Laura Bates - Fix the System, Not the Women

I read this with great optimism and hope Dr Pragya Agarwal

Fix the System, Not the Women

Laura Bates

The Sunday Times bestselling author and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project

Brilliantly fierce and eye-opening Guardian

Profoundly important a book everyone should read Observer

Excellent has the power to spark social change Sunday Times

Laura Bates is showing us the path to both intimate and global survival Gloria Steinem

Brilliant a brave new book shows why we should all be afraid Independent

Thrilling, intelligent, accessible, uplifting and empowering. Read the book Lucy Mangan, Stylist

Shocking, powerful, passionate Sunday Times

Will make most women feel oddly saner Caitlin Moran

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For my wonderful mum, for being there every single step of the way.

I have so many stories. Too many to list Theres too many stories to even remember, let alone tell.

Everyday Sexism Project entry

My list, like most, starts before Im even conscious of it. It starts with the ugly, heavy piece of gold jewellery my mum finds on the passenger seat of the car as she and my dad leave my grandparents house after visiting to introduce them to my new baby brother. The gift is there because, after two daughters, shes finally had a son. I am five years old and have no idea Ive already been weighed, valued and found wanting.

At primary school, Im baffled by jokes about women with small feet who can fit closer to the kitchen sink, kids who think make me a sandwich is an effective insult, and the total playground segregation between footballing boys and skipping girls. Before the age of eight, Im pressured into selecting which boy I will marry (I panic and offer my cousins name). Before the age of nine, my best friend runs straight into a wall and loses half her front tooth, so desperate is she to get away from the pursuing boys in a game of kiss chase. On school coach trips, kids pass around papers with numbers corresponding to sexual acts and the names of boys in our year group. You have to pick two numbers and withstand the screams of mirth and mockery about what youve done with whom. When my dad later finds the paper crumpled in my school bag, I dissolve in horror and hot shame. I want to say that I dont know what it is and I didnt want to do it, but I cant.

When I am thirteen, I come out of the changing rooms for a swimming lesson and listen to the boys rating the girls bodies out of ten. I feel furious, terrified, ashamed and humiliated. None of the girls say a word. I learn that, among my peer group, a girls value is measured by how many boys find her attractive and want to have sex with her. I hear boys in my class describing girls as slags and thunder thighs. Male peers mock me for my indignation when they pass around a magic pen with a picture of a woman that can be tipped upside down to slowly remove her clothes. The games at the back of the bus now involve spin the bottle and chicken where a boy runs his hand up the inside of your leg towards your crotch until you are cowardly enough to stop him.

As I begin to move through the world, the lessons accumulate. Not just the lessons I learn at school, but outside, too. By the age of fourteen, I have been followed, whistled at, shouted at, catcalled and propositioned more times than I can count. I have learned to flinch when a man I dont know comes towards me in the street. I have learned to cross the street if I see a group of men together on the pavement. I never feel completely safe in a public space, but I am not really conscious of this and I cannot put my finger on the exact moment it began. It is just my reality.

I read endless magazine features about flaws I didnt even realise I had and all the many things I should be doing to fix them. I skim a copy of a womens weekly that carries a circle of shame on the front cover, highlighting the publications disgust at a female celebritys cellulite or stomach rolls. In my early teens, I start secretly buying SlimFast milkshakes and hiding them in my school desk. I suck in my stomach every moment of every day. My body shape is average, but my emotional relationship with it becomes fraught and torturous. No matter what else is happening in my life exams, friendships, music lessons, school plays I am rarely not worrying about whether I look fat. Locked in my bedroom at night, I faithfully follow a holiday body bootcamp exercise regime ripped out of a magazine, repeating it over and over again. Before going on holiday, I stop eating almost altogether. I ration myself to a handful of cereal for breakfast and one for lunch. When we go out for a meal on the first night away, my body is so unused to rich food that I spend the rest of the night vomiting in the bathroom, trying to keep quiet so my family wont notice what is happening.

At school, we have one session just for the girls where a policeman tells the girls to shout fire instead of rape if they are attacked. People are more likely to respond, apparently. I think the boys are playing football at the time. No lesson at school ever covers anything related to sexual consent or healthy relationships, let alone rape, coercion or abuse. So, when a boy does something to me that I dont want to happen, I dont know how to say no, how to stop him, how to do anything but freeze. I sit on the toilet afterwards and look at the blood and I never, ever tell anybody what happened.

In my mid-teens, when I wear a close-fitting top with a caption on the front, a male teacher stops me in the corridor, holds my shoulders and slowly, leerily reads each word aloud. When I confide to another teacher that we need the costume department to purchase slips because the white dresses weve been provided to wear in a theatre production are see-through, he grins and tells me (in front of my mostly male classmates), But we like to see your underwear. Another male teacher sits on the edge of a girls desk in an English class, pouts and asks her, Do you think Im sexy?

At fifteen, I receive inappropriate emails from a senior male colleague at my part-time holiday job; I am called into a managers office to be reprimanded for causing this, having worn a short skirt. Around this time, men in the street start telling me to smile or cheer up because it might never happen. It doesnt seem to occur to them that maybe Im no longer smiling in public spaces because it already has.

At the end of each year, there is a Christmas party in our school houses during which girls compete at licking cream off upright bananas while long lists of gossip about various dalliances and activities with different boys are read out with great hilarity. When Im in the sixth form, a new teacher, recently arrived, asks me if it has occurred to me that the entire occasion reduces girls entirely to their sexual experiences, positioning them only in terms of their relationship to their male peers. I look at her blankly. It has not occurred to me that any other approach is possible. When we arrive at the school Christmas dinner, the boys already assembled start barking uproariously and singing Who Let the Dogs Out at the top of their voices.