Burning Beneath

The other day, I was sitting at the Windsor Sportsmen’s Club, laughing with a friend while a women’s baseball league was having its banquet nearby. Women of every kind, from different walks of life, in an atmosphere that felt welcoming and inclusive.

One young woman caught my attention. She was wearing what looked like a long crocheted jacket or top, very short, high on her thighs, and from where I was sitting I couldn’t really see anything underneath it.

I turned to my friend and said something along the lines of, “With everything happening in the world, wouldn’t dressing like that be asking for trouble?”

And almost as soon as the words left my mouth, they hit me.

Asking for trouble.

Where did that come from?

I knew exactly where.

It came from years of cultural conditioning. From all the warnings girls hear growing up.

Cover yourself.
Be polite.
Don’t go with the wrong crowd.
Don’t walk alone.
Don’t stay out too late.
Don’t dress “that way.”
Don’t put yourself in dangerous situations.

And beneath all of those warnings is an uglier message.

If something happens to you, maybe you brought it on yourself.

The moment I recognized that thought in myself, I was ashamed of it.

Because think about what we are actually saying.

A woman goes to a party. Maybe she wants to drink, dance, flirt, be adventurous or simply have fun. If she walks into the wrong house, is assaulted, and someone says, “Well, she should have known better,” what are we really saying?

That men hurting women is an expected part of life, and women are responsible for successfully avoiding them?

Imagine applying that logic anywhere else.

If I finish work late and walk through a dark parking lot to reach my car, have I “put myself in danger”? If someone mugs me, assaults me or attacks me, does that somehow make it partly my fault because I should have known a dark parking lot could be dangerous?

Of course not.

The responsibility belongs to the person who chose to harm another human being.

What disturbed me even more was how naturally that sentence came out of my mouth. My friend, an older woman herself, someone who spent years confronting injustice and breaking barriers while working in policing, didn’t immediately question it either.

That is how deep some ideas go.

Sometimes we imagine “brainwashing” as something dramatic. But often it lives inside tiny sentences we have repeated for decades without ever stopping to examine them.

I have lived between two worlds.

I was born into a traditional Middle Eastern culture where gender roles could be extremely explicit. In some households, even a young boy could suddenly become “the man of the house” whenever the father was absent.

Then I came to Canada.

And one thing that continues to surprise me is how many of the same ideas still exist here. They may be expressed differently, sometimes more subtly, but women and girls are still constantly told to manage men’s behaviour by changing their own.

Watch what you wear.
Watch where you go.
Watch who you trust.
Watch your drink.
Watch the time.
Watch how friendly you are.
Watch how sexual you appear.

Women spend enormous amounts of energy learning how not to become victims.

Maybe we should spend far more energy teaching boys and men not to create victims.

Clothing is not consent.

Flirting is not consent.

Going to someone’s house is not consent.

Drinking is not consent.

Being sexually confident is not consent.

Being beautiful is not consent.

Being reckless, adventurous, naive, young, trusting, or even making a terrible decision is still not consent.

Sexual violence can leave trauma that follows a person for years and can affect relationships, families and generations. That is exactly why our focus should be on preventing the violence itself, supporting survivors properly, and holding perpetrators accountable, not searching the victim’s behaviour for something we can blame.

So yes, I am ashamed that I said, “Isn’t she asking for trouble?”

But I am also glad that I heard myself say it.

Because recognizing our conditioning is how we begin dismantling it.

I was wrong.

That young woman was not asking for anything.

She was wearing clothes.

That is all.

Whatever someone wears, wherever they go, however attractive they are, whatever choices they make with their own body, nobody receives automatic permission to touch them.

And maybe the lesson we should have been teaching all along is much simpler than all those rules we gave girls.

Keep your hands to yourself. Respect boundaries. Consent must be given. And if it isn’t given, stop.

That responsibility belongs to the person doing the touching.

Every single time.