[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_92

Fix the system, not women, Laura Bates, 2022

“In early 2012, by coincidence, I experienced several such incidents in just one week. I was shouted at in the street. I was followed by a man sexually harassing me. Another man touched me inappropriately on the bus. On each occasion, I responded as I had been conditioned to: I tried to ignore it. I felt the prickly heat of shame and anger crawling up my neck; my heart rate sped up with the familiar fear. I looked straight ahead, got off the bus, and walked home. I didn’t tell anyone. I never dreamed of reporting anything. But, for the first time, I joined the dots. I recognized that these incidents were connected. If they hadn’t occurred so close together, I might never have thought twice about any of them. I realized they were common”.

It is the beginning of “Fix the system, not women,” Laura Bates's latest book. Bates is the founder of “The Everyday Sexism Project” (https://everydaysexism.com/). Many people believe that one of the biggest problems in combating misogyny and gender discrimination is men's reluctance to recognize the problem. It's not like that. One of the biggest problems in tackling misogyny and gender discrimination is the internalization of both by women. Women are the first not to see the problem because they grow up in a context where the issue is their normality. All women suffer discrimination and violence daily, but not all of them realize that it is discrimination and violence; many feel humiliation, injustice, and anger, but they connect them to the single person who caused it, or worse, they consider themselves the cause. They fail, as happened to Bates, to “connect the dots.” They fail to see how all these inappropriate behaviors they constantly suffer are not isolated and unfortunate episodes but are part of a large whole.

Bates underlines how the process of inferiority of women begins in the cradle and continues constantly through education imparted by the family and then by school until adulthood, embracing all spheres of existence. Bates reports in a table something that may seem frivolous to most: all the phrases of the mainstream T-shirts for children. The list includes “Mummy's Little Soldier” for boys and, “Mummy's Little Cupcake” for girls, “Be Your Superhero” alongside the respective female

“Daddy is my Superhero” for the masculine, “little genius,” and the feminine version, “Princess in training.” Again, “I'm super!” for the male and “I hate my thighs” for the female.

The list is long. Bates underlines the double face of discrimination: it affects females and males. “The slogan and messaging aimed at boys repeatedly suggest that they are less worthy of love, cuddles, and kisses and that they should be independent, powerful, and strong. It is only acceptable for girls to show vulnerability and emotion or to reach out for help. Later on, all this will reach its logical, devastating conclusion in the fact that suicide is the leading cause of death for men under fifty”.

Last year, I noticed something similar to gender discrimination in clothes when shopping for swimsuits. The women's costumes were almost all uncomfortable: the underwear was either too tight or left too much of my butt exposed, and the bras were nearly all padded or with structures to support the breasts that were so rigid that they went heavy marks on the skin. So, given that my body measurements could fit those of a 15-year-old, I had the idea of looking for a solution in the children's department, and I was convinced I would find something comfortable.

To my horror, I discovered that even girls under ten were offered two-piece swimsuits, even if breasts only started to grow after the age of 12. And that they were all padded. This means that it is possible to see a 6-year-old girl building sandcastles while wearing a padded bra that simulates the breasts of an adult woman.

It's not just accustoming a little girl to the suffering and discomfort of bras that are not made to "hold the breasts" but to please the predatory gaze of men but also to make their identity coincide with a secondary sexual character, such as the breast. I imagined the same six-year-old girl arriving on the beach wearing a t-shirt with the words "I only date heroes," showing the false breasts of her padded bra: it is a practical demonstration of the way we raise our daughters. We sexualize their little bodies before they have even learned to read, and we teach them not to act but to wait for the prince, the hero who has built his glory while the princess was in the bathroom making herself beautiful for him.

The long list of phrases on children's t-shirts and the female swimsuits reminds us of how the early notions of controlling, male-dominated sexual relationships are already normalized from the birth of each individual – together with the inevitability of our role differences and the fact that "boys will be boys" – and how they constitute the structuring message of our society so much so that, Bates writes, "we're printing it on children's sweatshirts and selling it in supermarkets for £4".