When Her Body Became Their Playground
Mini Essay on sexual entitlement, agency, and what we teach boys and men.
EuHarra Brown | Brown Expressions
For 50 men to sit in a group chat and speak about a woman as if she were a pocket pussy is vile.
But the part that keeps sitting with me is this:
Where did we go wrong?
Because these men didn’t suddenly become like this once they came of age.
This kind of thinking has a beginning.
Did it start on the playground?
When we told little girls that if a boy hits her or pulls her hair, it means he likes her.
When harm is packaged as affection, what are we teaching children about the difference between desire and entitlement?
We’ve been normalizing harm against women since their youth.
We tell teenage girls to protect their sexual boundaries, while the boys around them are often being taught directly or indirectly how to pursue, pressure, manipulate, and obtain access to those very boundaries.
What is a woman to do?
If she uses her sexuality, she’s a whore.
If she withholds it, she’s a prude.
If she waits until marriage and doesn’t do it enough, she’s still the problem.
If it’s taken from her, she’s still asked what she did to contribute to it.
We’re asking women to bear the weight of sexual morality and responsibility while demanding so little sexual responsibility from men.
So what is all of this actually about?
It’s about why society and the people within it has become so comfortable with men lacking sexual responsibility, restraint, and respect for women’s agency.
These men didn’t invent this thinking in adulthood.
It can begin much earlier: in boyhood, in the messages boys receive about women, sex, pornography, conquest, masculinity, and the pressure to prove themselves through sexual experience.
The point isn’t to find one thing and declare it the cause.
The point is to ask what we have collectively normalized.
Because this isn’t simply about sex.
It’s about how easily a woman can become reduced to the body parts that provide someone else with pleasure.
It’s about seeing her vagina as something that belongs to someone else rather than something she owns and has sole agency over.
The very thing that allows human life to continue becomes the thing society teaches women to be ashamed of, responsible for, protective of, and punished over.
Rape isn’t simply sex without a woman’s consent. It’s theft at the highest level, with the lowest penalty and the full absence of penitence.
~ Brown Expressions
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