Street harassment really fucks a girl up

Probably one of the more fucked up street harassment incidents i’ve ever experienced happened last week. I don’t want to go into details but I’m totally fine and I don’t remember the faces of the guys who thought it was a funny joke that maybe I was afraid they would rape me (there was no physical danger I don’t think just a lot of fucked up discussion). I told a lot of people I know about the event and a lot of people I know were pretty mad about it. A lot of the men I told were pretty shocked about it.

I was pretty offended and unsettled by it, but I was not surprised. Because street harassment is something I’ve been thinking about every morning of every day of my life since at least high school, just like most women.

My high school was on the other side of a valley from where I lived. I walked across the Bloor St. Viaduct every day from age 14 to 18. I was usually too late to cross the street twice so I walked on the side of oncoming traffic.

After the first few weeks of grade 9, I learned that if I wanted to walk to school uninterrupted, skirts and shorts were not an option. Walking by myself on a bridge with few pedestrians and many cars meant the amount of honking and incomprehensible hollering I had to tolerate was roughly proportionate to the amount of skin visible between my socks and the hem of my skirt.

Every outfit I wore to school for four years began with a careful calculation of what I wanted to wear compared to how much shit I was willing to put up with on my walk to school that day.

I graduated high school 9 years ago. Every morning when I get dressed a part of my subconscious still scans my outfit from head to toe and looks at my body from the perspective of men who feel the need to yell obscenities at children from the windows of their cars.

This is my fairly safe and unremarkable story of learning how dangerous my own body is. Many women have learned this lesson in much, much more unpleasant circumstances. All women have learned and internalized this lesson in some way. Every woman you meet has some sort of complex about her body, learned from the way strange men react to it, and have been reacting to it at least since she went through puberty.

I wish I could unlearn this. I wish we could all unlearn this. But the fucked up shit that happens to us when we are children sticks with us.

Imagine what a generation of women could do if we weren’t afraid of our own bodies.