We've all heard variations of that misguided, victim-blaming adage: "If you didn't do X, boys wouldn't do Y." See also: "You were asking for it with that dress/those photos/etc." Put any which way, victim-blaming and slut-shaming is bullshit. And this woman's hilarious tweet shuts it all down, with the help of two very telling images:
'Boys wouldn't send weird messages if you didn't put up such slutty photos' pic.twitter.com/rNMBJTPKTc
— cat (@catttttt___) August 19, 2016
It all started when Cat, a 17-year-old student in the U.K., posted an innocuous photo of her new headphones on Snapchat, and immediately received a response from a stranger that said, "You wearing those and nothing else, that would be heaven."
“I was amused that a photo I had considered to be innocent with no kind of sexual connotations still managed to garner unwarranted comments," she told BuzzFeed. "I [was] also annoyed because it seemed that as a young woman on the internet, you really can’t escape casual sexual harassment.”
Cat's photos show that sexual harassment is prevalent no matter what women do or post on social media. “I had seen many people say that boys only message these things because of the types of photos women upload," she explained, "so [I] decided to use that as the comment above the photos in my tweet to show the irony of this.”
Cat's point clearly resonated with plenty of Twitter users. Since the tweet was posted last Friday, it has gone viral, with more than 30,000 retweets and over 50,000 Likes at the time of writing. But let's make one thing clear: Even if Cat had posted a sexy underwear photo, she still wouldn't have been "asking" for some creep to solicit her for nudes. But the fact that the unwanted comment was in response to a mere pair of headphones just underlines the absurdity of the "you were asking for it" line of thinking.