Cat Calls Suck

By Sophia

I was on the way to school this morning, minding my own business, coffee in hand, when out of a parked car came two craned necks, two guys nearly breaking their backs to get a good look of my butt.  Great.  I love feeling like a sexual object.

This isn’t unusual at all, since I deal with it almost everyday, and so do most women and girls.  It has become an awful fact of my daily life – no matter what I am wearing, I will always garner unsolicited male attention.  It is more than just a quiet humiliation – often, it is very obvious, and other people on the street may notice it.  A look or a whistle is incredibly damaging for me – all I want to do is scream in the guy’s face, but that wouldn’t do much.  This kind of behavior stems from societal values, bred-in-the-bone ideas that have been around since biblical times, which say that women are sexual objects, and should be treated as such.  How do we even begin to reverse this kind of behavior?

I don’t know, I just needed to rant a little bit about it, since I fume about this everyday.

If you get the chance, you should check out this great article on RookieMag about cat calls and such in high school. Luckily, I haven’t had to deal with  craned necks and whistles in school, but many girls do.  We no longer can accept it as a fact of life – attitudes need to be changed, and women need to be empowered further.  Maybe voting in favor of pro-choice legislation should do the trick…..