Women Grow Up to be Sluts, Men Grow Up to be Rapists

Taken from: www.sparksummit.com

It was a normal Friday night and I was heading out to dinner with some of my guy friends. As we were driving down Lane Avenue, one of my friends, we’ll call him Ben, rolled down the window and yelled, “SLUT!” at two girls walking together on the sidewalk. All of the other boys laughed. I was outraged. Once we got to the restaurant, I decided that I needed to say something to Ben. I asked him why he felt it was okay to yell such a hateful term. His response? “They were asking for it.”

Ben went on to tell me that because they were dressed in short skirts, tight tops, and high heels, the girls were clearly advertising that they wanted to hook up. He felt it was his responsibility to call out this kind of “socially unacceptable”  behavior and publicly shame the women for putting their bodies on display.

What concerned me most about Ben’s speech is that Ben would be described by almost everyone as “such a nice guy.” He always asks me about my day, he is a genuine listener, he holds open doors, and he always says please and thank you. Ben is respectable, he goes to his classes, he gets good grades, he comes from a wealthy area of Columbus, and his family would be described as upper-class. If I saw Ben walking down the street, I would not identify him as a threat to my safety, emotional or physical. If men like Ben think that it is okay to humiliate women, I began to wonder if every man is capable of acting in a similar manner.

I find it sad and disheartening that women cannot walk down the street, whether by themselves or with their friends, without being afraid that they could be called a name. I also find it sad that when I walk anywhere at night, I feel that I cannot do so by myself for fear of being violated because of my sex. Safety should be a basic human right, but sadly, it is not. I think that Ben’s name-calling comes from a place of not being able to understand what it feels like to be a woman. He has never felt unsafe because he is a male. (Allow me to be clear. Ben may have felt unsafe many, many times in his life, but not one of those times correlate to him being a male.) For women, because we are female, we are taught to be afraid, to be aware, to always be on edge. This is not okay with me.

During my conversation with Ben, I told him that he should feel embarrassed and even outraged that women are taught to always assume the worst about men. We live in a culture where I assume that if a man is following me home, he is going to assault me. I will never give that man the benefit of the doubt and think that he and I are simply both taking the same route and that he just happens to be walking along with me by chance. As a woman, I have been taught to be afraid. Fear is good, I am told, because it means you are paying attention. It is the responsibility of men like Ben, and the men who laughed at Ben’s outburst, to want to change the way our culture thinks about them. Every time Ben calls a woman a “slut,” is a time he makes it okay for that woman to respond with “rapist.” After all, he was asking for it.