June 12, 2015
The amount of times my girlfriends and I or just me by me, have been catcalled by men who are at least I would say 50+ years older than us, is ridiculous. This subject has been brought up a lot in the today’s media and society, there have been experiments of girls walking through cities wearing simple clothing and still getting catcalled. Or the time that the news reporter tried to almost stand up and defend the men that were catcalling and the other news reporter who was a woman went off on him. Catcalling is all around us and that’s inevitable, women do it too, maybe not as much as guys but they do. The question that I have is that, do the men that are catcalling NOT realize how uncomfortable it makes the women feel? Have they not seen the news reports on this, the experiments done the just mere conversation about this topic in general?
This past week I was in town with one of my girlfriends, it was a beautiful day so we decided to walk around and take advantage of that. There were so many instances where men would look at us and not be shy at all about, actually make it quite known. Now the both have us have been looked at before so it wasn’t new to us, we would just ignore it and keep walking minding our own business how most women would. This one particular instance though, this group of men were sitting outside a restaurant and we walked in, we were visiting our friend and she said, “Yeah those guys out there just 100% checked our your ass.” I turned around, if I had to take a somewhat educated guess they were maybe in the 40s. I turned back around and ignored it, when we were leaving though one of them did say “God damn” towards us and I felt so uncomfortable! My friend who works in town told me that he always comes into the store but never looks at her or says anything to her, that made me feel even more uncomfortable. The group of men that did this, were very uncleanly and definitely just creepers objectifying women as they walked pass them. Now I’m not saying that if those men were let’s say in their late 20s and Zac Efron attractive it would’ve been okay, no I would’ve have qualified that as a classic fuckboi (will explain the meaning in another post) move. Just in generally speaking it makes me feel uncomfortable.
Other women have touched on this before like I’ve said earlier, but I do think it’s an important topic to talk about. What right do men have that make them think they can do that to us. If I’m wearing a dress that isn’t fitting I still get catcalled, so what is it, to impress your buddies? Your ego? Or is it just because you have low self esteem about yourself that you feel the need to do this and make others feel uncomfortable? Because please tell me I would very much like to know. I admit though some women do play up to the catcalling though, they’ll egg men on because they know men will and then make themselves look like the victim. Those women also need to be stopped, you’re doing an injustice to yourself and other women around you. Again, I’m not saying either that women should feel the need to be less sexy, women should feel sexy and good about themselves all the time. But if you’re one of those women who just do it to get the man’s attention so for that 1.3 seconds you feel like the baddest bitch out there, and then after feel like crap…please stop.
Back long ago we have let men take control, they have been the providers the household, after you asked mom you had to ask dad to make sure it was okay to do something. Women have slowly made a comeback and have taken back that power, and men also are slowly understanding that both men and women can share the power or be very close in sharing. Hopefully by the time my friends and I are old and our kids are in college doing great things, stuff like this won’t be as relevant, but as of now it is and we need to start standing up for ourselves more.
The Not So Secret Concerns 