  

We need stop teaching girls what they need to do to avoid being sexually assaulted and start teaching people what it means to respect someone’s body and learn the meaning of the word no. Maybe then women won’t be so worried about going out alone. 

I know that women aren’t the only ones who get sexually assault, it happens to men too and I’m not going to ignore that. They don’t deserve what happens to them either. However,  it seems to me that women are the ones who experience it, or something extremely close to it, the most often. This is because society has let these things go on for so long that it has become normalized.  

Let’s stop this. Let’s make the streets feel a little safer for women.