I.B.

High school me can only be described in one word: doormat. I had a terrible habit of letting people trample over me without making them stop to think about the impact of the steps they would take and the dirt that they would rub into me. And the worst part? I would find myself apologizing to people for things that they did wrong unto me. 

In high school, my crowned achievement was being on the captain of the dance team. At other schools, dance team is about kick lines and pom-poms, but at my school, it was about hair flips and how many body rolls we could possibly fit into one dance routine. Initially, I loved the attention I got from going out in front of the entire school and dancing my little fifteen-year-old heart out. However, it was this same experience that I valued so highly that lead me to unhealthy measures of self-worth and a lack of self-respect.

My sophomore year, I was sexually harassed to no end. It started small, the occasional cat-call in the hallway or comment about my butt. Slowly but surely, I began to receive direct messages on Instagram from guys in my grade saying things like “I’d like to bend you over the barrel” or “I want you to be my boner garage.” My personal favorite was “Hey, Izzy… I heard dancing is easier with your shirt off. Maybe you should try it.” With every lewd, cruel message I received, I became more and more accustomed to letting men speak to me in a way that no one should ever speak to another human being. I sadly began to measure my self-worth based on how many boys at my school thought I was hot or wanted me to “bend that shit over” (their words, not mine). 

Throughout high school, I saw no problem with the way I was being treated. I truly started to believe that the things that these men (well let’s be honest here… boys) were saying to me were meant to be taken as compliments. I found myself seeking the approval of the boys on the football team or the baseball team or whatever team happened to be walking by during dance team practice that day. 

Toward the end of my sophomore year, I was pressured by multiple boys to send naked pictures on Snapchat. The boys would promise me they wouldn’t screenshot and that the pictures would disappear after the 10 seconds that I would send them for. The most common means of persuasion was “You can trust me.” Deep down I knew that I couldn’t trust a sixteen-year-old boy, but I had such a strong need to feel desired and sought after that I agreed. This desire to feel wanted lead me to allow myself to be degraded by men both through social media and through my own sexual activity in high school. As I predicted, you truly cannot trust sixteen-year-old boys, and before I knew it, I was being called into the principal’s office because rumors were circulating and people were looking at pictures that I had sent in confidence in the middle of third period sophomore English class. 

By the time I was called in to talk to the principal, the worst had just begun. I could not walk anywhere without feeling the eyes of gatherings of boys on me. No boy would ever have the guts to say something in person, but the DMs and Snapchats I would get from those same boys who stared in the hallways grew more derogatory and more “I have the right to your body” than ever before. To be quite honest, the worst of it came from other girls. One girl went so far as to cuss me out in and accuse me of stealing her boyfriend in front of dozens of people even though he was the one attempting to initiate something between us. It was at this point that I realized how rampant slut-shaming can be in our society, and began to reject the double standard that men who get around are “players,” but women who get around are “whores.”

For years, I only saw social media perpetuating the issue of slut-shaming. Posts of women in bikinis have comments like “Slut” or “Cover up,” but comments on pictures of shirtless men say things like “So hot” or “OMG you’re so sexy.” I never felt comfortable speaking out on social media about the way I was being treated because I knew that I would not be taken seriously due to this double standard. The double standard in combination with the fact that people never believe the sexual harassment stories of women caused me to suppress my emotions of devastation and rage for years. When confronted with continual sexual harassment, I put on the façade that I liked what boys were saying to me to postpone acknowledging the fact that it was not okay.

Now, there is an entire community of Instagram pages dedicated to female empowerment and normalizing the idea of female sexuality. As I’ve gotten older, I have seen the development of empowerment in women my own age not only because of these social media influencers, but also because of the open discussion that has grown surrounding the need to stop slut-shaming women young and old. In my opinion, getting rid of slut-shaming altogether starts with being conscious of the way we speak to and about other women and their sex lives. If women continue to call other women sluts and whores then it implies that men have the right to call women sluts and whores, which they do not.

Thinking back to my sophomore year of high school often makes me angry rather than upset or embarrassed. Teenage boys can be cruel, and I was more impressionable then than I am now, so it infuriates me that I was taken advantage of and spoken to in the way that I was. If I could tell young Izzy or anyone else going through something similar one thing, it would be that the opinions of high school boys about your physical appearance, your personality, or your sex life do not define your worth. For years, I measured my own self-worth based on these unrelated metrics when I should have been focused on the qualities that truly make me the person I am. No boy’s opinion should define how you think about yourself, especially if they’re expressing it to you through unrelenting sexual harassment. 

All I can say is that if the only thing a boy can come up with to try and get you to like him is “I want you to be my boner garage,” you deserve so much better.