Posts tagged self reblog

pbnpineapples:

One of the things I see most often on Tumblr is womyn talking about being catcalled and how hurtful and degrading it is. I have read some very powerful, and empowering accounts of this, and all my respect to them. It takes a lot of courage to speak out when your voice and concern is not acknowledged by society as a whole. 

But today, I am going to talk about the flip side of this. 

I have known catcalling from a very young age. I hit puberty at the age of 9, and at that age, I already looked like a, well, a 12 year old, if not older. Catcalling, being whistled at, “undressed by a man’s eyes” was something of a common thing for me, and as time passed, it was also something I started looking for, craving for. It made me feel beautiful, desirable. 

Now, before you rush to take the above paragraph as evidence of “see, feminazis just make a big deal out of nothing, it is a compliment!” wait a second. As I hit puberty and I started filling out my natural, God given, beautiful curves, my parents went to war on me on how I was becoming fat, and as inevitably happens, I had a bit of an acne problem in my younger years, my parents weren’t happy about that too. 

And then there were the other things too. I “dressed sloppily”. I was bullied at the time for body odor (it’d take sometime for my cousin sisters to figure this out and come to my rescue). I was clumsy. There were a bunch of other things. 

So what did I do? I took the whistles of strangers on the street, and tried to build my self affirmation through that. The days I didn’t receive any? I mentally beat myself up for it. 

Twisted irony in all this, but patriarchal and colonialist beauty standards fucked with my self image. It was those same beauty images that pushed my parents to do what they did (I love them, they meant well), and patriarchal notions meant that it was other men, men with whom I had nothing to do with, to whom I went looking for a bit of self affirmation. At the end of the day, I had no agency of my own. 

Catcalling hurts. Even if you mean it as a compliment. It comes back to pound on a woman in various other ways, its invasive, and well, why do you want to make obscene pigs out of yourselves anyway?