Only when we choose to, Not when they make us.

When I see men sexualising women it makes my gut churn. It turns me into some rabid superhero, foaming at the mouth ready to devour them in a frenzy of blood and ethics.

But then, I also crave that same kind of hideous attention from that very same gender.

My generation struggle with this conflict more than those before us and more than those after us.

We lie between two times, one throughout our childhood, where women were still presented as sex objects, where the undertones of the 50’s were yet to have faded out and the times we now live in, where we have started to really crack the glass ceiling. The Me Too Times.

Living our puberty years in a world where our parents and grandparents constantly reminded us that our sexuality wasn’t something to express freely while then growing through our adulthood watching women holding me accountable for doing things that we didn’t even know counted as sexual assault.

This new movement of sexual ownership challenges so much of our subliminal childhood messages. And while we welcome this new sense of empowerment, we still often revert back to wanting to be treated the way the media had made us expect we would be.

At the end of the day, no woman can deny the guttural reaction they have when they hear misogyny or see sexism. We are all infuriated by men sexualising or objectifying any female, of course. But we still haven’t grown beyond a need for us to be that woman.

…. But only when we want to be, not when they choose to make us one.