Now I'm ready to spit...
I swear, if I see one more person respond to the phrase "women should be able to wear whatever they like without fear" with "while you have the right to wear whatever you want, wearing a meat dress for a walk through a dog park may not be the wisest of choices" I cannot be held responsible for my actions. First of all, way to compare me with meat. Very nice. Secondly, most, if not all, women have learned this lesson, painfully (whether through humiliation or Worse) by the time they're sixteen. Really? I shouldn't wear a deep-V belly shirt, a micro-mini, and 4-inch heels down a dark street in Druid Hill? The devil, you say! I would never have thought such a thing! Lastly, you're responding to a gender equality issue with a public safety tip. Apples and oranges.
As a few of my friends (wave to
commodorified and
ducinbradbury)around these parts have written lately, how about we make sexual assault prevention about, you know, people not assaulting others? It's degrading to both men AND women to keep the status quo. Men[1] are human beings perfectly capable of keeping their hands and genitalia to themselves. Such assumptions that they can be oh-so-easily turned into assaulters by a flash of skin is incredibly demeaning. Additionally, women[2] should not bear the responsibility for keeping themselves from being assaulted by determining what they're going to wear on a given day (or evening) based on what might (or might not) attract a would-be attacker.
A perfect example is the poor man who was beaten at a Dodgers game for wearing a Giants jersey. No one has ever said he "asked for it." No one has done anything but completely denounce the people who assaulted him so terribly. Not even the usual trolls have come out to play in the comment sections of these news stories. It says something. And it's nothing good.
1. That's not to say that men are the only people who sexually assault others, but all too often, in common discourse, this is how the roles get boiled down.
2. Same goes for women--they're not 100% of the victim base by a tragic long shot.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.
As a few of my friends (wave to
commodorified and
ducinbradbury)around these parts have written lately, how about we make sexual assault prevention about, you know, people not assaulting others? It's degrading to both men AND women to keep the status quo. Men[1] are human beings perfectly capable of keeping their hands and genitalia to themselves. Such assumptions that they can be oh-so-easily turned into assaulters by a flash of skin is incredibly demeaning. Additionally, women[2] should not bear the responsibility for keeping themselves from being assaulted by determining what they're going to wear on a given day (or evening) based on what might (or might not) attract a would-be attacker.
A perfect example is the poor man who was beaten at a Dodgers game for wearing a Giants jersey. No one has ever said he "asked for it." No one has done anything but completely denounce the people who assaulted him so terribly. Not even the usual trolls have come out to play in the comment sections of these news stories. It says something. And it's nothing good.
1. That's not to say that men are the only people who sexually assault others, but all too often, in common discourse, this is how the roles get boiled down.
2. Same goes for women--they're not 100% of the victim base by a tragic long shot.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.