wyldflowa asked:

Praise be to Queen Maggie for that perfect response to that victim blamer. You took every word that was going through my head and delivered it way better than I ever could. The clothing thing killed me inside; I DO select my clothes based on "what won't get me harassed today?" I have tons of clothes that look good and felt great until I got harassed in them, I wear scarves constantly to cover any cleavage... I STILL GET HARASSED. Why can't we live without this gauntlet of unwanted attention? :,(

Because our bodies are public property, meant to be touched, displayed and commented on in whatever way men see fit.  I don’t state this as an exaggeration, I state it as a fact.  In a society where men will slip drugs in your drink, guilt you, get you drunk, knock you out, make you feel horrible about yourself or just flat out use force on you to make you have sex and this happens to one out of six women, many of them children, we are no better than property. 

Plenty of men choose not to utilize that privilege and take responsibility for themselves.  Some don’t have the guts to try.  Some do it and make excuses why it was okay.

But the fact remains that the option is open to almost any man who wants to do it bad enough.

So when your body is public property, you are subject to be paid attention to all the time.  There’s no such thing as a “proper time or place.”

Seriously, have you ever heard of someone telling someone else when a good and bad time to hit on someone is?  Men assume if they see a woman they like they are free to go after her whether she’s making bedroom eyes at him across the bar or at her father’s funeral.  There is no sense of appropriateness going on here.

When I talk about the things men do and say, what I usually mean is that they can do those things, they can say those things and they can get away with it.  Thank goodness there are men who know that just because they can do something doesn’t mean they should.

But there are just as many, if not more, men who have no sense of when to keep their eyes off, hands off and mouth shut.  And it has to stop.