E-Portfolio #1- Meme

The aforementioned is a select one of the countless memes that I discovered as a result of a quick Google search on sexual harassment. While some memes are designated to bring awareness to a certain subject, the most common purpose of a meme is to make people laugh. This meme is guaranteed to grab the attention of a wide variety of individuals, ranging from young children to full-grown adults. By comparing this controversial subject to a Pokémon game, a broad audience made up of individuals of varying ages and opinions is pulled in. Pokémon games are extremely popular and are becoming increasingly more popular by the day. If you have never played a Pokémon game, allow me to give a short explanation of the underlying meaning of this meme. In any Pokémon game, when another Pokémon trainer detects your presence, an exclamation mark pops up above their head, and you have no choice but to participate in a battle. Even if your party Pokémon are drained of health, exhausted of energy, and are lacking spirit, when spotted by a Pokémon trainer, you are forced to battle, regardless of condition. This meme compares a Pokémon trainer’s persistence to battle and the lack of any possibility of escape to being sexually harassed and the lack of consent involved. When “The Meme Center” published the meme illustrated above, they were attempting to be comical while additionally casting a light on how utterly powerless and out of control you feel when being sexually harassed. While navigating through social media sites to select a meme that deals with this touchy subject, I discovered SO many memes that treat sexual harassment entirely as a joke. In my opinion, sexual harassment is by no means a laughing matter. Sexual harassment is a very serious topic that is quite often normalized. The fact that there are THOUSANDS of memes on sexual harassment (if not even more) constantly circulating through a multitude of social media platforms proves this. Searching through this kind of media (memes) sheds light on how often sexual harassment and assault are normalized in society.

I want to address that men also regularly experience sexual harassment of varying intensities, but because I am currently enrolled in a Women’s Gender Studies class, throughout this semester I will be focusing specifically on women who experience sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is a normalized phenomenon, especially among young women of this generation. So many women (and men for that matter) are sexually harassed daily in a variety of different settings. Sexual harassment and assault can occur in a multitude of social settings such as the workplace, school, church, the store, or even in your own home. Quite often, young women make sense of and cope with the pervasive violence in their lives by framing it as routine, like it is no big deal. Women are often taught that we should take this inappropriate attention as a compliment, laugh it off, or to just ignore it in general. Women are taught from an adolescent age that we should dress in more wholesome clothing if we want to avoid being sexually harassed. Society has engraved it in our heads from a young age that men cannot control themselves, so we must cover-up. This is even the case with elementary school dress codes. They teach us when we are six years old that we must cover our shoulders so that we do not distract the boys. In my opinion, it seems a bit messed up that we are in a way teaching our boys and girls that sexual harassment is normal at such a young age? By normalizing sexual harassment in society are we essentially saying that kind of inappropriate behavior is okay? Is there not a way that we can ensure our daughters are aware of the dangers of the world without essentially teaching them that if they are sexually harassed, it is their fault?

Sexual harassment ranges in levels of severity.  Sexual harassment can rapidly escalate from being catcalled/whistled at to receiving twenty texts in a row begging for nudes, to having someone physically putting their hands on you, and can escalate to even more extreme circumstances. It has been proven in numerous scenarios that catcalling can quickly escalate into sexual assault and other intense forms of violence. While these more extreme circumstances are not guaranteed to occur, if you are being sexually harassed you are at an extremely high risk of being sexually assaulted, physically abused, or even raped. I do not know a single female who has not endured sexual harassment, assault, or even worse.