Women, Male Gaze, Consent, and Responsibility

I like to link articles I find interesting. Here is one from The Atlantic, my go-to secular magazine. 

I don't agree with everything in this article, but every parent of a young girl should recognize that their daughters live and will live in a culture where violence toward women, and disrespect of them for their bodies, their beauty, their plainness, their size, their curves, their weight, and so on, by men of all ages, is justified (by that I mean they get away with it, not that it's right). While I do believe women can make sensible decisions (i.e., not dancing in their underwear at a window, as one of her examples), women do not have to be provocative in their clothing or actions to be victims of harassment or violence. In fact, they rarely are

There are lots of binaries here: women are harassed for being attractive, and for being unattractive, but in different ways. In both situations, the core issue is that some men and boys think they have the right to do so. Another binary is that a woman is pushed into sex she doesn't want (and succumbs due either to lack of training, fear of worse abuse, poor sense of self, or lack of Biblical understanding about sexuality) and then is shamed as a slut. Not that girls are always victims; they can want it and pursue sexual activity. But in my experience, now quite long, I've seen a lot of girls pushed into sexual activity for all the wrong reasons, rather than initiating it. 

All that to say that Christian parents and grandparents must understand the realities of our incredibly hypersexualized culture and protect, train, openly discuss, and protect some more their little girls and young teenagers. Not in a purity culture way; that was pretty toxic, but in an informed, patient, open, loving, boundary-aware way. 

It is possible; people who say "kids will be kids" when it comes to sex are abdicating their responsibilities. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/03/girlhood-melissa-febos-lucid-expose-rape-culture/618445/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=masthead-newsletter&utm_content=20210403&silverid=%25%25RECIPIENT_ID%25%25&utm_term=Subscriber%20Only%20Weekly%20Newsletter  

A student called me a bitch on my evaluations this last year. While it might have been a girl, I suspect it was a male student who believed it was his right to use the word against a woman old enough to be his grandmother for no other reason than he is male and I am female. The evidence on how student evaluations privilege men and and how women and minorities get lower ones is pretty solid. I now read other teachers' evals and I see it all the time.