You Are Not Alone

I have not been reading mentions of the adult man who got a light (or no) sentence for raping a 12-year-old girl (and I'm not linking to any stories about this here). But that prompted a friend on Facebook to post this. She is an adjunct professor of sociology and women's studies in the Boston area:

All these discussions about an adult man getting a pass for raping a 12-year-old girl inspired me to ask two of my classes today at what age did the women in the class first get sexually recognized by an adult man, whether it was comments, touching, cat calls, or so on.

Even I was chilled to find that collectively the average age was TEN! And everyone of them had a story about a creepy friend's or boyfriend's dad. Wake up, world, and stop fetishizing little girls!

These were predominately white, upper-class girls. The discussion today made clear that they had never even talked about it with each other before. Collectively, all the girls felt like they must've done something and were shocked to find out they all have the same stories of dads at friend's houses or a little boyfriend's daddy and they all felt they must've been leading on these grown men going as far back to age 10. Our culture is so fucking broken.

The fact of their experience is sickening, but the silence that surrounds it is almost as troubling. You don't even know that it makes sense to talk about it because no one talks about it.