“Eat a hamburger!” “You girls just made my day!” “Put a shirt on, pervert!” “I can see your cootch through your shorts!” These remarks and many more salacious ones have been directed at me and my teammates on the women’s cross-country team — often accompanied by wolf whistles, honking and leering out the car window. Once a driver even touched himself as he idled alongside my teammate.
In my day-to-day life, I have not yet felt the direct impact of women being paid 80 cents on the dollar. Never in the classroom or the workplace have I been made to feel inferior because of my sex. Only when I am running do I feel unequal — frustrated that I cannot run after dark or on a wooded trail alone. My neck is getting pretty sore from looking over my shoulder for 65 miles a week.
“Getting catcalled can ruin my whole run,” says Alexis Van Pernis ’18, a middle-distance runner. “In a group, it matters less because we’ll often laugh it off and take comfort in the fact that there’s strength in numbers, but when I’m running alone, it makes me very aware of how vulnerable I am.”
The past 50 years have revolutionized athletic equality for women. In 1967, one of the first female finishers of the Boston Marathon had to fight off the race director who tried to rip her number off once they saw a woman on the course. Five years later, Title IX outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex in “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance,” especially athletics.
Despite these strides for female athletes, sexually-aggressive language needs to be placed higher on the agenda of women’s issues — for athletes and non-athletes alike. This behavior, which in the past has been normalized as “locker room talk,” has moved from the shower room to the campaign trail to the White House. It may just be anecdotal, but my teammates and I have noted that the frequency of verbal attacks has risen along with President Trump’s political status and the media coverage of his misogynistic comments.
These trends galvanized the women’s marches in Washington, New York Boston and dozens of other cities this January. But we need to do more than stand in solidarity on Beacon Hill and cheer on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, as my teammates and I did. We in the crowd were just preaching to the choir — one that doesn’t ogle at women in sports bras. Media coverage of the unprecedented turnout at the marches masked the need for policies to protect women when we do not have strength in numbers. We have been taught to keep our wits about us, to counter these offenses with silence because retorting or approaching the heckler could easily escalate the verbal abuse into a physical altercation. The lack of a political or personal voice for women’s safety leaves us without recourse in these daily assaults.
The National Organization for Women’s top issues include reproductive rights and justice, economic justice and ending violence against women. But even the latter is focused on domestic and sexual violence, not its verbal and gestural precursors. This issue is particularly salient for those whose day-to-day travel and activities take them down unpopulated routes and make them feel unsafe. This past summer, three women were killed mid-run; while random homicide is very uncommon, fear of it is not. According to a survey conducted by Runner’s World magazine, 43 percent of women experience harassment while running, compared to only 4 percent of men.
The long-term solution could be donating to organizations, like NOW or Emily’s List, so that more women who understand this plight can be elected to Congress and enact legislation to promote gender equality. But if the Equal Rights Amendment wasn’t passed under former President Jimmy Carter, I doubt it can succeed under Trump. And even a federal amendment stating that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged … on account of sex” would be powerless against these anonymous, day-to-day harassments.
For now, we need a grassroots solution — one that starts with America’s schoolchildren. Sexual respect must be taught alongside sexual education as early as elementary school. Young adults should learn to differentiate between a compliment and a lewd remark — even if their president cannot. Sexual harassment is of course inherently about sex. But at a deeper level, it is about boundaries, respect and feeling safe where we live, work and run. Studies in the United States and abroad have demonstrated that teaching physical boundaries at all levels of schooling can ingrain a sense of sexual respect that continues into adulthood. Comprehensive and accurate sex education programs that teach the importance of consent, communication and respect equip students with the tools and confidence to discern what constitutes harassment.
Thus far, sexual education is only required in 24 states and Washington, in varying levels of detail and adherence to “medical accuracy.” Similarly, only half of all states require any kind of sexual assault education in schools, often leaving it up to the parents or relying on lessons in female self-defense — this policy only normalizes these incidents. U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-VA, summed up the cursory approach by saying “there’s a traditional skittishness about sex education in the K-12 system.” But even the most limited sex education programs may find it more comfortable to teach the importance of respectful, safe interactions with strangers on the street, than those with intimate partners in the bedroom.
Many of us heard of the language of consent for the first time our freshman year at Brown. Colleges across the country have now taken up the call of consent — but the middle school boys leering out the school bus window won’t receive this talk for five more years, if at all, and that might be too late. It might be too much to ask our current state legislatures to mandate teaching consent in middle or high school, but it shouldn’t be too onerous for educators to reinforce the elementary school adage, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Quinn Bornstein ’18 can be reached at quinn_bornstein@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
