https://youtu.be/0au3EQztWy0?si=evZBWR6DXqN4xfy3
Looking for reflections on sexual bullying and gender-related issues, I came across this video on YouTube. In it, a mother writes to a program, worried because her daughter is the target of sexual comments, looks, and insinuations from her high school classmates. The mother says the reason is her daughter's attractive body. The ideas and opinions in the video have helped me develop many more reflections than those presented in it. In class, we’ve explored many types of violence—from physical to the more psychological forms. A kind of violence in which the abuser selects their victim. But this kind of sexual violence during adolescence, in my opinion, is more systematic. More invisible, more accepted, and therefore more terrifying.
Adolescence is a stage when our self-esteem is more fragile than ever, because we are learning to love ourselves. Above all, we must learn to love a body that is changing, that is imperfect, and that is ours. A body that, in today’s society, defines us more than we would like. I think about how much bullying comes from that privileged group whose bodies align with all the Western beauty standards, aimed at others who are mocked for their imperfections. But this way of overvaluing the body and dehumanizing the person also exists when a man feels entitled to look at a woman’s body with desire.
The video gives the example of a girl who has learned to feel beautiful in her body and her identity, but who is made to feel like an object by the gazes of her classmates. She is made to feel like just a body. Perhaps the dehumanization that happens in adolescence when we look at a ‘perfect’ or an ‘imperfect’ body are just two sides of the same coin...
The harasser may not act, but a girl can feel touched just by a look. Because, as I said, adolescence is a time when we all want to have an individual identity. We all want to be perceived as the person we’ve learned to be. However, comments, stares, and attitudes driven purely by sexual desire bury the identity of the person receiving them. They force that person to exist( or learn to exist) on a completely artificial, false level, one that’s detached from their true self: the level of the male gaze.It’s terrifying to think about how many people have to accept that their face is no longer just theirs, that their body also lives as a doppelgänger in the sexualized perception of adolescents. That the violence may not be personal, but it is systematic. And when that violence causes you pain—because it humiliates you, because it forces you to wear clothes you don’t want to wear, because it triggers episodes of depersonalization, because it makes you change the street you walk on—you stop caring about where it comes from. You just want it to stop.
The real problem is realizing that it never really stops, and many victims aren’t even aware of it: because they learn to adapt to a society built around the male gaze, a gaze that starts in the classroom, and that sadly, classrooms don’t do enough to blind. To blind it with humanist, sexual education—education that focuses on gender issues and can reveal just how cruel, superficial, and limited our reality truly is."
Comments
Post a Comment