'Asking for it'

"We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: you can have ambition but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

One of my favourite blogs is by a girl called Michelle Monroe, she often does 'Book club' posts and posts the books she's currently reading. In one of her posts she talked about this book and the importance of reading up on things like this. Now I'm quite dubious about books like this and the same with films, if I think something is going to haunt me or play on my mind in a negative way I can't motivate myself to read/watch it. However, I think it is the world that has moulded us this way and it has to stop. We have to be more open minded and become comfortable with talking about subjects that make us uncomfortable. This book for instance, needs to be read again and again by women and men, by young girls and boys, by everyone. At first it seems like a book about a spoilt brat, the book is written to make you feel inclined to perceive this young girl as a rich, annoying bitch. It is so cleverly done that by the end you feel as an audience to this book just as guilty as the characters that you grow to hate. The ending to this book was kept true to reality and it absolutely infuriated me.

The book is told from the perspective of Emma O'Donovan, an eighteen-year-old girl living in a small town in Ireland. In the beginning of the book she is going about her day to day life, think a young Regina George, she is the leader of her friendship group, she attracts a lot of male attention and at first you believe she loves it, basks in it even. But gradually you come to realise that she is actually a very miserable young girl that craves this attention, her mother has brought her up to believe that outer beauty is an important asset to have, her father has spoilt her but you also notice that he treats her mother with very little respect. In my opinion, she is brought up to believe that men have the upper hand and that all she has to offer in this world are her looks. Now this book took me a couple of months to read because I kept putting it down as I get very irritated by bitchy, nasty girls and to me this character seemed just that, however the more I went back to it, the quicker I began to read it.

Emma goes to a house party one evening with her friends and gets very drunk, she starts flirting with guys and one offers her drugs or rather seduces her and then puts the drug into her mouth, she then completely loses control of herself and ends up unconscious outside of her house. She is woken by her hysterical parents who rather than asking how she has got into this state, are more concerned with getting her inside and getting her covered up, being mortified that the neighbours might see them any less than perfect. As the book continues it becomes apparent that Emma was raped at the party by not just one but a couple of guys who not only did this but took hundreds of explicit pictures of her and uploaded them to social media, she is then bullied for months, the case goes viral, she doesn't attend school, she loses her friends and her family life falls apart. The girl you initially hated becomes the girl that breaks your heart. As a reader you feel as though you are suffering the brutality the victim is exposed to and it induces absolute rage. I felt furious as a reader that as this girl was young, popular and beautiful that she was immediately considered a 'slut' and that she was to blame. 

I would love to say how this book ends but I want people to read it but what I will say is that it is absolutely not the ending you are so hopeful for. I want more people to read this book because rape culture absolutely needs to be eradicated. I am the oldest of four sisters and I want nothing more than for my sisters to grow up in a world where they feel comfortable in themselves, in their bodies, that they realise that having good qualities on the inside are much more important than anything you show on the outside, that they can grow up in a world where they see the opposite sex as equals and are treated with the same respect and that they never have to fear that decisions regarding their bodies will be made for them. 

If you think I'm just on a "feminist rant" then have a look at the statistics: 

• Approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped in England and Wales alone every year; that's roughly 11 rapes (of adults alone) every hour. These figures include assaults by penetration and attempts. 
• Nearly half a million adults are sexually assaulted in England and Wales each year

• 1 in 5 women aged 16 - 59 has experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 16
• Only around 15% of those who experience sexual violence choose to report to the police
• Approximately 90% of those who are raped know the perpetrator prior to the offence

I don't feel that we are living in an equal world, I feel like I far too often hear girls being degraded and spoken about in a vulgar manner. Not only with guys bragging about sex and talking about the women they have had sex with in an insulting way but also with girls naming other girls 'sluts' and 'slags' and other offensive names regarding their body or choices. Something that majorly upset me about this book was the Afterword by the author Louise O'Neill she talks about her research for the book and how so many of her friends had opened up to her about a time when something similar had happened to them but they were too afraid to report it because they felt they were somewhat to blame. These women had SHAME, how do we live in a world where a woman feels more ashamed of themselves for being forced into a sexual act than a man does for inflicting this? 

"We need to talk about rape. We need to talk about consent. We need to talk about victim-blaming and slut-shaming and the double standards we place upon our young men and women. We need to talk and talk and talk until the Emmas of this world feel supported and understood. Until they feel like they are believed." - (Louise O'Neill)