Women, I think we all need to sit down our daughters and teach them all about defending themselves through practice.
Sit your daughter and pretend to be the boy who molests her, insults her, or tries to scare her. Teach your daughter that she has to look at you right in the eyes and repeat these words to you: “Don’t you ever do that to me. Don’t you ever talk to me like that. I hate it and it’s offensive.”
You must arm your daughter for self-defense.
But why it is more natural to us to clench our teeth and smile and murmur “Oh, stop” that is often mistaken for flirtation?
Many women will say that they were raised like that. And while we try to not make the same mistake when it comes to our daughters, we still see situations where boys in puberty get sexually aggressive to girls and girls seem to be lacking the voice to call it off and stop the harassment.
Patriarchy is still there mainly because women still believe deep inside them that they are not equal. They constantly overthink and analyze their behavior.
In heterosexual weddings, the patriarch “gives” his daughter to her new “patriarch” i.e. the groom. And people all applaud to that. She takes his name and takes a new identity for herself. As if traditional marriage was equal to slavery.
Yes, I know that many modern women do it because they want to cherish the tradition, but I refuse to honor a tradition in which one person legally controls the other one. That’s not worth celebrating, nor even symbolically.
If two men signed a contract when the non-white one was agreeing to adopt the identity of his Caucasian partner, would you pop the champagne? If any sport has banished people of color from playing would there be full stadiums still?
Therefore, there is no wonder that there is a justified outrage against men who harass and objectify women.
Marriage is a partnership between two equals, not slavery. We ache for equality between genders, but we don’t fight for it with the same intensity as we fight for racial equality.
The #MeToo movement is powerless and cannot bring justice to a culture that is so comfortably habituated to misogyny, even more so that some women still fear to lose the trait they were taught to use best – their charm.
And it seems that everywhere I go, I hear people utter only two types of sentences – “You want to grab a coffee?” and “You want to have sex with me, babe?” It’s disgusting. Many women can’t pass a street without being followed or subjected to nasty comments from men.
One day I made an experiment and I tied a cushion to my stomach under a loose dress and I found out that this worked like a magic charm in repelling men. I could finally walk carefree.
Moreover, if the #MeToo movement has proved anything is that we are not safe.
It shouldn’t be like that. We must demand safety and liberty to do our work, wear whatever we like to wear and walk wherever we need to go. Still, plenty of women put up with harassment at work or on the streets.
No woman wants to live in a rape culture where it is not even possible to overreact to harassment because she’ll be accused of overreacting, lying, or even hearing comments that she is cute when she is mad.
Women, we’ve found a voice. Let’s use it, shall we? This madness has to stop once and for all.
