Picture this: You’re seventeen, working cash at a store, and one of your coworkers, younger than you, barely sixteen, comes up and tells you they just got hit on by a creepy old man, again.
That’s terrible, you say.
They shrug. It happens all the time. I look older than I am.
You wrack your brain, trying to think of the last time a creepy old man hit on you at work. You come up blank. You give your coworker a sympathetic shrug and tell them to call the manager if it happens again. You don’t let them see the way your face falls when they turn around, and you definitely don’t tell them about the small kernel of resentment in your belly or the little voice whispering in your head.
Of course, they hit on her. She’s gorgeous. Way prettier than you.
You try to tell yourself that you don’t want to be hit on by old men at work anyway. They’re creepy, they make you uncomfortable and it’s sexist and gross and objectifying and pervy. You’re not even legal, they shouldn’t be looking at you like that.
But maybe they would if you were hotter. Sucks that your tits are small and your uniform does nothing for your shape. Sucks that you’re not attractive.
Sucks that the perverts don’t want you.
This is a really challenging thing to talk about, but it happens. We live in a male-dominated society, and whether we want to admit it or not, lots of us have grown up weighing our worth on the opinions of other people. We want to be seen as desirable. We want to know that other people think we’re beautiful, even though we know it’s what’s on the inside that counts. What’s inside isn’t going to get us our first kiss, it’s not going to get us looked up and down in the hall and whistled at or make guys smack our asses and tell us we’re looking fucking sexy today.
I can say from experience that what’s inside is going to get you the more important things, but as a teenage girl, surrounded by friends who were more beautiful than me, whose bodies were more mature than mine, who had boys chasing them and checking them out and hitting on them, I was painfully aware of the fact that I wasn’t getting that sort of attention. The kind of attention that made them uncomfortable. The kind of attention that is objectifying and derogatory and what every feminist teaches us to fight against.
As much as I tried to not let it get to me, I started to crave that attention. I wanted boys to check me out. I clung to sexist statements like “you’ve got a nice ass” hollered at me down the hall. I prayed for older men to hit on me at work. Not because I wanted love or companionship or a sugar daddy, not because I thought it was healthy or because I wanted it to lead to a real relationship, but because I wanted affirmation that I was pretty. I wanted to know that men wanted me the way they wanted my friends. I wanted to know that I was hot enough to be objectified.
We talk all the time about unwanted attention from men, the microaggressions women face, the ways we get sexualized and why that’s wrong. But we don’t talk enough about how, for a lot of young girls, not being sexualized can be just as damaging to their self-esteem. We don’t talk about how, no matter how much young girls are educated about feminism and the ways they deserve to be treated, the longing to be desired can cause them to misconstrue harassment as validation.
I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying it’s something we should accept. I’m saying it’s there, and we need to talk about it.