Sadbh
Today a male teacher told a girl to zip up her hoodie because she was wearing a top under that showed her shoulders
sexualised
Tori
A close family friend always makes little jokes about my mum’s breasts and compares them to his wife’s. It’s happened for years and I saw it as so normal. He would throw small things down my mum’s cleavage and it was always the running “joke”. At about 15 he started doing it to me, too. It was irritating but I guess I kind of found it funny, too. Nobody saw a problem with it. Years later I can see it for what it was and how it was so normalised that nobody cared. But that’s a really difficult thing to explain to family to get them to understand why it’s wrong and why it’s damaging.
Charlotte
My friend and I came out of the ladies’ toilet in a club, to find two much 50+ year old men purposely blocking our path. They said ‘We think you two are gorgeous’ and asked us repeatedly if we wanted to go with them, very immediately asking for sex. Another woman we had befriended in the loo tried to tell them that we had boyfriends and to leave us alone- they completely ignored her. She was around 30 and we are 19 so it was pretty obvious the men were targeting us because we’re younger. After their continued harassment where they received no positive response from us (I literally wasn’t looking at them) but I looked up and stuck up my middle finger at them. They were immediately angered and offended, we managed to pass them but they one of them said ‘I’ll follow you home’.
Monique
The other day I was playing cricket at school, when a boy walked up to me from behind and felt entitled enough to smack my arse multiple times as I was going into the batting nets. Being the sassy 13 year old feminist I am, I shut him down; explained what a mysogynist he is and told him that women/girls are not here to be looked at and be sexualised. Frankly I would like to be aloud to live in a world where I can do sport in the correct clothing with out a chauvinist boy smacking my behind.