They Said, ‘It’s Normal. Stop Making A Fuss.’ Then She Decided It Was Time To Make A Fuss.

[eridani]

http://www.upworthy.com/they-said-its-normal-stop-making-a-fuss-then-she-decided-it-was-time-to-make-a-fuss?c=upw1

About 18 months ago I had a really bad week. I was on my way home from work one night and it was one of those hot evenings where the traffic was at a standstill and as I walked down the road and the cars crawled next to me some guys started shouting out of their car windows about my legs, about the things that they'd like to do to me, and I ingored them and I carried on home and I got on with it, like you do.

And then a few nights later I was on the way home on the bus quite late at night and I was on the phone to my mum and I thought at first that the guy next to me just accidentally brushed my leg with his hand and I carried on talking to my mum and then I realized that actually he was grabbing and groping my leg and moving his hands up towards my crotch. And I stood up to move away from him but because I was on the phone to my Mum, I vocalized it in a way that I don't think I would have otherwise. So, I said, "I'm on the bus this guy's groping me," and everybody on that bus looked out the window or looked down at their feet or looked at their phone, ceratinly nobody stepped in, but more than that there was a real sense of why are you making a fuss about this, woman? This is your issue, deal with it, don't make us think about it and that immediately made me feel ashamed, it made me feel like maybe I'd done something wrong or maybe I shouldn't have been there on my own that late at night or I shouldn't have been wearing what I was wearing and all of those thoughts that that reaction triggers. And again I carried on, I went home, I didn't mention it, I got on with it, like you do.

And then a couple of days later I was walking down the street in broad daylight and there was a big truck that was being unloaded some scaffolding that was coming off the back off it and there were two guys working together and as I walked past one of them turned to the other and said, "Look at the tits on that." Not "her", "that". And they started discussing me as if I wasn't there even though I was one meter away and I could really clearly hear them.

The thing that really hit me about these three incidents was if they hadn't all happened in the same week I never would have thought twice about any one of them, and I started asking myself why that was, why this was so normal, why was I so used to them? I started thinking back about hundreds of incidents that had happened over the weeks and months and years that I had never said anything about to anyone because it was normal.