It’s 2013 and women and men should be completely equal, but they most definitely aren’t.
This past week at my place of employment, I had three different men make sexual remarks to or about me, and I could do nothing to defend myself. Of these three men, ironically, two of them were police officers.
I was behind the counter, mostly hidden from view, and was cleaning. I felt their eyes on me so my ears perked up to hear what they were discussing. One of them was telling the other the sexual things he’d like to do to me and wondering aloud how young I was. The officer who was listening got up to go to the bathroom so I looked up for a moment and the one who was talking about me was staring right at me, with a look of disgusting hunger on his face.
The sad truth is that I’m used to it. All women get used to it by a certain age.
I’m used to carrying around a can of pepper spray in my purse. I’m used to being hollered at on the street, in a store or around campus. I’m used to altering the way I dress or act in certain social situations to keep myself safe.
And I’m used to the fact that most guys just don’t get it.
We can vote, we can own property, we can get jobs, we can own our own things and our own lives but the gap is still there.
There’s the wage gap, where on average full-time working women get 77 cents to every dollar that men earn.
There’s the gap with women in power. There has never been a female president of the United States. The U.S. is 51 percent female, but only 17 percent of U.S. senators, three of the nine Supreme Court justices and six governors of the 50 are women. These low numbers continue at the state level, with only 23.6 percent of elected representatives being female.
There is the one-sided taboo of a female’s sex life. If a man sleeps with 10 women, he is seen as a stud and is respected by his fellow men. But if a woman sleeps with 10 men, the words “easy,” “slut” and “whore” get thrown around and she is seen as less valuable.
It blows my mind how this constant feeling of fear and precaution is ever present in most women’s lives and how this issue doesn’t get talked about enough.
I am sick of seeing pictures of rallies for women’s rights and seeing it mostly being women. I am sick of rape victim blaming. I am sick of this idea that women must do things to avoid being raped rather than men just being told not to rape.
Most of all, I am sick of feeling like I can’t succeed as much as my male counterparts for the mere fact that I have a vagina and they do not.
There needs to be a movement, and it needs to be co-ed.
Men need to stand next to us because violence and hatred against women also affects the men that love them.
The next time a man decides to degrade a woman, it could be your mother or your sister. We need to stand together not as men and women but as unified people and fight for equality.
Mariel Gates is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Baton Rouge.