how often are you looking over your shoulder?
#YesAllWomen: Madman and misogynist Elliot Rodger shocked the Isla Vista beach community near the University of California, Santa Barbara this past weekend with a violent murder spree that he proclaimed posthumously was fueled by lifelong rejection from females. In the wake of the UC Santa Barbara murders, women began taking to Twitter to share their fears, frustration, the daily precautions that women learn to take to stay safe, and personal, heartbreaking stories of violence, abuse, harassment, and intimidation– using the hashtag #YesAllWomen, to mean that we all share these burdens.
Many men chimed in to stress the importance of men utilizing this important insight to see and think about what females go through in a male-dominated world day to day. While the needlessly contrarian hashtag #NotAllMen soon sprung up in “defense” of males and certainly plenty of trolling types entered the conversation to try to silence the confessions, women and men alike have been praising the experience as an overwhelmingly positive and eye-opening conversation about our culture.
Time magazine online reported, “Rodger’s comments inspired an online conversation Saturday around the #YesAllWomen hashtag to criticize the way society teaches men to feel entitled to women at the expense of their health, safety and, in Rodger’s case, lives.”
Here are some wonderful examples from the weekend’s impromptu forum:
#Yesallwomen Let us raise a generation of men that believes that to be kind is a million times more powerful than to harm.
— Kendra Stanton Lee (@Kendraspondence) May 25, 2014
You’re not entitled to a woman’s body. Not your wife, not your girlfriends, nor anyone else’s. #YesAllWomen
— zellie (@zellieimani) May 25, 2014
#YesAllWomen because our bodies continue to be legislated, regulated and bargained like chips at a poker table.
— A is For (@AIsForOrg) May 25, 2014
#YesAllWomen are shamed for their bodies: too fat, too thin, unattractive, too attractive, menstruating, aborting, living.
— sonia saraiya (@soniasaraiya) May 25, 2014
#notallmen practice violence against women but #YesAllWomen live with the threat of male violence. Every. Single. Day. All over the world.
— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) May 24, 2014
The leading cause of injury to American women is men. #yesallwomen pic.twitter.com/fkUADGHcbO
— Casey (@SingletrackM1nd) May 25, 2014
What would you declare with your #YesAllWomen hashtag? —Casandra Armour
