Are those real?

Hello again! I thought today I'd take this space to speak about a personal experience I've had re: my body. Originally I planned to share multiple on this one post, but ultimately I decided to space them out. So! Be on the lookout for more of these personal posts.

Per the title, I can see what you might think this will be about... but I bet you thought wrong! It's important to highlight how we all deserve our personal spaces (and how we deserve to not have those personal spaces invaded) and how we deserve to be known and talked about for more than our bodies. So here we go!

This post will be dedicated to an event that totally shouldn't have happened (it took place at work!) If you didn't already know, I used to tour/work in the music industry. I did 4 Warped Tours. I always end up telling this story as a joke, because it's just bizarre to me, but I also think it was highly invasive and disrespectful:

If you've ever been to a Warped Tour show, or any festival at all, you know that its loud all. the. time. Bands play nonstop plus whatever general noise might be around. So, basically, one day on Warped, my tent spot was like, perfectly triangulated between 3 stages. As a result it was pretty deafening.

I'm just doing my thing, selling shirts, minding my own business, listening to Attila play behind me (why is it always Attila?), when this woman walks up to the tent. I would assume that if you come up to a merch tent that you want to... buy some merch? No? Ok, just me, I guess. Anyway, this chick comes up to me and says something that I can't hear. I mean, there's a couple feet of tent in between us. There's music blaring. She's speaking softly. She repeats but I still don't hear. She gestures for me to lean forward to hear and I oblige, thinking she's going to ask about shirt sizes or what all we have, when she GRABS MY BOOBS. She grabs my boobs and says in my ear "How big are those?"

I'm mortified. Like, truly mortified. On top of that, I'm so confused. Why would anyone come up to me while I'm working and interact with me in that way?

I think that the way women are viewed as sexual objects in our society makes it easy to feel like you know someone, or that you're entitled to speak about their body. Doesn't make it right. Typing this out on the blog now, it makes me feel way different than when I tell it as a joke to my other industry friends. And that's part of the problem, isn't it? To suppress whatever has happened to us, whatever has violated us, we try to make light of it and defend by way of saying that we understand their reasoning or actions.

I brushed it off because I didn't want to come off as being too serious or standoffish, but I would never in a million years invite anyone to address me entirely by my body. It is dehumanizing and disrespectful. I could probably go on for a million years about how this makes me feel, with no resolution.

So, I'll just leave it at this: I deserve to be talked to professionally when I'm in professional situations, and so do you. I deserve respect regardless of my body, and so do you. We must do better to be aware and active in standing up for ourselves in situations like this.

xoxo,

Victoria