On February 24th, I attended a D200 floor program run by my RA, Julie Eller. This was a Service Learning program titled Express Empowerment. The program began with food, which is important for any great program. As we ate our mozzarella sticks and vegetables, Julie explained to us the point of the program. We have so many social media platforms that we can be using to change the world. She wanted us to start doing something about that.
Julie showed us pictures of people with protest signs addressing all sorts of issues. Our instructions were to create a protest sign dealing with an issue that we feel passionate about. Then she would take our picture holding our sign. Once she put the pictures on the Internet, it would be our job to share ours and explain what our sign was talking about. She wanted us to take over social media with issues that really matter.
For my sign, I knew I wanted to do something that addresses the way college-aged girls are treated. A few months back I was extremely moved by the #yesallwomen conversation on Twitter. This conversation was created after a boy went on a shooting rampage on a college campus targeting sorority girls on a college campus. After the Twitter world exploded with women pointing out that that boy’s though process stems from our society’s idea that men have entitlement to women, men shot back with #notallmen. This conversation said that not all men have those thoughts. Women fired back with #yesallwomen saying that while not all men feel entitled to women, all women have to live their lives worrying about the men who do.
That conversation is what created my feminist side; however, there was a problem that I noticed throughout many of the tweets on that page. In many of the tweets talking about how slut shaming is wrong, women would say things that could be taken as offensive towards girls who choose to wait to have sex until they are married. I strongly believe that what you choose to do with your body is nobody’s business but your own. If you want to have sex go out and have as much sex as you want. I hope you make safe choices and you have a great time. If you want to wait to have sex, then go out and have fun without having sex. Nobody has any right to say anything to you about either choice.
In order to figure out what to put on my protest sign, I consulted the #yesallwomen conversation. Then I found a quote from the breakfast club, “If you haven’t you’re a prude. If you have, you’re a slut. It’s a trap.” This quote is from 1985, and it automatically made me think of a line from a 2013 Kacey Musgraves song, “If you save yourself for marriage you’re a bore. If you don’t save yourself for marriage you’re a whore…ible person.” These quotes, almost thirty years apart, show that this issue is nothing new and also that it has yet to be fixed. This is what gave me the idea for my sign, which is shown here:
Once Julie put the pictures online, I made a Facebook post detailing where my ideas for the sign came from and why this was the quote I chose to present on my sign. I was shocked by the reaction that I got on the post. There were people who I rarely talk to commenting positively on the post. One girl who I am Facebook friends with only because we go to Stockton even shared my post. Julie also hung our pictures up in the library and one girl from our floor caught someone who we do not know looking at the pictures of us with our signs. This program was amazing and it really makes me want to do more to get my voice heard.