My best friend once tried to set me up with her boyfriends best friend. They clearly thought only of how much fun it would be if we went on double dates and nothing about our personalities. First of all her boyfriend told him I was practically begging to be set up with him (not at all true since she had to convince me to agree to it), which seemed to make him think that I was easy and he could say whatever he wanted. We got into a huge fight which led to him throwing a fit and giving my kik username to his friends and telling them to harass me. Which they did until I finally had to delete my account.

To my first serious boyfriend, You taught me that the most important part of me is my sexuality. That I should be eager to please and easily pleasured and that’s how to earn affection and attention. You taught me that there’s something wrong with me if I’m not pleasured by what you do and how you do it. You pushed me to do certain things enough times that I said yes, because I thought I was supposed to. You shaped, molded, and manipulated me until I learned how to fake intimacy and give everything to be the girl you dreamed of. My thoughts warped to the point that man after man has treated me this way and I didn’t even bat an eye. I swore up and down I’d never let anyone hurt me the way you did. I put my heart in chains and locks, but I somehow forgot to protect my body. The sacred gift that I have from God, I just let it be the object that you taught me it should be. I’ve been sexualized and made to feel like an object by you, by your best friend after you, by men I thought were my friends, by strangers, by an older coworker, by younger boys who thought they had that right too. No, I didn’t let them all have what you had. But I let them objectify me because you taught me to see myself that way too. Now I’m left with the tragedy of what I’ve allowed, but you’ve lived on seamlessly because that’s how it works. That’s how being a girl in this sex-hungry entitled-man’s world is. You should have known better. But the truth is, you get to walk away, somehow, without even being aware of what you’ve done.

When I was in middle school this boy became my best friend and we hung out everyday and spoke on the phone for hours every night. I became so blind to how he bullied me by commenting on my body in front of all my friends. He would say things about me being fat, and that I should go cry in a bathroom. He was vocally trying to determine if I was wearing a bra, and his constant request for me to send naked photos of myself to him became less and less of a joke. He was awful to me and out of the blue ignored me for a whole summer. He is the only person I have ever hated and I hate the fact that all my friends still like him. I know that if I told my friends, no one would take me seriously, and even if they did, they still would hang out with him.

This guy from my Spanish class saw me walking with my boyfriend and he immediately knew he was my boyfriend because we were holding hands. Not too long after, we saw him at my locker and he said to my boyfriend “You better hold on to that one, she’s alright”, I didn’t even know this guy’s name so I said “Hey, you don’t even know who I am. You don’t even know my last name.” then he said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s gonna change in a few years anyway.” That got me really mad. I have my own identity and I am actually NEVER going to change my last name. I was written off and now I hate seeing that guy in my Spanish class everyday, and he continues to be rude and audacious.

As a college freshman in my first semester, I had a lot of questions so I went to office hours a lot. I’m a bubbly person and apparently the professor misinterpreted this as flirting… He sent me an email saying “Oh, and you were exceptionally beautiful today–the dress really shows you off very well. (I can be more descriptive if you want.)” Apparently this is not considered sexual harassment at my university. They let him go for “other reasons.” Yet when I watched the sexual harassment training video they send out at the beginning of each year, my situation exact situation was described and that is considered sexual harassment… Someone needs to watch their own video.

I was 12 years old, new in a school full of people “above” me, socioeconomically and ahead of me biologically… waiting to get on the school bus after school. A boy who was kind of muscular and bearded picked a screw off the pavement, held it out to me tauntingly and said in a sinister voice, Hey, “Margaret, want a screw???” Believe it or not, I did not know for a long time what he meant but I instinctively knew I had just been harassed in an ugly way.

I’m 23, and today I overheard a guy my age talking about his 2-year-old daughter. He was saying he couldn’t wait to have a boy to run around and do active things with, because all his daughter likes to do is sit and play and pretend to make dinner in her toy kitchen. I’m sorry, but at age 2, aren’t the parents teaching her those behaviors? Perhaps the girl just needs to be taken outside and shown fun, active games. I’m sure she would enjoy them. It was a reminder to me if I have a little girl that I want to get her outside at a young age and encourage her to turn into an active, badass woman!

My story took place in the early 80’s..I was in my mid-20’s and I was applying for a permanent job at a local temp agency. I was dressed in a suit comprised of a skirt, blouse, and a matching jacket, high heels and stockings (common business attire at the time). During the interview, the owner of the company (a man) asked me to stand up and turn around. I remember being surprised at his request but I did as he asked. I did get the job and thankfully there weren’t any more incidents like that or worse, but to this day, I remember that part of the job interview and realize that if I had been a man, that request would never have been made.

My sister and I were walking through downtown (which was incredibly busy) to get to work when a passing man stopped, turned to us and said “If either of you were alone..” We were 16 and 15 respectively and without adult supervision, so this was terrifying to say the least.

A boy I had gone to middle school with incessantly asked me for nude pictures of my self. I explained again and again that I wasn’t interested in doing that, and explained to him that what he was doing was sexual assault. After dozens of messages, I finally told him that I had a boyfriend (though I didn’t at the time) and that was when he stopped asking, not because he didn’t value my comfort or my feelings or my wishes or my right to say no or my value as a human being, but because he saw me as another man’s property.