Keep on Walking: A Woman’s Continued Work
“Being a girl is being prepared for the worst in men, and being absolutely shocked when even the men who you thought supported you show you their worst. Think about how hard it must be to learn to trust someone, anyone, in a world like this.”
It was Wednesday, February 28th when the first message came in. I’d been completing a homework assignment for Chemistry when the Instagram notification lit up my phone. Seeing the name of my friend attached to the notification, I had simply expected some regular banter, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
It started with a question, and then before I knew it, I felt the tears welling in my eyes as the conversation continued. Unable to discern my own emotions, I called my friend David. Each ring from the facetime call while I waited for him to pick up felt like an eternity.
When he finally picked up, the smile on his face was quickly replaced with one of concern as he saw the tears on my face. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I think I just got threatened.”
For the fourth edition of the Python Post, I wrote an article titled “A Woman’s Unnecessary Work: On the Sexualization of Young Girls at CSH.” The article was officially published on March 1st, 2024, and it caused a pretty big stir in the CSH community and in my own life.
I was first inspired to write about the article following the ruling in the E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump case, where Donald Trump was ordered to pay $5 million in damages after being found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll. Years of sexual misconduct, misogyny, and harassment in that case, and in the very world that we live in, prompted me to put a microscope on the ways in which those actions occurred in a place where we spend so much of our time: CSH. And so, I zoomed in on our community briefly, before zooming back out to the world in a broader context.
The only issue though, was that many of the boys in the grade stayed fixated on our community.
You see, the point of the article wasn’t to bash anyone or to personally attack any of the boys in it. It was, instead, to bring harmful actions to light and highlight the ways in which they echo power dynamics in the real world. The simple truth is, no one likes being written about in a negative light, but in this case, the negative light just so happened to be the truth, and thus an essential component.
The truth about how often things like sexualization occur is something that we – as women – are taught to push aside. One of the earliest lessons I learned was that if a man ever catcalls you or says something sexual or offensive to you in public, you just keep on walking. Why, you may ask? It avoids confrontation, and keeps you safer. How sad is that? And the truth is that this is a lesson that all girls learn at some point or another. Just keep on walking. But at some point it hurts to keep on walking as if nothing is wrong, and you actually have to do something about it.
Aside from that though, I do think that one of the most interesting things to focus on is the response that those boys received following the release of the article. Following a series of conversations and mediations with the boys discussed in the article and certain members of their inner circle, it was revealed that they never received any backlash or harassment as a result of the article. I did.
The threat that I received two days prior to publishing my article was just the first of many comments that I would go on to receive.
Five days after the article’s release, I sustained an ankle injury from basketball that required me to be on crutches. Coming to school the day after, I can recall one of the boys sitting in the hallway with his girlfriend and blatantly laughing at my condition as I hobbled down the hallway on my crutches. In another incident, I had been sitting in AP Lit while one of the boys was sitting directly behind me with his friends. When I got up to move my seat so I could be closer to my friend, the comment I received from behind me was “just walk it off” while the rest of the boys laughed.
About a week after that, I had asked to use the bathroom during advisory. My friend Emilie opened the door for me, since I struggled to do so myself, and with an “excuse me” I made my way right through the middle of a group of boys gathered in the hallway. As I walked through, I heard one of those boys say “she deserves to be on crutches as karma for writing the article.” They laughed as I continued moving.
In addition, I’ve also received more sporadic comments ranging from being called a liar to being told everything I wrote about was “woke bs.”
Since the article was released, it’s as if those boys have let the fact that I’m human slip away from them as they continue treating me in the way they have.
Take the boy who threatened me as an example. Prior to me writing the article, he and I were (at least by my consideration) somewhat close friends, especially because we had worked a lot together during the college admissions process. He was someone who I had grown to not only respect but also value highly as a friend, which is why I felt so blindsided and hurt by what he did. It can also get a little complicated when you consider the fact that his friends were people I wrote about, but even with that in mind I think what hurt me the most was the fact that he intentionally tried to harm me in a way that took away the humanity I thought he viewed me with as one of his friends. Prior to a mediation I had with him and one of his friends I had written about, he had sent me an apology, but while he was apologizing he lied about his knowledge and involvement in the actions taken by boys across the grade to intentionally hurt me. It was later revealed in the mediation that to this day, he and his friends joke about me in a way that is rude and dehumanizing enough for people to come up to me and tell me. Our mediation was ultimately left unresolved, and while I appreciated his apology, I didn’t accept it and I still don’t. You can’t be sorry and still intentionally take away someone’s humanity and mistreat them at the same time.
I think that part of the reason why I was so shocked and hurt to receive that kind of treatment also had to do with the fact that it was unexpected. Ever since I was young, I’ve been conditioned to expect certain things and treatment from men like catcalling, and so when it happens I tend to not have a reaction because it’s what I’ve been accustomed to my whole life. But this was different because it wasn’t just unexpected, it was also intentional. I like to believe that men with the audacity to catcall don’t think before they speak, but all of these things were thought out. Being a girl is being prepared for the worst in men, and being absolutely shocked when even the men who you thought supported you show you their worst. Think about how hard it must be to learn to trust someone, anyone, in a world like this.
There is almost certainly nothing in a man’s experience that can empathize with this experience, and maybe that is the reason why they have such difficulty understanding the impact that their actions have on women. But even I don’t know for certain. If there’s one thing I do know though, it’s that the disappointment that women feel from men is unparalleled to that which men feel from women.
The actions of these boys is also something that has really put into perspective the concept of “blind loyalty” that you often see with prominent figures I wrote about in my article (like Donald Trump). These boys have admitted that they know the behaviors which I wrote about are common occurrences, and yet, knowing that it’s the truth they still attack me. Not because I lied, but because they don’t like that I made the truth more public than it already was. To some extent it actually worries me that it’s so easy for them to treat someone like garbage.
However, not all of them are like that. In fact, I actually happened to have an incredibly productive mediation with Bryson, one of the boys who I had written about. The issue that Bryson had with me and with my article was the fact that it felt personal because it was about him. However, just like I told him, the only reason why it was his name in there was because his name was the one that popped up the most when I did my research. If it was any other boy, including one of my friends, their name would’ve ended up in there because it wasn’t about picking and choosing, it was about telling the truth.
Ironically, it’s also interesting how my gender plays a role in the way in which the boys in the grade now perceive me. I wasn’t the only one that wrote about misogyny or toxic masculinity in that edition; in fact, the other people who wrote about it just so happened to be boys. But, if you ask any of them if they’ve been mistreated or experienced any challenges since publication, the answer is no.
I’m willing to bet that, if I was a boy, I would not have received the response that I did, because boys don’t have the audacity to treat other boys in the ways that they’ve treated me. They do, however, have the audacity to treat women how they’d like, and that’s a problem.
I remember one time a little while back when I was having a conversation with one boy, and he sent me a video about how women are “dishwashers,” and then proceeded to ask me to defend why I thought that they weren’t. About two minutes into trying to defend myself I realized how dumb it was, and even as I write this I’m sharing the same sentiment. It is beyond stupid that girls feel pressured to defend themselves from the misogynistic views held by boys, but the truth is they don’t have to. If men don’t have to defend their every decision, women shouldn’t have to, either.
Another thing that was quick to reveal itself following the release of my article was the culture of “victim blaming.” One thing that I was told by the friends of these boys was that because they couldn’t know who the girls were themselves, they didn’t believe anything in the article, even though they knew their friends had acted in such a way. Instead of taking accountability and acknowledging it, the first thing that they did was try to shift the blame onto me and onto the girls.
In fact, it was so hard for them to not victim blame that they had actually concocted a plan to go around and confront and interrogate the girls in the grade until they found out who the girls were. I had only found out about this plan because one of my friends (who is also friends with these boys) knew about it and told me. With this in mind, I warned the girls whose stories I’d told in the article, and told them I was doing whatever I could to protect their identities. However, I also knew that they now had to be careful in school because I didn’t know what the boys were planning.
This is also something that extends into daily life. Gender will always play a role in the way women are treated, and it’s something that I (along with many other women) have had to learn to live with. There have been so many instances in my life where I’ve told a boy that I play a sport or have some niche hobby or interest that they wouldn’t expect a girl to have, and the first thing that they do is question me. Guys don’t get that treatment.
Even if you consider the plan those boys made to confront those girls, it actually reveals something about this unchecked power that men have which makes them think that behaviors that are wrong are actually okay.
One time, when I was walking to school for a Saturday prep session, a man was walking in front of me. I had my headphones in, and I’d been listening to music when he suddenly stopped and turned around. He gave me a good look up and down, and then proceeded to curse at me and call me a “dumb bitch.” He not only threatened to hit me, but also followed me for half of my walk while cursing at me. I hadn’t said a single word to him even after he accosted me, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel unsafe or even scared. I ended up having a panic attack on my way to school as a result of the interaction, but that man doesn’t know that – nor do I think he would care.
You see, to those boys the confrontation was something they had planned for their own comfort, but what they failed to realize was that they not only made a group of girls feel uncomfortable, they also made them feel worried enough that some didn’t even show up to school the following day because they didn’t know what those boys had in store. There’s a general lack of empathy and consideration for the feelings of others that is evident in the actions of these boys.
I have had to learn to live with the general lack of care that men display. Where men don’t care, I have to care infinitely more. I have to care about what I wear outside, about how I talk or act so men don’t get the wrong idea, about covering up around men, and so many other things that men have never spent time thinking about.
Following all of this, the school held an empowerment day centered around my article where the senior class was split up into gender-based groups to talk about it and any experiences they had relating to it, and then mixed-gender groups to share their findings. Missing from that empowerment day were not only one of the boys I’d written about, but also his friend who’d threatened me. However, just because a few didn’t see the point of it doesn’t mean the same for the rest. Some of the boys were actually quite reflective and were able to get something out of the day.
The point is, the opportunity is there for reflection and growth, but whether or not this growth actually happens says more about the people who refuse to take it than it does about anything else.
I’d rather be hated for telling the truth than be loved for hiding it. I knew the risks that came with writing the article, but I still did it because I had an obligation to all of the girls who shared and trusted me with their stories, and even those who didn’t. And yes, I did get a lot of hate and backlash for writing the article, but I also made so many girls and women feel comfortable enough to tell me their stories after the article was released. Knowing that I was able to make a community of people that are so overlooked feel not only seen, but also comfortable enough to know they have a voice and their stories matter was and will always be worth all the hate and mistreatment.
Women are Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain. The boulder of expectations, limitations, pain, children, the future, and the world. Every roll to the top of the peak ends with the possibility of feeling a sense of triumph and glory. And then – just before that possibility – there’s a boom, as the boulder rolls right back down to where it began. All hope is lost. Start from scratch. Up the same hill. The same cycle. It’s the weight of the world in their hands.