Ed. note: this speech was delivered at our Day of the Girl celebration in New York City on October 11, 2012. Ava Nadel hails from Brooklyn, NY, and writes with Girls Write Now.
by Ava Nadel
There are a multitude of things that really tick me off about what men say. The first one stems from my participation on my school’s cross country team. Every other day we have practice in Battery Park, a few blocks away from Millennium High School. We meet in the lobby and my coach has the team carry each other’s bags in shifts while everyone else runs to the park. But she does it based on your grade or whether or not you are a veteran runner.
One day it was the seniors’ turn to carry the bags up to the park. One of our freshman boys brings his scooter to school with him because he has a long commute. Seeing as he had not given anyone his stuff yet, my coach told him to give his belongings to one of the seniors, and he said, “No woman is strong enough to carry my stuff.” I looked at him in disbelief, unable to fathom what he had just said, and so I grabbed that damn scooter from him. When we returned to the park, I plopped the scooter down in front of him and said, “Gosh, I really don’t think I can carry this scooter anymore because I’m a woman.” He gave me a cold look and the next week, he came up to me and said, “I think we’re equal now.”
On a more serious note, disrespect is an issue that woman encounter daily. Directly across the street from my brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn is what used to be the parking lot for the YMCA. When I was in my freshman year of high school, they began plans to turn the parking lot into an outdoor pool. Because the construction would take a long time and the fact that there would be a serious amount of noise pollution, the Y granted everyone on my block free membership for the duration of the project. I loved this idea. I started taking kickboxing, yoga, and yes, even Zumba.
But with all this fun came a few struggles. Every morning I had the same routine: I would get up, eat breakfast, get dressed, and leave. Shutting the door behind me, I looked up and saw the construction workers sitting on the curb across the street. I continued walking down the steps and landed on the sidewalk, beginning my daily walk to the train station. I would hear whistles—plenty of whistles—and they would stare at me, gawking rather. And they would be there, in the same place, hanging out and smoking cigarettes, when I would come home in the afternoon. The same antics would begin again. This continued, right until the end of this past summer. Soon I realized it was not just me. I knew they did it to other women too. They even did it to my neighbor. She’s 12.
Before that, I always felt like the target. I did live directly across the street from the construction site. Sometimes I thought it was only me because I look Hispanic to most people. And slowly, as I grew, as more men cat-called me, honked, whistled, you name it, I knew this wasn’t the case. One night, I was walking to East Houston street to take the F train because I had tutoring nearby. Daylight Savings Time had ended a few weeks ago and it was only five pm but it was getting pretty dark out. I started walking at a brisk pace and then one man said to me, “God bless you, beautiful,” and then another mumbled something to me, another whistled, and there were at least two other guys after that.
Every time some guy says something to me on the street, I always feel the urge to snap back at them, curse at them, or even throw something at them, like my Advanced Biology textbook. Because that’s all they want really, is for us to respond and for us to know that they notice us. I started to take that into account and accept that being cat-called by men is a regular thing, but that still doesn’t make it okay. I would ask my mom why men who were old enough to be my father, if not older than that, would say such provocative things to me and sometimes even my friends. She would say, “Ava, you could go out in Ugg boots and an oversized t-shirt and it wouldn’t change anything.”
That is what gives me support. Knowing that thousands of woman in the world feel objectified by men and that we are all striving to end this struggle gives me support. There are plenty of things that hold women down in today’s society, and there are plenty of people out in the world who, like the men who work across the street from your own house, call us names and pick on us and try and make us feel like crap without ever getting the chance to know the real us and what the real struggle is. This is why we have each other—mothers, sisters, friends, and support systems. This is why we have the Day of the Girl, and Girls Write Now—the reason I am here today – to give us strength and remind us that we are all strong and, most of all, unstoppable. Thank you.