“Did anyone at school touch you inappropriately?”
That was what my mom used to ask me every day coming home from Kindergarten. It was such a stupid question. 5-year old me didn’t even know why she was asking. She just knew it was a question her mother asked her every day after school, and a question she answered truthfully and honestly every single day. In the same year, she remembered hearing stories about a girl who was assaulted near my school, and my mom was worried about me walking home, even though I only lived a few blocks away and I walked with my sister every day.
“Don’t talk to strangers”, “Don’t leave your sister’s side”, I remember being in a constant state of fear walking home every day. What if someone I didn’t know came up to me, what would I do? What if they attacked me and my older sister? I remember discussing what we would do if someone attacked us, which consisted of her holding him off, and me running and calling for help.
I’ve spent a huge chunk of my life hearing stories of girls getting attacked and how I shouldn’t walk outside at night, how I shouldn’t wear certain clothes and how I shouldn’t do certain things to provoke an attacker. And for a while, I listened. I strayed from certain clothing, I always came straight home after school, and I did everything I was told. And to my current dismay, I wrongly judged women for the things that they wore, and how that could affect whether they got sexually assaulted or not. So in a way, you can say that sexual assault and I have a close relationship.
But these demands I got from my peers, began to interfere with my daily life. I couldn’t not walk outside while it was dark. In high school, I got out of cheer practice at 7:00 pm and sometimes I was tired and it was hot, so I took the bus all the way home in my shorts. High school was also when I decided to become more body confident, and when I began exploring what clothing I enjoy wearing, and crop tops were one of them. In high school, random, and almost always older, men would approach me, and I spent more time than I would care to admit dodging them. It bothered me so much that I would reconsider leaving my house in the summer, and I began to think about if all the interactions I’ve had with men was entirely my fault.
I remember leaving cheer practice in shambles because I was sweaty and tired and still being honked at on the side of the road. I remember walking out in broad daylight, wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, and people were still shouting at me from across the street. I would wear long jeans and long sleeves but the harassment didn’t stop, and I just grew accustomed to it. I stopped getting angry and ranting to my friends about it because I decided that it was something I would inevitably have to live with, and I didn’t know why.
I never starting gaining clarity until the day when I was at cheer practice, talking to one of the girls on my team about an experience, and her mentioning that something similar happened to her. Another teammate told me she was once followed home. Another teammate mentioned she constantly got honked at going across the Horace Harding Expressway. It was one of the first time in my life, that I didn’t feel ashamed, but it also hurt me, because so many people I cared about were affected.
And recently, when the hashtag #MeToo was trending on twitter, and so many women were sharing their stories of sexual harassment, the world felt a lot smaller, and some of the things that happened to me, happened to other women, and it happened ten-fold. It was a bunch of women collectively coming together to say, you’re not alone.
And yet, despite sharing all of our stories and experiences, the elephant in the room was still there. We all discussed how we were ashamed, how we were disheartened, and broken down, but we never discussed the perpetrators.
Most of the men in our stories were never held accounted for. People still tell their children “boys will be boys”. People still expect their daughters to be responsible, mature and grow up a lot faster than they should, rather than teaching their sons to take the same sort of responsibility. People still don’t believe women when they say they have been raped, when only around 2-10% of all rape accusations are false, and some of those accusations were only considered “false” because they could not find enough evidence, not because the perpetrator was not guilty. People still believe that certain actions done by the woman can prevent them from getting harassed and assaulted.
I had grown way too accustomed to the idea of sexual assault or harassment, and I believe that other people do too. There are so many jokes thrown around, so many scenes on TV and in media that desensitize me to the idea of sexual assault, that I almost began to feel nothing about it. But as I grew older, she seemed to follow me. She started to scare me. The looming fear that it could happen to me at any moment terrified me, and the idea that nobody might believe me or care about me if it did, terrified me even more.
There’s an entire culture of women that feel ashamed of the things that men did to them, and that has got to stop. Someone even pointed that instead of saying #MeToo, we should say #HimThough, because women are in no way responsible for the acts of aggression or violence against them. Women simply want to live, work, and be treated as people, rather than sexual objects that only exist for the male gaze.
We don’t deserve to live like this, and we shouldn’t have to make hashtags on social media for people to believe and validate our experiences. We should actively be supporting women and holding the perpetrators responsible for the feelings of discomfort and pain that they have caused so many women. So that we can finally stop saying #MeToo.