Calling out #ShirtlessShamers

Our ally Lindsey of Cards Against Harassment wrote an excellent guest piece for The Daily Beast. Here are two excerpts:

“This January I started #ShirtlessShamers2016, a Twitter hashtag in which I juxtapose men’s sexist, slut-shaming social media posts about women’s bodily respectability with their own bare-chested pictures. This isn’t my first adventure in challenging misogyny through social media; you may also remember me from such other controversial positions as, “Street Harassment: Please Stop Doing It.” …

When I started using the #ShirtlessShamers2016 hashtag, I expected things to stay funny. Light. Playful. Sexism and gender-based double standards aren’t really funny, of course, but lampooning shirtless broskies who are heavy on ego and light on self-awareness has a certain silliness to it. They flex their pecs and regurgitate some casual misogyny, and we marvel, bemused, that they aren’t in on the joke.

But, as is often the case, we laugh to keep from crying.

I am about five weeks into the hashtag, with more than 100 posts (conveniently gathered here for your viewing pleasure) and the recurring themes are far from funny….

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a problem of young men being doofuses. The double standard is pervasive, and touches on the fundamental right for girls and women to be in their own bodies without being deemed provocative and inappropriate and at risk. That right matters. It matters for all women but especially for black women and girls, whose bodies are hypersexualized from very young ages. It matters for people like my sister, who has had strangers chastise her for breastfeeding her infant even as men jog half-naked nearby. It matters in how we continue to talk about street harassment as a problem related to clothing choices or other respectability proxies, no matter how many marketable white women go viral for reminding us street harassment happens to women in t-shirts and jeans.

This issue also matters for people like me who have survived sexual violence and routinely run into uninformed rape apologists and enablers who desperately want to prop up a myth that sexual violence is a problem contributed to by clothing or other victim choices. (It’s not.) It matters for people who have been bullied and shamed by their classmates and schools for the crime of developing parts unilaterally declared to be inappropriate or distracting. (They’re not.) It matters for people in the sex industry who are treated as if they shed their humanity when they shed their clothing. (They don’t.) The list goes on. Holding men and women’s bodies to a different standard as far as nudity and sexuality is concerned matters for everyone who has come to accept that no amount of fabric can fix an underlying culture problem.”