All you women are looking very sexy today

We were having a quiet cup of tea in our hotel foyer with a couple of friends after another friend’s birthday party.  There had been a rugby match that afternoon and Scotland had won, so a certain amount of drunken revelry was expected and acceptable, however the place was remarkably peaceful, until we were approached by a well dressed young man who had lost his group of friends and wanted to substitute us as an audience for his slightly tipsy talk.  The guys engaged him in some unremarkable conversation about the rugby until he turned on me and began to shower me with unwelcome compliments.  It seems I was a ‘gift’ and ‘unexpected treasure’ that was turned out just to turn him on.  


There was no foul language, nothing explicit, but a most unwelcome leer and a lurch towards me.  I’m not often out late at night these days and I am also rather elderly, so my skills in humouring a drunk without encouraging his unwelcome advances are not as well honed as they once were.  The Professor, bless him, stepped in and deflected the whole thing with humour.
 
What shocks me about the encounter was how I immediately went through the mental checklist every woman asks herself when encountering everyday sexism:
 
Am I wearing lipstick or rouge? No.
Is my neckline too revealing? No.
Am I wearing high heels? No
Have I been drinking? No
Am I dressed as though I am ‘up for it’?  Well I was wearing a slightly clingy ankle length evening dress…oh dear, should have plumped for a safer pair of trousers? Were the flat shoes and the thick tights not sufficiently demure?
 
It reminded me of a cardboard placard penned by a homeless man I’d seen earlier in the day, ‘All you women are looking very sexy today’.  Perhaps it works for him with women who feel flattered, or men who find that amusing, but It made me sad to think that was how he feels he has to communicate with us to win us over.
 
So here is my message for any men out there who are sucked into this misogynistic, patriarchal view of women and who wittingly or unwittingly maintain it:
 
I am not here to decorate your world
 
I am not here to flatter your vanity

I am comfortable being an older woman
 
I dress to look nice, not to signal to you that I want sex
 
If you want to treat me nice, treat me like a fellow human being, don’t appraise me or despise me as a sex object