There comes a time in every young girl’s life when she realizes that her body is not her own.
For me it was age 14, walking down the beach after I’d competed in a cheerleading competition earlier that day. Very small for my age, brace-faced, and obviously young, I stopped dead when, while walking under a pier, I noticed a middle-aged man taking pictures on his phone from above. Of us.
I turned to my two other friends, “Do y’all see him? Above us?”
“Just keep walking, don’t pay attention to him,” my friend said, speeding up her pace, her eyes wide and disturbed, but it was obvious she’d dealt with creepy men before. Earlier the same day, I’d listened to her repeat “too young for you, too young for you,” to a 19-year-old asking us to hang out with him on the beach.
I realized my body wasn’t my own when my male friends began to rank the girls in our friend group. I wanted to be hot because the male gaze was what mattered. They made the rules. Twisted harassment became compliments. I thought I was supposed to be flattered by whistles from Ford F-150 windows. Their validation was reflected in my self-worth. I drank tons of water instead of eating when my mom wasn’t home to see. I learned to count calories way before a child should have.
I didn’t have it nearly as bad as some girls did though, and I should address that. My body wasn’t my own, but I was never physically harmed because of it. I watched my best friend freshman year of high school wither away because all she’d do during lunch period was stare at the apple she’d brought. I had to ask her everyday what she’d eaten for dinner the night before, scared she’d skipped that, too. I watched as another friend was taken advantage of by an 18 year old boy that went to her church. At 14, she thought it made her cool, desirable and pretty. Looking back, it all just continuously shows me that from a young age, little girls are being turned into sexual objects before we even know what sex is.
We are not just our bodies.
And the media, growing up, didn’t help. Now, sexism gets called out regularly. When I was in middle and high school, it was a norm.
From overtly-sexual songs, like “My Humps” or rapper encouraging us to “Pop, Lock and Drop It,” to “Laffy Taffy,” or even the classic “Bitches Ain’t Shit but Hoes and Tricks” song. Our representation, and our portrayal, was few and far between. Girls in movies/shows/popular culture were skinny and white. Everyone wanted to be Paris. Fat girls in shows were comedic value, never central to the plot, never of importance. Even Gilmore Girls fat-shamed. Women were sexualized on every magazine and album cover. What else were we supposed to think about ourselves? Even fighting breast cancer involved the sexualization of women’s bodies, as Raquel Isabelle de Alderete put in her poem “Memories.”
“I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME ONE OF MY FRIENDS CAME TO ME WITH EYES SO RED I THOUGHT SHE’D INHALED A DESERT. SHE SAID HER MOTHER HAD DIED FROM BREAST CANCER THE NIGHT BEFORE. SHE SAID HER HOME WAS AN OPEN GRAVE, A HOLY SPACE. SHE SAID SHE’D RATHER BE IN SCHOOL THAN DEALING WITH AN ABSENCE SO LOUD NOBODY COULD SPEAK. I STILL THINK ABOUT HER EVERY TIME SOMEONE SAYS “SAVE THE TA-TAS” INSTEAD OF “PLEASE GOD SAVE OUR MOTHERS HAVEN’T ENOUGH OF US SUFFERED.”
And that representation, and how we perceived ourselves, rolled over into adulthood. I didn’t realize that I could actually tell a guy “No” until my sophomore year of college. I wasn’t allowed to own my body until I realized that, for years, I was basing my self worth of the fleeting perception of the male gaze.
I don’t know if a lot of men have ever consciously thought about the things young girls have endured, from older men and their peers. Perhaps not until they have daughters. The excuse “how would you feel if that was your daughter, your sister” isn’t good enough. It shouldn’t matter if a girl is a daughter, or a wife, or a sister. It should matter because she’s a person, that doesn’t deserve to have her innocence and solidarity over her own being ripped from her at the hands of a man.
Growing up in the south, I loved country music in high school, and it it was, and still is, notorious for sexualizing and fetishizing female bodies. Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party” was all the rage my sophomore year, along with a thousand other identical bro-country anthems about tan-legged-juliets and “pretty things” getting “down in the Georgia clay.” Lines like “If ya wanna drink/go baby just do your thing/give up your keys/hell, why drive when you can stay with me?” Not only is it possessive of female bodies, but also a little date-rapey. It took country duo Maddie and Tae 5 years to realize, “Hey, that’s a little fucked up,” and release a song called “Girl in a Country Song,” which was an anthem for the fed-up and over-sexualized women of country music, who wanted a say in how their bodies and beings were sung about. They sing, “Being the girl in a country song, how in the world did it go so wrong? Like all we’re good for is looking good for you and your friends on the weekend, nothing more.” It was the clap-back of a decade, and marked a new era for women in country. And I wish it would’ve happened when I needed it most.
See, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being sexual. It’s who’s in charge of the sexuality that matters. That’s what feminism is all about. Girls shouldn’t have to realize it at the hands of creepy old men, or boys forcing them into situations they’re uncomfortable with. They shouldn’t have to hear men singing about their bodies, fetishizing their features, and comparing them to disposable women in bro-comedies, or even worse, porn.
I started to realized the “beauty problem” my senior year of high school. We had to make a speech for my leadership class on something we really cared about, and I chose the portrayal of women in media. Because I wrote it four years ago, it expresses only a basic understanding of the complexities of feminism. It uses cliches and sounds, fittingly, like a 17 year old wrote it, but I still read over it sometimes, to remind myself of how far I’ve come, and how I felt in that moment.
“MY QUESTION IS, WHY DO WE LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE IT’S OKAY TO MAKE OTHERS FEEL BAD ABOUT THEMSELVES?” I ASKED MY AUDIENCE OF 25 OTHER STUDENTS. “IT’S SOCIETY’S FAULT. THEY PUSH THESE IMAGES IN OUR HEAD, WHAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE. WE CAN’T HELP THE WAY WE’RE BORN. CELEBRITIES AREN’T PERFECT, BUT THE MEDIA MAKES THEM OUT TO BE,”
I wrote, and pitched to my 25-student Leadership class. I hope our world continues to progress in a way that makes these feeling I had disappear. Now I realize it’s more the patriarchy’s fault more than anything, and the reason the media displays women in such a way is entirely rooted in the patriarchal idea that the male gaze matters. The entirety of high school, I was so focused on the male gaze that I forgot to think about myself.
The continuous critique in today’s mainstream media is a start, but sometimes I find myself asking, is it just for clicks? Now that it’s “cool” to be a feminist, are we oversimplifying it to sell beauty products and get traffic to websites? The biggest oxymoron of them all is make-up brands and Gigi Hadid-esque models telling me I need to love myself. It stresses me out, because the modern-day, mainstream movement sometimes misses the point. Being progressive for the sake of being progressive isn’t a stance, it’s a death sentence. It’ll fizzle out. We need the feminist movement to be productively progressive, not just Lena Dunham yelling at us through a computer screen.
The movement is oversimplified, and the tendency to oversimplify can prove a massive problem. “Basic” feminists (ex: Dunham, Taylor Swift and her “Squad”) flood Facebook, and “news” sites like “ATTN:” and “Now This” post wow-factor content that disguises itself as progressive, but doesn’t necessarily promote progressive ideals. It’s in it for the clicks, it’s in it for the “OMG THIS IS TERRIBLE” comments, it’s not in it for real change. They promote parts of feminism, but ignore, or fail to address, the effects.
Sex-positivity became the heart of the feminist movement, but the intricacies of promoting sex-positivity didn’t come into the foreground. For example, porn.
“WE TELL OURSELVES THAT PORNOGRAPHY IS “JUST A FANTASY’ AND THAT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH “REALITY’ EXCEPT THAT PORN IS A REALITY — IN OUR LIVES, IN THE LIVES OF THE WOMEN IN PORN, IN THE MINDS OF THE MEN WE INTERACT WITH ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS. PORNOGRAPHY SHAPES OUR SEXUAL FANTASIES AND IF MEN’S FANTASIES (OR EVEN WOMEN’S FANTASIES) ARE SHAPED BY IMAGES OF WOMEN BEING DEGRADED, ABUSED, AND/OR OBJECTIFIED, I FAIL TO SEE HOW ANYONE COULD ARGUE THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH “REAL LIFE.” ARE OUR THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, IDEAS, AND DESIRES NOT “REAL LIFE?”
–Meghan Murphy, Feminism is the new misogyny: On "Belle Knox Feminism" and "The New Backlash"
The idea is that, since men sleep with whoever they want, women should be able to as well. Think about Amber Rose’s campaign and her “Slut Walk.” It has good intentions, but it’s oversimplifying the issue. Not only does it inadvertently continue the idea that women are just sex objects, it also ignores emotional repercussions of sex. It is inherently feminist because it encourages women to make their own decisions, but it’s in turn promoting rash and damaging behavior. In the same way many media outlets portray porn as liberating, they’re ignoring that fact the no matter how much a porn star says she’s “happy” as a porn star, that the only reason porn exists in the first place is because of one reason: male demand. Rachel Moran, founder of the organization “Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment” or SPACE, said at FemiFest 2014;
“PROSTITUTION EXISTS FOR ONLY ONE REASON; THAT REASON IS MALE DEMAND. NO AMOUNT OF POVERTY WOULD BE CAPABLE OF CREATING PROSTITUTION IF IT WERE NOT FOR MALE DEMAND.”
And what we need to promote and work toward is the eradication of female action for male demand, and we also need to stop ignoring the intricacies of sex. Sex positivity reinforces the idea that we need to have sex to be fulfilled, and it lacks the consequences of being sexual. There are emotional effects of sleeping with a lot of people, and there are certain influences that can lead girls, especially young girls, to be this way besides the need for liberation. It’s how girls get taken advantage of. We acknowledge that the patriarchy is awful, and boys (and men) can be rude, misogynistic, and disrespectful, so why is the mainstream movement’s response to that “Go have a much sex as you want”? Sex, for many women, and men, is tied deeply to affection and emotionality. It can be fun, but also upsetting and emotional.
Sex positivity paints it over as an inherently positive experience, and we all know that it often is not. Sexual assault happens. Girls get pressured into situations they don’t necessarily want. It tells impressionable young girls that sex is the solution to their problem and ignore the effects of their mental state. We need to be more careful about how we frame discussions of sex. You have to understand the emotion, physical and mental effects of it, because men don’t often offer the needed support in the aftermath. It’s not worth hating yourself. All this needs to be factored into the conversation.
The media, as well, also tends to whitewash feminism, especially when it comes to celebrities. Female experiences are inherently different for white women versus women of color, and women of different socioeconomic classes. Womanhood is distinctive based on circumstance. Certain stereotypes are assigned to different races, therefore railing against the “dainty feminine” stereotype ignores the way that black women are often stereotyped as hard, angry and masculine. Conversations of feminism need to be intersectional.
So my experiences growing up aren’t the same as everyone else’s’, and I cannot speak for all women, but I think I captured the jist of the female experience in saying that women still don’t own their bodies. This Twitter thread by author Kelly Oxford summed it up as well. Maybe one day they will. I hope it’s soon. I’m tired of being scared to walk home, and I’m tired of being scared to tell men no. I’m tired of having the male gaze in the back of my mind. And I’m sure everyone else is tired of it, too.
**(All images are screen-shotted from The 1975’s song “Girls” for it’s critique on the portrayal of women in popular music, as is the site title “Eyes bright, uptight, just girls.” I used them for this purpose, and all rights go to The 1975 and Interscope Records)**
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