All The Things I've Never Said Before - Part 6

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Because I am a girl I know that at the age of 12 I would have been told that if boys pulled the girls hair or poked us with pencils that it would mean that they liked us, but we never really did like it that much. And by the age of 13 we would walk down the street and these bad men would look at us from our feet to our face. So we will have to listen as they completely replace our identity from human to an object. They would say very cringeworthy things to us that make us want to run so badly but always somehow wind up frozen in place, so we continued to walk at a fast pace. Turning onto whatever sidewalk was the absolute closest to us just so we had the chance to get away even if it never did lead us in the right direction. Because mom always said, "if you see a strange man following you make your way to the other side of the street and remember, if they ever grab you, scream." This had to be something we as girls had to learn at the age of 13 because we were just too young to understand. We were spanked by the boys at our school, but we knew that it was cool because it only meant that we had nice bodies. So when it came time to rate our bodies from 1-10 we knew that if you were a ten, you would learn to spend the rest of your days hearing the whistles, purring, and the word "damn girl". Because let's be real, if you were in the category of a damn girl then that only meant one thing: you weren't actually a damn girl at all you were just a toy labeled 'do whatever you want to me,' even when I had never agreed. So here we are, forced to watch what we wear because if there was too much shoulder then that meant we had to change our clothes because it was too much of a distraction for the boys in the class. So really the only thing we seemed to be learning were the tips and tricks to tie up our shirt so that it never hangs too low, because it would prove to the guys that we wanted it. Wearing shorts, tank tops and ripped up jeans meant that we were asking for it. When we finally turned 16, we screamed because the men that followed us down the street and onto the sidewalk had finally caught up to us. We quietly said, 'please don't touch us there'. We know that we are asking for it by the high heels we are wearing but we know now that we were just some of the 68% of victims that will never dare to tell a soul. So I will go home feeling sick and take a few showers in hopes that we will finally get some sleep. And we pray that in the morning we can pick out the outfit that is the most discreet because all we ever wanted was to make sure that no other man from that sidewalk will ever look at us to just want a taste. We as girls want to make sure that we are covered up as much as possible so that our identities will never be replaced with what you would call walking candy. We will sit at the back of the class where nobody can ask how our weekend was because we know as girls that if they ask, we might just burst into tears with no clue what to do. So it is here where we will continue to live in fear. We will continue to run as quickly as possible toward home so that we never see the same men again that wait for us to be alone. You see now, they went from little boys poking us to big men provoking us. They went from these little boys pulling our ponytails to watching the trail of tears fall down our pillow, and now every night we cry ourselves to sleep, and we'll wake up in fear because we see the man in our dreams that caught up to us on that sidewalk that night left us bare. We went from playing with our toys to becoming toys ourselves. So you see these boys will be boys, and us women will never tell