Why I Don’t Feel Bad for Flicking Off Men in Cars

(Trigger warning)

My perception of oppression has always been somewhat distant. I have never thought of myself as having the right to complain about my life; real oppression, I have always been told, is far away, in another place. I am a white, upper middle class girl who grew up in a safe neighborhood in a large, Midwestern city. I am lucky enough to go to school at one of the most expensive private liberal arts colleges in the country. Throughout my life, I have always had intense and meaningful female (and male) friendships, and two very supportive parents. What oppression is there in my life?

Like remembering a vague dream you had the night before, it wasn’t until I started reading the works of bell hooks, Jessica Valenti, Gloria Steinem, etc., that memories started surfacing. Things I had completely disregarded at the time floated to the front of my brain and began to feel overwhelmingly negative. For example, I had never liked to think about the time that the Orthodox Jewish boy exposed himself to me while babysitting me and my brother at the temple my mother was working. In response, I hid my face in my hands and brought my then non-verbal brother over to the window and away from the boy. It had never occurred to me to tell my parents about this until I was 20, and suddenly, in recalling that memory to them, it started to feel like an event.

When I was 12, and struggling to process my sudden and inconvenient breast development, I started to notice people – men – noticing me. That year, visiting a friend in a rural town about forty minutes away from where I lived, the two of us, both exhibiting 12 year old bodies on polar ends of the spectrum, went swimming at the town pool. An older boy, who then seemed to me about 20, but who was probably only 15 or 16, was standing behind us as we waited in line to go off the diving board. Turning to his friend, who looked closer to our age, he said in a loud voice, “which do you like, big titties or little titties?”

I immediately stiffened. I turned to give the boy a dirty look after looking for support from my friend who was trying very hard to pretend like she couldn’t hear anything. The offender’s companion looked just as uncomfortable as I felt. “Uh…doesn’t really matter to me,” he mumbled.

“Well, I LIKE BIG TITTIES,” the boy said loudly. I was suddenly aware of the way I looked in my bathing suit.

This exchange, coupled with my friend’s warning to stay away from a bespectacled, pasty looking adult man in one corner of the pool because he was “a pervert”, did not make me feel any kind of warmth to this “quaint” (hick) town at a sheltered 12 years old.

How telling that while I have been fortunate enough not to have ever been physically touched in a sexually abusive manner, the verbal or visual occasions felt, in the moment and now, disgusting. After I told my mother about the boy at the temple, I surprised myself by bursting into tears, though I assured myself and my mother that this really hadn’t plagued my life in any way that I knew of. Only after did it occur to me that I was not crying for myself at 20, but for myself at 6 years old. What an awful thing to do to a 6 year old girl. I wept bitter tears at the violation of my sacred 6 year old self, even though my only real scarring after that point was a revulsion towards that synagogue.

It’s really a never ending list – the time someone yelled “SHOW ME YOUR TITS!” from a moving car as I stood next to two male teachers. One of them looked uncomfortable. The other one laughed. The time I was decked head to toe in exercise clothes, riding my bike with my mother, and two men wagged their tongues at us between their fingers. At the time, I had been totally perplexed. I was fourteen and chubby – I certainly did not look sexy in an oversized t-shirt and bike shorts. Of course, now I know that it had nothing to do with how attractive I looked, but just by the mere fact that I was a girl.

While I have never felt ashamed by any of these experiences, I do feel a pronounced sense of…ick. When I was younger, however, I found myself laughing them off. Once, my mother told me a story of how a preschool teacher of mine in Israel was being accused of exposing himself to the classroom. In a conversation with my parents not long after that, my tiny toddler self announced, “AND I TOLD HIM TO PUT IT BACK IN HIS PANTS!”

When my mother first told me that, I thought my own reaction was hysterical. I recalled the story to my friends, laughing, though they contrarily looked at me in horror. It wasn’t until I started thinking about the Orthodox boy in the states that I realized that this was not funny. It was horrifying.

I must admit that I am somewhat comforted to know that even as a 3 year old, I responded to these gross, powerful threats of dominance with as much revulsion and anger as I could muster. Male strangers and authority figures in my life had tried (and still try) to put me in the role of the submissive victim, and even when I was a toddler, I had enough self-awareness and pragmatism to know that I was not to blame, and it was the fault of the men. However, I do still feel appalled that a life I had previously considered safe from oppression is actually subject to the normalized sexism of American (or Israeli) life. It is this that has led me to the conclusion that my previous understanding of oppression was wildly cartoonish. Oppression, and the oppressors, are nuanced and sneaky.

I am compelled to write this, because as someone who staunchly believes that education and self-reflection can save the world (an opinion no doubt bred by privilege) I want to make clear to myself and to others that non-physical sexual harassment is not the gray area of abuse. I have never, not once, even when I was laughing, felt flattered or complimented at sexual suggestions shouted from passing windows. Even when my response was to shrug it off (or, in later years flick off the offenders), I still felt the same ick factor as when I could only drown in my own embarrassment.
Visual and verbal harassment comes from the same impulse as physical abuse, which comes from the same impulse as legislation that closes 47 of the 52 abortion clinics in Texas, which comes from the same impulse as suggesting that a woman’s body can abort an unwanted pregnancy naturally. The impulse is that of masculine insecurity trying to compensate with oppressive dominance over a population of people that history, Western religion, and social practices have taught is both the weaker sex and inherently less sexual than men.

I have zero sympathies for the tortured souls of the men who have thought to make themselves feel better by making women – trans, cis, or by any other form of identification – feel worse, to the point that I see no reason why engaging in correcting the justification is a productive use of my time. While the conditions of any kind of oppression are complex and nuanced and deserve dialogue, the justifications do NOT. This is why I refuse to go in detail debunking such paltry half-assed explanations like “I thought you girls liked that” or “she was asking for it” or “don’t go to the pool, then.”  I am also done explaining to my female friends why I would flick off the street harassers.  “They’re just trying to compliment you.”

I have realized now that all oppression is heavily linked and interconnected. The impulse to traffic women into sexual slavery is the same as making me, the white suburban girl from Ohio feel ashamed of my breasts. I am grateful and relieved that my life is more fortunate than those in positions with much higher and more dangerous stakes. I am also done brushing my experiences off as inconsequential.

I am unfortunately not in the position to influence real legislation that affects women in the United States or in other countries, nor am I in the position to actually make a difference in the lives of the women in sexual slavery. I am not qualified to tell women what to do in situations of real sexual trauma. I do, however, feel qualified enough to point out the examples of patriarchal oppression in my life and in the lives of my friends. I do feel qualified as a woman to tell my male friends to fuck the fuck off (and explain in nicer terms why) when they say something sexist, and I don’t feel bad or guilty for flicking off men in cars who tell me to take off my bra.

As someone who is interested in going into a profession of teaching and the arts, I am reminding myself to actively make sure that the boys about to become men know that their sexual fates are not diminished to the roles of aggressors or animals, but that it is their role to actively fight against the conditioning that would make this so. I am reminding myself to impress upon the women that their bodies, or what they do with them, does not have any affect on who they are as people – no matter what men in cars say.

I don’t believe men are programmed to be sexual aggressors, just as I don’t believe women are in any way less sexual than men. I do believe that the world is changing (for the better, even if parts for the worse), and that we have the potential to head towards a society where power is not what we ultimately strive for, but rather that we strive towards egalitarian respect. We can achieve this, if we make an active stride for it.