If you’re a woman reading this, chances are you’ve been left speechless by sexism a few times in your life. Make that a few dozen times. From the inappropriate remark to the hand where it shouldn’t be, we often find ourselves giving men the benefit of the doubt.
What if he really didn’t mean to brush my breast as he leaned over to check my seatbelt? (He did.)
What if the office nerd who always has to ‘squeeze past’ doesn’t realise he’s creeping me out? (He doesn’t care.)
Does the guy on the train know where his hand is? (Yes, of course.)
How can I get rid of this guy without appearing rude? (You can’t. Don’t worry about it.)
As soon as we’re born, most girls and women are trained to be nice, to think about others, and not make a fuss. Even when our parents try to shun those norms, broader societal expectations put us right back in our place. When boys are mean or aggressive with girls, we tell the girls it’s “because he likes you” or that boys “don’t mature as early as girls”; in other words, we tell girls to accommodate the inappropriate behaviour. Then, as they get older and more sexual in appearance, we ask girls to police the way they behave to ‘prevent’ what might happen, once again shouldering some of the blame and letting the boys & men off the hook somewhat.
We only have to think about the dreadful events in the UK recently to see how this works. Why didn’t Sarah Everard challenge the stop and arrest by Wayne Couzens, her rapist and murderer (a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police with whom most people would have complied)? Why was she out against lockdown rules? Thankfully, by the time teacher Sabina Nessa was murdered on September 17, attempts to place blame were fewer and quieter.
All in all, this early conditioning doesn’t serve girls well and forms patterns for our responses when we’re older. We need to change our messaging to girls, and here’s what it should be:
- Girls can behave just like boys, as long as it’s respectful to others and doesn’t endanger anyone (including themselves). The rules should be the same for all children. If you let your sons shout and get muddy, ditto for the girls. If you let girls cry but not show anger, have a word with yourself. (Messaging for boys, by the way, is a whole nuther topic.)
- Boys will not “be boys” — they will treat girls with respect, and girls don’t have to give them leeway because they’re boys. Normalising ‘laddish’ behaviour leads to microaggressions, banter and ‘locker room talk’ in later life, which in turn, disrespects women and often leads to humiliating or hostile environments. (By the way, in the UK ‘banter’ can be classed as sexual harassment if the behaviour is of a sexual nature, is unwanted, violates someone’s dignity or creates a hostile environment for them.) If left unchecked, there can be more serious consequences, as author Laura Bates pointed out in her 2016 Ted Talk “Everyday Sexism” (at point 14.30):
- Girls don’t have to “put up with” sexist behaviour, such as boys looking up skirts and pinging bra straps. Nor, as they grow up, do they have to “toughen up” as many older women advise them. (Yes, it’s not always boys and men who are the problem.)
- Girls have a right to call out sexism. It’s not rude to object or put a stop to something if they feel uncomfortable, embarrassed or scared. Many of us probably look back at experiences we had as younger women and wonder why on earth we let the offender ‘get away’ with what he did. Sadly, the training runs deep, and it’s not till we get much older that we start to give fewer you-know-what’s about what other people think.
- No one “asks for” sexism. There is nothing girls say, do or wear that contributes to sexism, harassment and worse. Apportioning some blame on what girls were doing or saying before any incident not only makes the whole thing worse for them, it ensures that they won’t bother telling anyone about future problems. Even seemingly inoffensive questions like “Well, what did you say to him before that?” imply that the offence was somehow justified or that she was partly to blame.
- Take girls’ complaints seriously. If they say something’s wrong or something’s happened to them, don’t second guess them or seek to lessen the problem, even if it comes from a caring place. A rapid review ordered by the UK government in June 2021 into sexual harassment in schools revealed that girls didn’t report many incidents because they felt nothing would be done about it. How heart-breaking is that?
- Let them know we are there for them. In her 2016 Ted Talk, Laura Bates begins by relating an incident when, traveling on a bus, she was groped by the stranger next to her. When she announced this to her mother (on the phone with her at the time), every other passenger looked out the window and did nothing with that information. It made Laura feel ashamed and triggered the age-old feelings of partial responsibility. If one person had stepped up for her, not only would she have felt safer, she’d have known she wasn’t alone in thinking she’d been wronged.
We need to do better by our girls so that they can do better for themselves.
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This post was previously published on Equality Includes You.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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