harassment

I’m not scared on the street very often, but y’all, this time I was scared. But if there’s one thing I know, it is that you do not answer these guys, because that only makes it worse. So I held my breath and hoped that if I didn’t engage, he’d drive off eventually. I felt for my cell phone in my pocket, wondering how quickly I could get ahold of someone if I needed to.

Gigi Hadid would like you to know that unwanted touching is not acceptable.

Ask any woman you know, and she can tell you a story about being taunted, propositioned, followed, grabbed, or otherwise harassed by strangers simply because she had the nerve to have a female body and be within their line of vision.

In my sickest moments, supposedly in the safe hands of health care professionals, I have had a chiro compare helping me undress to ‘unwrapping a gift’; a physio make sexual innuendos about the stockings I had to slip out of for treatment. Again, despite the shame, I remained polite, paying the receptionist for a transaction that left me sick to the core.

It's completely normal to be a woman and enjoy sex. The trouble is that when I’ve expressed my sexuality openly online, I’ve encountered some unwanted attention from men.

[CN: misogynistic online harassment; death threats; mentions of rape and child abuse] You shouldn't have to go to a great imaginative effort to humanize a woman to treat her like a human being. Spoiler alert — she's already a human being without you knowing her or caring for her or seeing her as a long-lost relative or even agreeing with her.

After receiving more than 100,000 accounts from women and girls around the world, Laura has compiled the stories and lessons from Everyday Sexism into a book named after the project.

No matter how drunk he is, he can’t NOT notice this. His hand is moving. What do I do? What do I do? Do I politely ask him to stop? Do I yell at him? Do I wheel around and whack him in the face? You don’t know what he’s doing, Jody. Calm down. Don’t make a scene.