Lest we think that the objectification of women is on the decline, in March Twitter told us that it is alive and well. During the first week, Kim Kardashian tweeted a nude selfie, which was re-tweeted 130,000 times, and ignited a firestorm of controversy. A couple of weeks later, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump got into a Twitter feud over the relative attractiveness of their wives — reducing both women to possessions to be compared like shiny baubles.
The month ended with hundreds of women responding to the hashtag #TheFirstTimeIWasCatcalled, put out by Huffington Post Women’s Editor Alanna Vagianos, who followed up with a story. I had to think long and hard before tweeting out my own memory because being catcalled was such an integral part of my adolescence. Growing up in the Upper Valley, I wasn’t immune from taunts at school and even on the street, but I couldn’t actually remember the first time. However, I knew that I was young, and I distinctly remembered the way it made me feel: uncomfortable and ashamed.
When I went to college in Boston, I was regularly catcalled on the street, but I no longer felt ashamed; I felt angry. My response was to confront the man or men (usually it was groups of men) and ask how they would feel if someone said to their mothers or sisters what they had just yelled out to me. Invariably, “hey, baby” turned to “bitch,” and in that instant my anger and disgust turned to fear.
When whistles abruptly turn to hostility, it’s worth questioning the root of such behavior. Is it a man’s need to feel power over women? When a stranger tells a woman to “smile,” is it because he genuinely cares about her emotional state? If these comments make the girl or woman who is on the receiving end feel uncomfortable or fearful, isn’t that proof enough that this is behavior that should be shunned and discouraged? Neither girls nor women want to feel like they are objects to be observed and rated.
The day Vagianos’ hashtag went live, I kept checking Twitter to read the responses, and what I read made my stomach turn. The majority of the tweets described being catcalled and even groped before the women had hit puberty.
Some of the particularly disturbing tweets include, “I was 10, at a family friend’s bbq in a swimsuit, it was a drunk dad, who thought he was funny”… “I was in 1st grade, dancing alone in the rain with an umbrella on my front lawn. A man in a car whistled at me.” . . . “10, exiting elementary school. Older boys. Adults around did nothing to correct the behavior.”
The more I read, the more repulsed I became. The misogyny of catcalling is one thing, but these exposed a deeper, more troubling trend: the sexualization of little girls. Most alarming were the tweets that described being physically assaulted. “The #FirstTimeIWasCatcalled I was 12. Man said ‘take care of your body’ then groped me. I was waiting for my mom after gymnastics practice.” The fact that the tweets came in from all over the country, and a few from overseas, showed the universality of the experience.
In 2014, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and Hollaback!, a nonprofit organization to end harassment in public spaces, conducted a survey on street harassment in 42 countries. With nearly 17,000 respondents, it was the largest survey of its kind to date, and its findings are alarming.
Eighty-four percent of women experienced street harassment for the first time before they were 17 years old; 82 percent reported taking a different route home or to their destination; 71 percent reported being followed; over 50 percent reported being fondled or groped and half the women reported feeling anxiety after experiencing harassment.
While valuable in shedding light on the issue, the study did not address the fact that men who catcall likely started out as boys who made sexual remarks to female classmates. The old “boys will be boys” argument no longer officially flies, and schools across the country have adopted a zero-tolerance policy. Unfortunately, this has not stopped sexual harassment, but it has produced cases of children as young as 4 being brought up on charges, which is ridiculous and misses the point entirely. Meanwhile, in valid cases, girls are often reluctant to complain because of repercussions from other students.
In a recent email exchange on the topic, Cindy Pierce, of Etna, author of Sexploitation: Helping Kids Develop Healthy Sexuality In A Porn-Driven World, wrote, “Some boys will say outrageous things to girls out loud because it is tolerated, normalized and they have safety in numbers. Girls who question it are called prudes, feminist (feminist equals bitch) or jealous. This forces girls to go along with it and be ‘chill.’ Parents and educators need to address the microaggressions and the tolerance of them when kids are young.”
One tragic result of girls being sexualized at a young age — whether through harassment at school or from adult men catcalling them — is that it has the tendency to cause them to internalize the message that their worth lies only in their looks. Countless young girls seek valuation through objectifying themselves, and social media provides the perfect forum for doing so.
In a TED talk given in 2014, Meghan Ramsey reported that roughly 10,000 people a month Google the phrase, “Am I ugly?” Ramsey told the story of a 13-year-old girl who took a video of herself and posted it to YouTube with the question: “Am I pretty or am I ugly?” At the time of the talk, the girl had received over 13,000 comments, most of them so nasty that Ramsey declined to repeat them. And that girl is not alone. Every day thousands of teenage girls post similar videos, putting their self-esteem into the hands of millions of strangers online.
“The sexualization of girls has really intensified with the internet and social media,” wrote Pearce. “There are just many more ways for girls and boys to be reminded of what it takes to be hot, socially and sexually relevant. There are also more ways that boys and men can exploit women. Social media has created a fiendish need for validation through likes, comments and attention, particularly for girls and women.”
Which brings me back to Kim Kardashian’s nude selfie. Kardashian has made a career of exploiting her body and she’s become an international brand — worth an estimated $85 million — doing so. She’s also sent countless young girls the fraudulent message that exploiting their body for financial or even social gain is empowering. (To drive the message home, she re-tweeted the nude selfie on March 8 under HAPPY #INTERNATIONALWOMENSDAY.) Equally troubling is that boys are getting that message, too. Some will measure their own worth by their looks, and others will feel emboldened to objectify and harass their female classmates, or both.
And the cycle continues. We’ve come a long way on many social issues since I was in school in the 1970s, but sexual harassment continues unabated. In 2014, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that one in four middle school students experienced unwanted physical or sexual harassment on school grounds. Boys and girls reported harassment in equal numbers, though the study didn’t identify the gender of the offenders. It did report that 9 percent of respondents dismissed the harassment as “joking” even while acknowledging that the event was upsetting.
The propensity to downplay the seriousness of the issue allows it to feed on itself. When we have little girls harassed while playing in the rain or going to gymnastics, teenage girls being taunted and groped in school, women being catcalled on the street, and presidential candidates screaming my-wife-is-hotter-than-your-wife across the internet, we can be sure that the problem is endemic.
Witnesses to catcalling, whether in their schools, on their local streets or even in the political arena might want to ask themselves: How would I feel if that were happening to my mother, my sister, or my wife? It’s your call.
Hanover native Jaimie Seaton has been a journalist for 20 years. She has contributed to and edited publications in the U.S., South Africa, the Netherlands, Singapore and Thailand.