Glad I found this site, it’s almost as reassuring as it is horrifying. Where to start? It’s everywhere, isn’t it? Everywhere and everyday. Small irritations to huge life-changing tragedies. I started a new job, my supervisor asked me to tidy up, pick stuff up off the floor. Another male colleague waited until I had done so, then said “You know he only asked that so he could look at your arse?” and I just gawped at them in silent bewilderment while they grinned smugly. Completely at ease in their harassment of me. My first year of uni, I went to a shop to pick up a toolkit for the house and was asked at collection “what a girl like me needed a toolkit for”…let’s just say I could think of a few choice uses at that particular moment. My sister was sexually assaulted at uni, but because it wasn’t quite full on rape, she didn’t think there was anything to report. She even felt bad for “leading him on”. Because he’d convinced her that she had, so any breach of consent was her fault. Obviously. Even worse, her friend and housemate faces dropping out of uni altogether after she was raped by a peer. Apparently so violently she may no longer be able to have children. She’s terrified to report it, because she has a personality disorder and knows that in our victim blaming society, in a “he said she said” scenario, her mental illness will be used to discredit her. Her assailant also knows this, smugly told her as much. She admitted to my sister that she would kill herself if she was called a liar by those she turned to for help and support…for justice. So instead she avoids classes she shares with the scum who raped her. The thing that worries me is that this website? Thousands of stories from all over the world. Women objectified and abused and treated differently purely for being born without a penis. Because men are being raised in a society that teaches them that this behaviour is OK. They are entitled to everything, and being offensive is just banter. And women are being raised to accept this behaviour as normal too, even to blame themselves, adjust their habits, take it as a compliment…the list goes on. It’s not a male conspiracy to keep women down…it’s more like a global pandemic, an insidious and malicious thing that hides behind society’s ignorance and acceptance. For any men reading…if you wouldn’t want someone to do/say it to your mother/sister/daughter, then don’t treat other women that way. Every woman is someone’s daughter, or sister, or mother. We were not put on this Earth to entertain you. We do not exist to give you a hard-on. We are not decorations. We are human beings, with thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams, just like you. Remember that, please?