Dear Jo,
I was walking through the park the other day with my girlfriend and she rolled her eyes and said 'men in the summer are the WORST'. She also keeps trying to throw out my flip-flops. What's going? I thought summer time was happy time?
Yours, Brad.
With love, Brad, I’m one of the growing numbers of women who would advocate keeping men in cages during the summer. We all crave those first few hot days; the waft of barbecues, the spike in vitamin D making everyone adorably chirpy, the heat of the sun on your face transporting you to holidays gone by. Ah, yes, and men suddenly remembering you have breasts and finding themselves incapable of not staring. The smallest dose of sunshine does seem to cause you lot to temporarily forget your home training.
In the same way you guys feel compelled to inflict your gnarled chicken feet and sunburnt chests on the world, women want to feel comfortable in the heat too. So, like, I get it - the streets become a sea of halterneck tops, short skirts and summer dresses. Why shouldn’t you openly appreciate the female form in all its glory when it's being laid out in front of you? The thing is I’m going braless today because wearing one in this heat feels like my tits are in a cage of molten lava, not because I am aiming to please a stranger. Your girlfriend will agree with me.
Earlier this year, Labour MP Melanie Onn drew eye-rolls after suggesting that cat-calling should be classed as a low-level crime arguing “as the nature of harassment and sex discrimination changes, so must the laws which govern it. If street harassment and continued sex discrimination has no place in our society, let us have laws which fully and properly reflect that.” Before that, in a 2017 YouGov survey 85% of women aged 18 to 24 said they’d been harassed in the street, none of whom took it as flattering.
Now, I can completely see how this may look like political correctness gone mad. A bunch of tearful, hand-wringing women stifling your friendliness. So here is some maths to help you grasp why, especially during the summertime when you lot let sunstroke go to your head, unwanted attention from strangers is tedious.
By the time we are young women, our bodies have been sexualised since our teens on such a large scale that it’s just become par for the course. I remember a man well into his twenties commenting on my bare legs and then making a joke about me fellating a Calippo lolly while I was in school uniform, long before I even knew what a blowjob was and a bemused 13-year-old me thinking “put what in my where?”
Fast forward through over a decade of reluctantly policing my own outfits, catcalls, leering, being followed, not buying Calippos and that thing-you-guys-do-when-you’re-in-a-pack-and-a-woman-walks-past-so-you-all-go-silent-while-simultaneously-making-it-obvious-you’re-looking-her-up-and-down-and-are-going-to-snicker-about-it-afterwards and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve wanted to punch a man in the throat. Can you understand why, when you’ve been conditioned to be on the defensive since puberty, even a harmless, lingering glance makes us hate you? No man has ever shouted “YOU LOOK NICE TODAY, I’D LOVE TO BRING AFFECTION AND STABILITY TO YOUR LIFE” at me from a speeding car, so I can only assume these acts are designed to make me uncomfortable.
I once tried explaining this to a good male friend who didn’t understand why I couldn’t just be flattered; it’s an ego boost surely? He didn’t get it. So every time I saw him that summer, I would stare at his crotch, make unsolicited comments about his body or ask him if he thought it was too hot to be wearing jeans. Sounds great right? If ONLY women were like this! Truth be told I didn’t think my approach was working until I was yelling at him from the top deck of a bus while making pussy licking motions and I – finally – saw a broken man. A man that just wanted to get on with his day, maybe do some grocery shopping and send some emails without some prick shouting at him in the street. My job was done.
The moral of the story is, at any time of the year - but especially during the summer - be a bit more mindful of your wandering eye and shouting at strangers and your girlfriend won’t want to beat you round the head with your flip-flops.
