In fourth grade, I remember feeling uncomfortable in my body for the very first time.
I was going about my day at school when a couple of my friends came up to me with something they had apparently heard through the grapevine; there were boys in our classroom looking at my butt, and the girls thought I should sit down.
It was such a casual conversation for something that would stay with me for years. I remember wondering how my teacher, who was sitting near the boys, could possibly have missed what was happening. I considered asking him to intervene, but I had already asked myself a better question: If you were right there, why hadn’t you done anything?
So I said nothing, but now I was suddenly conscious of a part of my body I had never thought to be conscious of before. I didn’t know how to explain what felt so wrong about the situation. I only knew that something about being perceived that way had made me feel strange in my own skin.
Looking back, I think that was my first introduction to a lesson that would follow me into adulthood: when someone makes you uncomfortable, the responsibility to do something about it somehow finds its way back to you.
Sit down. Cover up. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t walk alone. Don’t drink too much. Don’t trust him too quickly. Don’t trust him too slowly, either, because you might offend him. Be careful, but don’t be rude. Stand up for yourself, but don’t provoke anyone. Learn to recognize the warning signs, and, above all, make sure you never become the next story people tell to warn other women.
Women are constantly being taught how to anticipate danger. What fascinates and infuriates me is how often those warnings seem to stop at the individual woman. We learn the rules, memorize the red flags, have the fake “friend asking if you’re on your way home” audio downloaded, and share the stories. Then a few weeks later, another woman gets hurt, and we begin the process all over again.
At what point does a warning become a reason to change something?
Being Seen is a Liability
For anyone who spent the late 2010s watching fashion YouTube, Ashley Rous, better known as Bestdressed, might sound familiar. Her videos combined thrifting, sewing, girl talk, and the kind of self-deprecating humor that tickled my parasocial bone perfectly. Apparently though, others’ parasocial bones were tickled just as much, if not more.
As her online presence grew, so did the amount of her personal life available to strangers. Her apartments were often part of her content to provide inspiration to other women living on their own. The windows, the view, the little decor details that made her home feel personal were also details that ended up revealing more than she intended.
In her final NYC apartment tour YouTube video, Ashley discussed a stalking experience. Using the background details from her previous videos, a man had managed to identify where she lived and show up to her apartment, attempting to get her attention by throwing a toilet paper roll onto her balcony with a written message asking her out which reportedly included the reassurance that he was “not going to kill her.” Hilarious. When she filed a police report, the first station she went to laughed at her and told her he was “just being a nice guy.” Right!
I keep coming back to the absurdity of that reassurance. What kind of culture does a person have to be raised in to feel entitled to invade a stranger’s privacy, locate her home, approach her in possibly the most terrifying way, and still imagine that a date is a reasonable outcome? To interpret her home as an opportunity rather than a place she deserves to feel safe? Maybe the kind where you have to go to multiple police stations because your words will never hold their full weight in the eyes of the law.
And yet, conversations about incidents like these can so quickly become conversations about what the woman did wrong. Why did she show her apartment view? Why did she reveal enough information for someone to find her? Why put so much of her life online in the first place?
Of course, privacy matters. It is reasonable to think carefully about what we share publicly, especially when we have an audience. But there is a difference between acknowledging that people may need to protect their privacy and suggesting that the person who violates it is somehow less responsible simply because the information was available.
Ashley has not publicly given a definitive explanation for leaving YouTube permanently, and I don’t pretend to know her reasoning. What interests me is the larger contradiction her experience illustrates. Women are encouraged to be visible, interesting enough to relate and look up to, but not enough to make anyone dangerously interested. Then when those expectations collide, somehow the woman is the one expected to have anticipated the consequences, and the conversation becomes a retrospective of everything she should have done differently. And now I, and many other young women, have one less positive outlet to enjoy.
A Warning Is Not the Same as Change
The same pattern becomes harder to ignore when we look beyond individual encounters and toward institutions.
Take the Hockey Canada sexual assault case involving five members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior team for example. In July 2025, all five players were acquitted of the criminal charges against them.
Justice Maria Carroccia found the complainant’s evidence unreliable, citing gaps in her memory, ‘exaggeration’ of her intoxication, and rejecting the argument that she only participated in sexual activity out of fear of the men who outnumbered her.
Months later, an independent appeal board found all five had breached the code of conduct, with suspensions from being associated with the organization for four; essentially a warning, not a reversal of the criminal acquittals.
What interests me about this case is what accountability looks like when a case becomes a public spectacle. How do institutions respond to concerns about the cultures they foster? What makes them reluctant to respond in the first place? What changes after the headlines fade?
The public conversation surrounding sexual violence often becomes consumed by the reputations of the people involved, the credibility of the woman who comes forward, and the question of what she could have done differently. Meanwhile, the systems that shape people’s behavior are harder to fully grasp.
Still, I find myself wondering how many times women must tell their stories before the response moves beyond telling other women to be careful.
The Things I’d Learned to Apologize For
I have grown up enough to recognize some of these patterns in my own life, even when they show up in ways that seem relatively small compared with the stories that make the headlines.
Not too long ago, I went on a date with a guy. We were having a decent conversation, but I had already picked up on undertones that had unraveled most of my attraction. I thought it’d be rude of me to cut it short, so I used all the body language cues I knew to signal strictly friendliness. Then, I was in the middle of telling him a story when he interrupted me by grabbing my face and leaning in to kiss me. I turned my head, and he kissed my cheek instead.
It was awkward, I wasn’t interested in kissing him, and I don’t even particularly like kissing on a first date anyway. But somehow, after the date, I found myself apologizing to him over text for making the moment awkward.
I still wonder why that was my first instinct. I mean I was in the middle of speaking after all. I had not wanted to kiss him. I had not done anything to him. Yet I felt compelled to smooth things over, as though his discomfort were a problem I had created and therefore obligated to fix.
His response was that I should have just let him kiss me rather than making things “weird”. Definitely dodged a bullet there.
When I later told other people about the encounter, some tried to balance validating my discomfort and explaining his behavior. We had gone out to dinner. We had gotten drinks. We had been chatting it up, and he probably thought we were getting along more than we actually were. Maybe he had simply taken a chance and misread the situation. That it was “meant as a compliment,” “at least I can be flattered,” and it was “just a kiss.”
I can understand that people misread one another. Attraction is not always mutual, and an awkward moment does not automatically make someone a villain. My experience is obviously not something that needs to be taken to the police, but I cannot get behind the idea that a pleasant date creates an obligation to let someone kiss you. A decent conversation is not a promise, and turning my head away is not an offense that needs to be apologized for. Dinner is not a down payment on access to my body even if that access is as “small” as a kiss. A kiss is a big deal to me, so why shouldn’t I treat it as such?
The part that bothers me most nowadays is not even that he tried to kiss me. It’s that I felt guilty for not wanting to.
Why was I so quick to prioritize his feelings over my own discomfort? Why did I feel responsible for making rejection painless for him? And why did other people find it so easy to explain his expectations while treating my boundary as the thing that had disrupted an otherwise pleasant evening?
I think about my fourth-grade self in that classroom. Back then, I wondered what I could do to make myself less noticeable to those looking at me. Years later, I was still finding ways to make myself smaller, this time by apologizing for not giving someone what he wanted.
Different situations, different people, but a familiar expectation: women should adjust themselves to accommodate someone else’s behavior.
I am not saying that every uncomfortable interaction is a catastrophe, or that every person who makes a pass at someone is dangerous, or that every aspect of rape culture is equal to rape. I am saying that women are asked to make these distinctions constantly, often in real time, with incomplete information and consequences that can be difficult to predict. Do you see how these dangerous preconceived notions and expectations of “that’s just the way men think” become rules women are expected to live by?
We are expected to recognize the warning signs before anyone else does. We are expected to respond correctly, even when there is no response that guarantees our safety. And if something does happen, we are often asked to revisit every decision we made beforehand, as though the right combination of caution, politeness, clothing, timing, and intuition could have prevented someone else from causing harm.
What Will it Take?
This is what I mean when I say that every woman’s life can start to feel like a cautionary tale.
A girl learns to sit down because boys are looking at her body. A young woman learns that sharing her life makes her vulnerable to someone who believes he is entitled to enter it. A woman comes forward with an allegation of sexual violence, and her story becomes the subject of a public argument about consent, credibility, institutions, and accountability. Another woman turns down a kiss and wonders whether she should apologize.
I am tired of the idea that the purpose of women’s experiences is to provide instructions for the women who come after them. I am tired of the endless postmortems in which a woman’s every choice becomes evidence to be examined for the mistake that supposedly made the outcome inevitable. I am tired of the expectation that we can always successfully protect ourselves from someone else’s entitlement if only we are sufficiently cautious.
There is nothing wrong with learning from one another. However, there is something deeply wrong with making women responsible for anticipating every possible way another person might disregard them.
Awareness is important, and warnings can save lives, but a collection of cautionary tales is not the same thing as a culture that takes those tales seriously.