Scarlett Hawkins
  • Home
  • About
  • Novels
  • Blog
  • Contact

Blog.

Have you ever been groped by Santa?

8/8/2013

0 Comments

 
PictureNah, no chance she likes entertaining herself with an interactive story. She must be doing it for your attention.
Recently my mother gave me the intellectual equivalent of asking me to help her choose a puppy: to collect for her a series of articles explaining why feminism still hasn't "fixed it all" yet, and why young people (read: not girls, ladies, or women, but any and all genders) still have an aching need for equality.  It was so hard to know where to start, I became quickly overwhelmed.  I'm constantly posting interesting articles about human rights and equality on Facebook, which presumably has lost me many a virtual friend in my time... though I couldn't say how many "friends" with which I had started, so it's not particularly upsetting.  But I digress.

It's funny how gender equality, as a passion, snuck up on me.  As a teenager I was extremely passionate about virtually every meaty human rights issue there was, but considered the feminist movement "done" after the suffragettes sorted out all the contraceptive/right to vote business.  

Teenage me was a heck of a cynic.  She balked from extreme binaries and loved to advocate for the devil.  Many examples come to mind.  After all, it is not the victims, rather than perpetrators, of physical and sexual violence who are blamed for their abuse.  And it's not like men still capitalise on seduction guides that dictate on how to commodify women, appropriately belittle and intrigue them, and then push their physical comfort barriers because consent isn't about enthusiasm, but about ensuring that a man doesn't stop escalating physical contact until he can "make the ho say no."  It's not like people still make jokes about outdated gender roles by telling an assertive woman to "get back into the kitchen".  Nobody complains that men are emasculated by the existence of women in gaming, or engineering, or politics.

Oh, wait a minute.

Feminism still has a metric fuckton of equality to achieve.

Believe it or not, those examples are only the tip of the iceberg.  That form of sexism is slimy and unpleasant, but relatively easy to identify and call as being overt.  It's rare that anyone won't agree that it is deplorable that in Australia alone, one woman will die every week at the hands of a partner, or ex-partner.  But the insidious undercurrent of sexism is what sees these stories become framed as "he was under so much pressure/he snapped/she goaded him/this is a men's mental health issue more than it is a domestic violence issue."  Feeling your jimmies rustling as you read that contention? Boom. Point proven.  People don't like to confront their own ingrained sexism.  Heck, my fingernails gouged deep grooves in the floorboards of my mind as I was dragged, by logic, through a metamorphosis into proud feminist.

It's a harsh truth, but sexism is deeply rooted everywhere, even in the most seemingly "civilised" of cultures.  It's in the millisecond-long pause before you commit to a gender-trope-heavy punchline, and the moment when a woman is heckled from a car and struggles to establish whether it should be flattery, or offensive.  It's in the need for women to be amiable, polite, and never abrasive.  Because to be abrasive is to be a leader, and a woman "acting like a man" is abominable.

When I discovered the Everyday Sexism project, it took a lot of self restraint not to bubble over with excitement as I read men and women recount moments that made them feel as if they were constrained by their gender to accept behaviours of others that made them uncomfortable.

I have the fortune of being seven years older than my younger sister.  This allows me freedom to not worry about needing to impress her friends, all of whom have seen me slob around in a dressing gown so often that I suspect my sister tells them that I lost all my clothes in a suspiciously-concentrated fire. Simultaneously, she's razor-sharp, and we have some awesome conversations.  But best of all, above any sisterhood: I got to have Christmastime tradition far, far longer than anybody I've ever met.  And it's been ace.

When I was sixteen, our family went for the annual family photo with a mall Santa.  It's been a tradition in our family for over twenty years, and the album captures, in one snapshot a year, my every awkward teenage phase of my life.  But age sixteen was a special year, and not in a jolly way.  Because Santa took one look at my mother and I, and insisted we sit in his lap, whilst my sister, aged nine, stood to the side.

You thought I was kidding? Hell, no.  We still have the photo, complete with awkward-as-fuck grimaces.

When I think back on that moment now, all I can feel is revulsion.  Revulsion that some disgusting old dude in a fleecy fake beard exploited a happy family moment so he could get a sneaky grope in the one context where nobody wants to shatter the suspension of disbelief, and call out his bullshit in front of a child.

That is everyday sexism.

When I was walking through a narrow doorway at 8pm in a pub, and some guy going through the door the other way shot his hand out and groped my crotch for one, fleeting moment.  That was everyday sexism.  Not because he liked the look of my body - I doubt he even gave me a second glance before that moment - but because I was a woman who dared exist in a public space, arrogantly exuding the confidence of someone whose body is my own.  He clutched at my pelvis not because it did anything sexual for him.  He violated my space, and then the space of the girl next to me a split-second later, because he wanted to feel the power of depriving me of mine.

When I was walking down a residential street one beautiful summer's day at age fourteen and was flagged down by some stranger in a car who told me that my "legs were hot" and asked if I'd get in and go for a coffee with him.  That was everyday sexism, too... but at least he had the good grace to drive off quick-smart when I blurted out my age with shock and condemnation dripping from every syllable.  And it pains me to add this disclaimer, but no, there is no chance on earth that Scarlett circa 2005 looked even remotely close to over 18.  The need to clarify that as some form of self-justification is part and parcel of the pervasiveness of everyday sexism.

It is in my ex-boyfriend curling his lip in offence at my desire not to take somebody else's name.  It is in political enemies of my employer crying "who will do the work when she is on maternity leave?" and then, "she isn't taking maternity leave! What kind of mother abandons her family like that?".  It is in the jokes of my friends who praise the windy campus of my alma mater which causes the skirts of pretty girls to fly overhead, as if the internet is not rife with women who would happily consent to showing your their underwear, and all else under it as well, without violating their comfort zones.  It is in men being told that they need to don a stiff upper lip, because crying is for women and being vulnerable is for homosexuals.

Or maybe it's something as simple as: "Women have got it fine.  Feminists just being pissy because they're too equal now, and they're making things up to elevate themselves above men."

I guess what I'm trying to say that if any of this strikes a chord with you, I'd encourage you to talk to your friends and family about the everyday sexism that they have experienced, or witnessed.  It might actually surprise you how much of the things you say and do are dictated by gender roles.  And there's no better time to call this shit out.  

After all, who wants to live in a world where a teenage girl could ever start a story with: "Have you ever been groped by Santa?"

Picture
"Dear Chris. Stop staring at my tits. I don't come to work to be outfit-policed by morons who abuse smiley faces."
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Scarlett Hawkins writes novels... But in her spare time, she writes rants.

    Archives

    April 2019
    August 2018
    April 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    July 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    January 2016
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Careers
    Dating
    Depression
    Ethics
    Feminism
    Game Of Thrones
    Gaming
    Grief
    Loss
    Love
    Politics
    Pop Culture
    Self Improvement
    Social Justice
    Suicide
    Travel
    Villains
    Writing

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
  • Novels
  • Blog
  • Contact