happychaos
Proud Parent
Part of living in the real world is to stop pretending that any girl or woman with any kind of public presence can protect herself from this kind of garbage just by acting the right way, doing the right thing, or taking the right precautions. I agree wholeheartedly with the impulse that we should use this as a teachable moment, but what should we be teaching and to whom? If all we do is tell our daughters to be super duper extra careful and wary, we miss the point.
Teach your sons to respect women. Teach them to respect women's bodies and not to fetishize and commoditize them. Teach them not to take pictures without consent and not to share pictures without consent. Teach them that shaming any woman for the way she looks or dresses is wrong. Help them to see how awful this sort of thing is so that they will never do this to a woman, or to a man for that matter. And help them to have the courage to stand up to other men and say "this is wrong" when they see it happening. If we change our culture, we don't have to fear for our daughters so much.
I for one will not undermine all the wonderful things that gymnastics has done for my daughter in terms of her self image and perception of herself as strong by teaching her that she has to walk around in the world in fear because she walks around the world in a woman's body. I will teach her to respect herself and continue to be strong so that when someone tries to shame her or attack her (and it will happen, no matter how careful she is), she can respond appropriately, with all the strength and righteous fury that she can muster by believing herself to be entitled to equality.
I agree with you, except your last paragraph. Teaching your DD to be as safe as possible does not mean that you teach her to walk around in fear. I take reasonable precautions to keep myself safe, but I certainly do NOT walk around in fear, nor do I suffer from a lack of self-respect!
Teaching your daughter reasonable safety precautions does NOT mean that you are teaching her to be weak, unequal, or fearful. Righteous fury is great, but common sense precautions go a LONG way. No, you can never be 100% safe from crime, no matter what you do, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
And, I can say the same for all of my girlfriends (and we will never be to old to stop calling ourselves girlfriends....). None of us live in fear. We expect equality. We respond with righteous fury when wronged. We STILL do what can to avoid being the victim of a crime.
I'd love to believe that teaching boys to respect girls will solve all these problems men make for us women