Winning Essays

Beginning at an alarmingly young age, girls are sexualized and forced to conform to society’s ideals. Far too early on in our lives, women become painfully aware of their bodies as objects for male consumption and pleasure, not as a medium for self expression and empowerment. The suppression of female expression and constant objectification is the greatest challenge facing girls and women. Furthermore, belief that women's voices are meant to be silenced sets the societal norm that teaches girls from a very young age that they are not valued as individuals and must be submissive in order to be respected. What makes this such a destructive standard is that it seeps its way into all aspects of the growth of girls, to young women, and into adulthood.

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“Yeah, but were you asking for it?”

These are the words that shattered for me the illusory America I once believed in: the place where if I did nothing wrong, if I told the truth, I would be safe. This is the question that haunts every rape survivor, every survivor of sexual harassment, every woman who takes the bus home late at night and has to pretend to herself that she doesn’t see the predatory grin of the man who chooses, of all the empty seats, the one right behind her. If she doesn’t pretend, if she recognizes the smile for what it is, she has been taught to wonder,

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I gazed at her from afar. Her eyes dreamy, her mind floating in her own world. I watched her fingers dancing triumphantly to different keys. The tranquil and tingling music added to her mystery. There was almost an invisible veil closing around her, separating her from me and the rest of the world. I longed to comprehend the stories she conveyed in the music. I stayed there, never advancing for fear of breaking the perfect image.

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The soccer field was in a criss-cross solemn, watching the five-star flag rose slowly to the sky. Arrays of white, a patchwork of discipline and silence. One thousand faces in one direction, a uniform focus.

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