My little sister is thirteen years old. She's always been way more concerned about her appearance than I have with mine. When I was thirteen, I holed up in my room with a book and wore whatever clothes I could find that were inexpensive and would last a while. Make-up was foreign. My sister, on the other hand, has more make-up than any girl I know, and spends quite a lot of time picking her outfits and doing her hair in the mornings. For Christmas, I got a phone and bookshelves; she got a new straightener and curling wand.
Don't get me wrong, I love her. But this is all leading up to something.
She wore a hat to church tonight. Heck, so did I. It's been rainy, and wearing a hat is always less of a hassle than remembering an umbrella. While I was in the high school worship service, my sister hung out with the other seventh graders in the cafe to text, flirt, and drink coffee. Apparently, while she was with her friends, a boy stole her hat multiple times and called her names. Mean names.
To hear her tell it, the adults didn't do much to stop him. My mother, who was there, said she didn't really see anything, and even if she had, since the boy wasn't doing anything that was technically against the rules, there wasn't much she could do.
To her, she said, it looked like he and my sister were goofing off.
(I love my mom too, but this issue is really important to me. And my mom has said she will try to track down the boy, in case anyone is concerned on that score.)
This happens more and more in our society, I've noticed. This assumption that girls are more responsible than boys is not only ridiculous, it is potentially threatening. Any child, boy or girl, is as responsible as their parents and other authority figures teach them to be, and perhaps as their culture teaches them to be.
Guys, if they so choose, are perfectly allowed to stay out as late as they want. They can choose to hang out with friends or go somewhere alone. They wear whatever they want, and nobody calls them names for it.
Girls are advised not to go out at night. Girls must travel anywhere in groups; travelling alone is discouraged. If it's hot outside, and a girl wears a tank top and shorts, she's ridiculed.
In other words, we're taught responsibility. For us, it's a survival skill. By necessity we stay in passed ten, go everywhere (even the bathroom) in packs, and sweat through August in jeans because the alternative is receiving catcalls, wolf-whistles, and other forms of harassment.
My little sister has told me that she won't be wearing hats for a long time.
She's a thirteen-year-old kid. Hats are one of the few items that aren't on the List of Things Girls Aren't Allowed to Wear. But shouldn't she be allowed to wear whatever she wants in the first place?
Does any of the above seem fair to you? Because I'm not particularly happy with this situation.
We live in a society where girl clothes are made tight-fitting, showing skin is stylish, and even my little sister has a hard time finding shorts that are a suitable length for summer, because my mom refuses to buy the "short-shorts" that are stocked in most stores. Adults say girls should be modest and cautious, and clothing stores make it difficult to do so.
What would happen if we stopped telling girls what they're doing to make boys tease them and started telling boys not to tease girls in the first place?
Think about it: a boy pull a girl's hair in preschool, and the adults will give each other the Look and say, "Boys will be boys." Maybe he doesn't get reprimanded, or if he does it's nothing serious. And then this boy grows up, and he's in middle school, and he calls a girl names and takes her hat, and nobody does anything about it because they think, "Oh, it's just kids goofing around, testing the waters and all." So then he gets to be a grown man, and he's at a party, and he sees a girl, and she says, "No."
This boy's gone through his whole life thinking it's okay to mess with girls. How likely do you think it is that he'll listen to her?
