If you haven’t looked at it, check out the hashtag #Yestoallwomen. It was prompted by the California shootings and the killer’s hatred of women, and it’s shocked a lot of men because they don’t realize what women have to deal with. From the Washington Post:
The #YesAllWomen Twitter campaign is powerful. And necessary. It tells the stories we keep to ourselves, and it takes back a Twitterverse that is so often used as a space to intimidate, harass and threaten women.
So here’s a few stories that I’m not keeping to myself:
A Girl in School
From elementary school to junior high, I wore shorts underneath my dresses in case the guys got stupid.
In high school, I had to ride the bus to get home every day. One day, this guy sat next to me and started groping me. Every time I moved seats, he moved seats. I had an umbrella, and I hit him with it. Every passenger on the bus ignored what he was doing. The bus driver ignored it. I ended up getting off an exit early to get away from him and hoping he wasn’t going to follow me.
A Woman in the Army
During the three day a week physical training session, I ran until I was exhausted. I didn’t know I had flat feet and arches that dropped, making it ten times harder for me to run. Yet, according to some of the male soldiers, I was loafing or not trying hard enough. Yet, it was perfectly okay if the men walked.
After one such run, a male soldier wearing a road guard vest told me , “I can make you run faster. I’ll put raw meat on your back and set a doberman on you.” He thought it was pretty funny.
A friend who was a Marine had to put up with sexual harassment from her male Marines. She told me she couldn’t complain because word would get around that she wasn’t a team player.
She also reported that the women were always harassed about their weight. They were driven to the point where some had 1% body fat and everyone was always on them about not gaining any weight, even though some were at an unhealthy weight.
A friend came back from deployment broken. She’d been the only female in her unit, and the men had harassed every single day while she deployed.
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Some stories need to be heard.
Filed under: Culture, Military Tagged: Army, elementary school, Women Soldiers, Women Veterans, YestoAllWomen
