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everywrongturn-blog · 8 years ago

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Changing the Conversation (a response to the election)

There doesn’t seem to be a better time to start my campaign to change rape culture in American society and American’s cultural and societal issues with the portrayal of women, and concepts of sexual assault, harassment, and rape than with the beginning of this new presidency. The male we elected into office was voted in despite statements from his past suggesting that women are just objects he can do whatever he pleases too just because he is rich and famous. Unfortunately, he was sort of right. Those in power and status positions are able to continue to have successful careers and escape clear negative effects on their lives despite reprehensible things they have said and done. Bill Clinton can actually join Donald Trump in this conversation. As can many other politicians, actors, TV personalities, and athletes.

He was elected and now whether we supported him or not, liked him or not, we need to move forward. The question I pose to you is what is the way forward. I have my own idea about it. I think the election this year publically highlighted a huge issue within American society and culture. He was identifiable to women and men alike. Many of the men who voted for him most likely have engaged in “locker room” talk in their own lifetimes and said similar things. I know I’ve heard guys say similar things. As far as the women who voted for him go, there’s a high probability that they believed “locker room talk” and “boys will be boys” were acceptable excuses for his behavior. After all, they’ve probably heard it just like I have in their lifetimes, and both men and women have been taught that it’s just how men act.

I am sure there were plenty of people who voted due to party lines and beliefs in policies and how the government should be run, but it really irks me that such a large number of Americans were not more offended by how he spoke about treating women and did not act more strongly against it. I presume that there is an underlying factor reflected in this election from our culture and society that belays the level of our tolerance for poor treatment of women and our acceptance of terrible behavior from men. I have been subjected to this kind of “locker room talk” from guys I knew at a Christian college to the majority of the men I was around in the military. It always bothered me, yet I never said anything. I doubt I am the only woman out there who has been in that situation. I also believe there are men out there who have been as well.

If what Trump said has been widely defended by men and women alike as just how men behave and as locker room talk, then what he said isn’t the point of argument. What we need to discuss is why both men and women accept this behavior and excuse it, and how we can change it. We need to change the conversations.

I tried changing the conversation once; I flipped the table entirely. I was around guys who would rate my roommates, the girls we all knew, or just body parts of girls in front of me. I’ve had guys pick apart my body to my face and talk about specific pieces of me in terms of how attractive they were. I was around guys who said things like, “She’s easy, but she’s cute enough that if I got desperate I’d dumpster dive.”

I once said to this group about an attractive guy, “He’s hot, but he’s only worth doing once because I could never date him. He’s got no personality.”

I had a very pointed motivation behind this comment, it’s not me and not something I would normally say. It was an experiment on a spur of the moment impulse. I got a very strong reaction from all of the guys who were talking exactly like this about me and other girls. I was shallow, that was inappropriate, and I was a horrible person to just look at this guy’s body and rate him like that. Yet somehow it was okay for them to talk about women exactly this way. When I turned the tables on them it wasn’t tolerated behavior. I didn’t hear, “Girls will be girls.” I heard that it made me a terrible person. Of course none of them were terrible people for rating girls and saying the exact same thing about females. Maybe that’s the only way to start getting the message across. Maybe we have to be bold and drastic with initiating the conversation. Maybe women need to start whistling at guys, rating them, and discussing their do-ability right in front of them. When they react in shock and tell us that’s wrong we’ve finally got a foot in the door to ask them why it’s wrong for us and okay for them. Maybe it’s the best way to put the shoe on the other foot and teach them it’s wrong for them too.

That is also a very drastic approach. I can guarantee you that if women started talking like men, with locker room talk, in front of them we probably wouldn’t get very welcome reactions from them. I am also very aware that some women actually do talk like this. I’ve overheard one woman say to another about a guy they saw walking around shirtless, “Well if the body is hot you can always put a bag over his head.” Personally I feel that is just as disgusting as the things we heard in the election this year, albeit much more shocking for me to hear from a woman’s mouth. The change we need to make in our society is a responsibility that lies on the shoulders of both men and women. It’s one we need to work at together and a discussion we need to engage in. Yet, how do we go about trying to disengage ourselves from the lessons that culture, media, and years of heritage have engrained in us about how men and women act. Men treat women as sex objects and we are overwhelmingly portrayed as such in the media; yet there is a definitive level where women, almost all of us, have fallen into the societal and cultural standards and objectification of us even if we didn’t intend to. We all play off of society and media and culture plays off of us. Combating such long-standing roles, attitudes, stereotypes and opinions about the sexes that we all hold to a degree is going to be hard. Stopping the influences of those and the media on the next generation will be just as hard, especially when we aren’t making the necessary changes in our own beliefs and excuses.

“Who are you trying to impress?” a female coworker asked me, about my makeup one day.

I never wore much makeup, so little in fact most people never realize I have anything on; however, on this day I had done a little more. The assumption I faced from several people was that I was doing it to impress a guy. The reality was I wasn’t sleeping and was trying to hide dark circles, puffiness, and bags around my eyes. I had tried to brighten them up and make myself look more awake; I was trying to hide the fact that I had spent most of the night before crying.

I had worn the makeup for no one, except for me. I put a little extra care into myself because it helped me feel a little readier for the day when I didn’t want to get out of bed. Because I was worth the extra care. Because I didn’t want people to know how hard recent life events had been on me.

But that’s not what anyone would have thought, and likely wouldn’t have believed if I had told them the truth. No, I had to have put in the time and the effort for some guy. I had to be trying to catch his eye. I didn’t do this for me.

A couple of years ago I would have probably made a similar assumption. Why?

I live in and grew up in a society where women get the message engrained into them at a very young age: we’re supposed to look pretty and appealing to men. The media and our culture is deeply rooted in this attitude and idea, despite how many women have already moved past the concept that their ultimate goal is to find a good husband. We aspire to be more than wives now, but society’s conceptualization of women hasn’t caught up to that fact. Everything about how we look, our culture tells us, is about pleasing men. We need to start changing that dialogue.

I have been disgusted that a man with sexual harassment and assault charges against him can continue to run for and be elected president. This shows how deeply rooted and engrained a negative attitude towards women is in our society, as well as just how engrained the attitude that “boys will be boys” is, in both the minds of men and women.

The men who voted for Trump didn’t take the charges against him seriously enough. Instead, they attacked his victims, calling them liars. Statistics say that only 2-8% of sexual assault allegations are actually fake, and that is only based on those reported. If it had been their wives, daughters, and sisters making those allegations against a rich, famous, powerful man; would they have said they were lying, or would they have stood up beside them, supported them, and wanted to see that guy dead or at least in jail? Would they have labeled the guy a peeping tom and gotten a restraining order on behalf of their daughter if he had been peeping in their windows instead of entering the dressing room of a beauty pageant he owned?

Those men probably didn’t think what Trump said and did was all that serious. They were fifteen-year-old boys in the locker room once. Guys talk that way. Boys will be boys. They’ve probably said similar things. They’ve probably heard similar things and never bothered to tell the guy saying it that it was wrong to treat and talk about women that way. Maybe they chuckled over it.

The problem was, this wasn’t a locker room, it was his professional place of work which will soon be the white house. And he was a married adult with a beautiful daughter who has probably faced similar comments about herself. He wasn’t a fifteen-year-old boy in a high school locker room, he was an adult who should have known better. Yet Trump and his defenders apparently don’t know better.

More disturbing to me though is the fact that women voted for him. 53% of white women at that. I have to believe that those women didn’t react as strongly as they should have in an outcry against a man with these charges against him because they’ve learned the lessons society has taught them. Boys will be boys. Don’t be too sensitive and don’t take things like that too seriously, that’s just what guys say to each other when they hang out. Society teaches us everything we do should be about being pleasing to a man’s eyes and that we don’t need to take comments like his about women seriously. One woman said that it didn’t dissuade her from voting for Trump because it just made him more of a man to her, because that’s how every man acts.

That doesn’t work for me. A MAN doesn’t act like that. If we go by the excuse “boys will be boys,” then he has never grown up. He’s still a 15-year-old kid in the locker room, with hormones going crazy. Real men respect women, and recognize that a woman’s body belongs to her alone. Money, power and fame cannot excuse behavior like that and does not make it acceptable. If it’s power and money that allow you to walk up to a women and “grab her pussy” or do anything you would like to her, you are treating her as an object you own, not another human being. This sounds reminiscent to me of a time period where plantation owners owned female slaves and since they considered those women their property did whatever they wanted to them. I realize for most of you this is probably stretching it too far, but the facts are there: money and power is abused by those who have it, and having money and power does not make that abuse okay.

So we’re here now. Enough of America called the women making the allegations of sexual assault and harassment cases against him liars. This is not unusual, this is actually very common among any sexual assault and harassment allegations. That touches another huge issue about myths most people in this society believe is true about sexual harassment and assault – which is a topic for a paper of its own. Women and men alike voted for a guy who should have not been allowed to run and be elected, except just maybe, after a thorough investigation of the allegations against him (and I believe the same about Clinton by the way).

Our country is largely divided, violently protesting, and throwing temper tantrums fit for the terrible twos over this election, but that isn’t addressing the core issues it demonstrated. I want to change the dialogue. The only way to prevent a similar person from holding this office in the future is by changing the dialogue in the media and in our culture and society. We have to change deep rooted myths about rape, harassment, and assault; perceptions about how men act and our excuses for their behavior; and how women view themselves. We need to create a dialogue in our society the starts challenging the boys will be boys concept, starts teaching both girls and boys at a young age that this behavior isn’t acceptable and will not be tolerated, and start combating the idea that women and their bodies are objects that should be appealing to men. This isn’t going to happen overnight; experts in this field have been arguing about things like this for years.

Instead of “locker room talk” and “boys will be boys” we can teach our sons and daughters that talk like that isn’t okay, is disrespectful of women, and nothing can excuse it. We can teach our sons that talk like that is hurtful to women and, as a new study shows, an attitude that is potentially detrimental to their own mental health. We can teach boys that hooting, hollering, and whistling at a girl is never asked for or wanted, but is actually sexual harassment. We can talk to them about the problems in the media and society with using women’s bodies to sell everything from cars, burgers, and beer; yet it’s considered offensive for a woman to breastfeed a child in public. It’s not okay to turn our bodies into beer bottles and use cleavage to sell burgers, and it is okay to use our breasts for what they were designed for. They were designed for feeding children, not for the pleasure of men. You can further teach them about the huge issue with human trafficking and modern day slavery, which is a huge problem in the porn and prostitution industries. Teach them that those women may not have a choice in being in that industry, whether it was force by dire circumstances or force by abduction and threat. Teach them to be compassionate for women, to respect their bodies as human beings, and to not see them as the objects media and culture portray them as.

Teach your sons that there is value in a women’s mind, heart, and personality. Teach them that vulgar remarks are not okay. Teach them that in any situation dirty jokes and vulgar references to women are not funny. In no context is it okay to call a woman a prostitute; it’s never laughable. It’s never funny to be degrading and disrespectful. Take whore, slut, and “like a girl” out of their repertoire. Teach them to say “you’re really good at baseball” and not to tack “for a girl” at the end. Teach them that rating girls on a scale is degrading and hurtful. We’re all great in our own way.

And for your daughters – where do I even begin? Teach your daughters that the only person she needs to please and make happy is herself. Teach her that her body belongs to her alone and does not exist for the pleasure of anyone else. Try to combat the messages media sends to her by modeling in your own life the fact that you do not tolerate behavior like Trump’s from men. Teach her that wearing makeup or not should be about how it makes her feel, not about catching a guy’s eye. Teach her that any clothing choices she makes should be about if she feels confident and good in an outfit, not if it gets her some whistles walking down the street. Teach her that her goals in life should not involve attracting the attention of a man or several men, but about what makes her happy and gives her a life she enjoys. Teach her that it’s not selfish to want to be happy with herself and do things for herself, that it’s not selfish to not please everyone.

Teach your daughters that a real compliment sounds like: “Wow that dress looks so good on you,” “You have an amazing mind,” “You’re so creative,” “You’re really good at chemistry” and so on. Teach her that real compliments can be about her mind, her heart, her abilities – and not her body. Teach her that if someone compliments an outfit, physical features, and body there is a right and a wrong way to do that. Teach her that intelligent, respectful men who will treat her right will compliment her in a respectful way. Tell her that doesn’t sound like hollering, hooting, or whistling or comments in passing like “Check out that ass!” or “Look at the rack on her!” Teach her that those are inappropriate and harassing. Teach her that getting her bra strap snapped in a school hallway is not a behavior she needs to tolerate and that adults will not tolerate. Stop telling them boys will be boys.

And for the love of humanity, stop telling her boys are just teasing her because they like her. She’s complaining to you about treatment that’s annoying her, that’s harassing, and that she doesn’t like. Don’t teach her that it means the guy likes her, and that guys show that through treatment that she doesn’t like. You’re teaching her in that very moment not to stand up against treatment she isn’t okay with, you’re teaching her to accept things she doesn’t like in relationships at such a young age. Instead support her in telling the boy to knock it off. Teach her people who like us don’t hurt us, don’t tease or make fun of us, and that we don’t have to tolerate treatment we don’t like.

Furthermore, teach her that all men are entirely and solely responsible for their thoughts and actions. It is not her job to dress in a way that does not attract a guy’s attention or distracts him. There’s a huge issue currently portrayed in school dress codes that promote the idea that it is on the female to control male desires. Female students are facing humiliation and discrimination because they get told how they dress distracts the guys from their learning, putting responsibility for a guy’s focus of attention and desires on her and not him. I should hope they can control their focus and desires more than they are given credit for. Also, if we can combat media’s message to our daughters and teach them to love and respect their bodies I would like to believe they would dress themselves in a respectful manner and not inappropriately put their bodies on display, despite the cultural bombardment of our bodies as displays.

Maybe if we start changing the conversation the next generations won’t tolerate a presidential candidate like the ones we dealt with this year. If we stop making the excuses at young ages and continuing to do so throughout the lives of both boys and girls, but rather teach them mutual respect and hold them to the same standards we can start closing the divide between how we really would like to be treated and how we see ourselves currently treated. The existence of gender differences doesn’t equate to excusing bad behavior for either gender, we’re they only ones who create the excuses and can choose to stop them and refuse to accept them.

Whatever way we need to do it, the facts remain the same, we need to change the conversations surrounding this issue and start having a real “zero tolerance” policy for it in all areas of our lives.

#election 2016 #presidential election #feminism #media #womeninmedia #sexism

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