Midnight WoManifestos

You ever have that thing that hits you right as you turn the lights out, and you turn it over in your mind while you turn over in your sheets. It's usually in these moments, when some issue is perfectly clear in my mind, that I can write a concise response with amazing clarity. But then, what to do with it?

Tonight it was about #YesAllWomen, because I finally realized that this has been my experience all along.

From simple things, like being criticized back at my "engineering university" for bringing up boyfriends in conversation with new, male friends to not-so-subtly remind them that I am not interested in being hit on (A common, confirmed tactic used by nearly every woman I ever talked to on the subject). To a more recent incident that really upset me, where someone in a casual-professional setting used my sympathetic side to lure me into a conversation about his wife-troubles, only to blatantly push for sex, with not-so-nice of phrases. Talk about feeling worthless as an independent, unique human being.

I was blinded to it because I had never been outright sexually assaulted, at least not in the US... that's a different story, and most of my stories I had shrugged off as being part of my career path. And I do find them funny usually, but we all know humor is sometimes all you can do to deal with the overwhelming scope of the true issues. Through this hashtag, the true scope is finally becoming clear to me, and it's an exciting bubble of human rights that has never been revealed before.

What are we going to do about it?