Stop

To the high school boys loitering in the shopping center where I work,

Stop.

Stop harassing me when I'm biking to work.  Stop yelling out slurs and remarks about my breasts and descriptions of what you want my mouth to do to you.  Stop pointing out various parts of my body to each other in the way one would point out choice cuts of meat.  I am not a "heifer", a "slut", a "whore", a "bitch".  I am especially not YOUR whore, and do not refer to me as such.  You do not own me.  I am not an object that you can purchase or acquire through any means other than my own offering.  

Stop insulting me when I take the higher road and ignore your remarks and pass by without incident.  Stop acting like I should feel blessed that you would bestow your attention upon me, and that I owe you something in return.  Do not tell me that I'm the bitch for ignoring your "compliments".  Your remarks are disgusting and degrading.

To the man who stopped me in the supermarket,

Stop.  

Stop asking for my number, my name, if I'm single.  Those things in themselves are not wrong to do, but you need to look me in the eyes when you're asking.  Do not look lower than my eyes while speaking to me, and then get offended when I give you the cold shoulder and turn you down.  Stop acting like I'm a frigid brat for refusing you.  Just because I am single does not mean I am automatically interested in getting to know you, just because you liked what you saw enough to approach me.  I am single, not desperate, and I would like to think I'd never settle for a man who can't even treat me like a lady.

To society,

Stop.

Stop making it so that it's abnormal, weird for a woman to defend herself from such harassment.  Stop laughing verbal sexual harassment off as just a rude gesture.  It is beyond a rude gesture.  It is degrading.  Dehumanizing. 

I am a woman.  I am a daughter.  A sister.  A friend.  I am an artist.  A reader.  A Child of God.  I love to play video games and be with my friends and sing in the shower and slide across the kitchen floor in my socks and a million other things that make me me.  And each time you make a degrading comment, you belittle all of these things for your own selfishness.  You attempt to strip me of my humanity and turn me into a sex object that you hope will emulate your desires.

And it won't work on me.

But there are girls who aren't like me.  Girls who don't know that their worth is not defined by the men who would degrade them.  By a society who says you'll never be quite good enough.  There are girls who shove their fingers down their throat and vomit in the bathrooms between classes, in an attempt to attract the wrong kind of attention.  There are girls who dress a certain way because they've been conditioned to believe the attention they get is positive and they strive for more of it to fulfill them.  There are girls who have allowed themselves to believe the lies that they are nothing without the attention.

And it needs to stop.