When I was about 15, I went out with my family to run errands. I was wearing a pair of American Eagle shorts and black booties. Feeling self conscious about how much leg I was showing paired with my six foot tall height from the heels, I whispered to my mother a simple question.
“Hey mom, do I look like a slut in this outfit?”
The comment from only three years ago now stings in my memory. What’s worse is that part of me still thinks that I look slutty when I wear shorter shorts, high heels or low-cut tops because I’ve always been told to hide my body since I was little.
***
From the time that I was 12, I was aware of the fact that my body was constantly being analyzed and judged by the people around me, one of those people was my mother. In fact, she was the person who made me aware of it. I was always being told that I couldn’t wear shorts or shirts that were too short because they were inappropriate and would garner the wrong kind of attention from adults.
As a kid, I thought nothing of my mother’s comments, and I believed my mother was just looking out for me. However, it wasn’t until I turned 16 that I started to see how her constant comments had affected me as I had grown up.
Looking back, I had been taught to view my body as something to hide and something to be afraid of. If I showed too much leg, I was at more risk to be grabbed or taken. If I wore a marginally low-cut top, then I was going to be taken advantage of. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had been taught that showing any skin was slutty and would only lead to trouble.
***
My mother is a survivor of multiple sexual assaults, so when I turned 16, her policing of my wardrobe became more severe and paranoid. Over time, my mother had instilled in me a slight fear of the world. I saw almost everything as a way to get kidnapped or assaulted.
This fear increased the closer I got to college. The statistic of one in three girls gets sexually assaulted in college echoed in the back of my mind as I started my first classes. I got a call from my high school friend that she was going to a party at her college and all I could think about was how easily she could be taken advantage of and I couldn’t be there to help her.
I live in fear of the normal activities that come with college. I was raised to. I was raised to be afraid of being alone, of getting my drink roofied, of being followed at night – to the point that I struggle to see a scenario in which those things don’t happen to me, so I mentally decided to not take the risk.
My mother wasn’t trying to scare me to the point that I don’t go out at all. She was just trying to prepare me for the world she experienced through her eyes. But she experienced one the most extreme versions of the darkness of society, and she taught me to believe that that was the norm for everyone. She scared me into submission. She used to same misogynistic ideals that screwed her over in the 80s to make me fear my own body. She made me believe that not getting raped was my responsibility and perpetuated victim blaming in our society. She taught me that men were just going to be rapists and I needed to protect myself from them.
We see this happening to so many young girls and adult victims even today. If you wear shorts or a tank top you “were asking for it.” If you drink at a party “you were asking for it.” It has to stop. Society has to stop teaching girls that they are the ones to blame for their own assault and that they have to be the ones to prevent it. Parents have to stop training their daughters to slut-shame themselves for the sake of “protection.”
It’s hard to be optimistic about this topic in a world where Brett Kavanaughs and Brock Turners exist, but we have to start changing the narrative. We have to change it so that our future daughters and grand-daughters don’t have to live in the same fear.