Let's Talk About Violence Against Women

By Hannah Messinger on October 6, 2015

When the issue of violence against women comes up, everyone crosses their arms. The entire room either plays victim or sympathizes, but no one takes credit. No one stands up and says that they may be perpetuating the problem, or that the issue that is so commonly defined as a women’s issue has little to do with women at all. The room is full of pointing fingers, angry looks, people literally spacing out. As the words pour out and the argument becomes more clear, suddenly the mood begins to change for the first time, probably, in these specific people’s lives; for the first time because this conversation is usually shut off before it begins.

Soon, the theme of men’s interactions, playing around the idea that they will gain something from them, becomes all too apparent. The stories of the girls in the room are outrageous and aggravating, but so are my own. From the fact that men have literally poured drinks on girls for refusing their unwanted attention, to the way that all of us have lost friends because we didn’t give in to others’ sexual desires, suddenly seems unnatural. What in our world is telling young men that they are owed such treatment, and what is telling young women that this is normal behavior? Normal behavior that should be not only put up with, but eventually given in to, and if not given in to, it is their responsibility to somehow deflect it?

I’ve been told about the contrasts between our gender identifications countless times. Men have an ego that refuses to be hushed or broken; women have little to no voice. And it is true that, as a young women, I feel as if I have been trained to keep my mouth shut, to politely nod or shake my head, to hope the advances go away without having actually ever uttered the word “no” for fear of offending the opposition. I’ve been told it’s everything about how we have been socialized; it’s all about the norms we’ve squeezed ourselves into like tiny plastic boxes. This is why, most of the time, even our male friends didn’t see what was happening in front of them when we retell the stories about how we were treated minutes before; this is why our female friends cower away when they’re alone at night and a man walks by, covering their stomachs with their forearms, hiding their eyes behind their hair. In a study I read about, women and men were asked what they were most afraid of. Women said they were afraid of being raped or murdered; men said that they were most afraid of being laughed at. And it’s so sad to me, the fact that this is what we call and define as and defend as a norm.

I have been told endlessly about how to dress. I have been in rooms where, in an attempt to fix our generation, we’ve been told as women how to avoid being raped. Cut your hair shorter, carry heavy or threatening items, have pepper spray, stay on the phone, don’t walk alone, ever. I have always listened intently, always wondered what it was I could do to protect myself from something I felt that I would always need protection from. Always bring at least one boy with you if it’s dark outside and you’re not in a public place; always take the free self-defense classes, six times if you have to. Always keep every inch of you covered. As I get older, I’m realizing truly that this entire system is not my fault, that it doesn’t matter what I do, it will always be the same until something bigger moves to change it. The fact that I believed I was contributing to the problem on a major level, or that my first questions after a women has been a victim of violence were, “What was she wearing? Where was she? Was she alone?”, seeing if she complied to my rules, our rules, the rules we were told from a young age. Shake your head, smile, back away, let him find a new victim, cower into your friends. If she was a victim, she must have done something wrong.

The honest truth is, she didn’t do anything wrong. If she wore a shorter skirt because she’s proud of her legs, if she didn’t carry pepper spray because there wasn’t room in her bag, if all her guy friends were busy that night but she went out anyways, if she didn’t say no aggressively enough, if she had too much to drink and interpreted his movements as just fun, if she did anything at all that didn’t follow the rules we’ve repeated like mantras in our heads since grade school, is she really to blame? Do any of us really have any right to blame her for something we didn’t even witness, or didn’t even stop, or didn’t even  think twice about when it happened to other people we’ve known? It will never be her fault, and it isn’t our fault as women that society chooses to fix us and not the perpetrators.

Until our language reflects the fact that women are worthy instead of using feminine attributes as something offensive, until the world we live in accepts that fact that women are not always dressing for sex, we will not make any positive gains to eradicate the prevalence of violence against women. Until we teach men about predation instead of teaching women how to best avoid being preyed upon, until we reach the conclusion that this is a cultural problem not a women’s problem, we will be stuck in the same rut we’ve been in for too long now. Let’s talk about violence against women; let’s fix our mistakes and move forward as equals.

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