Romania: Just because I'm a "girl"

2023-08-19 08:44:00, Blog CNA

Student and journalist Delia Dascalu

"Your place is in the kitchen!", "It's your own fault, why are you wearing these clothes!", "Shouldn't you be a part of OnlyFans?" – these are clichés that I have come across more often in the last five years. They started when I was 14 years old, at that age I became aware of them. But actually they had started long before, since I was a child. Over time the expressions were transformed and turned into real hate messages. They became threatening and I became a sex object two months ago, when I published an article in the Romanian press about how "friendly" Constanta on the Black Sea was to foreign tourists.

If I had been a boy, this wave of hatred would not have been created and there would not have been incitement to violence and violence, after the published article. Maybe there would have been some negative reactions and comments, but surely this barrage would not have started against me. The article was a simple experiment in which I accurately described my journey, ostensibly as a tourist, from the train station in Constanta to the Neversea music festival on the seafront in the city centre.

Hundreds of people reacted aggressively, insulted me, insulted me, attacked me for my physical characteristics and clothes, but no one dealt with my writing, what and how I had written it. The article was finally me, not the topic I was dealing with.

In 80 percent of the 1,000 comments made on Facebook, written almost all by men, I returned to the firing board. Yes, I wrote in the article just to make it clear how a part of society reacts to the screen of a young girl, who starts the path of journalism with a social experiment.

In their comments, I am sometimes part of the scripts of pornographic films, sometimes a girl who has to talk about the happiness of having "survived without being raped", I was sent to the brothels, invited to have group sex, dehumanized and I turned into a sexual object, without an identity, without a past and especially without a future.

But I am lucky, that my friends, friends and colleagues, my family were by my side. This is very important to me, because without their support, without their encouragement and laughter I would have come out of this story completely emotionally destroyed.

The happiness of young women who learn from computers

Another reason why the comments didn't throw me off balance has to do with the fact that I'm used to them. Since the age of eight I have had access to the Internet and social networks. I have had unlimited freedom on the internet. Along with freedom came sexist expressions, but at the time I didn't know they had that name, and they were harassment. I remembered that they were quite normal.

At the age of 13 I started playing multiplayer with foreign players. When you're a girl on the Internet, you know from the start that someone will come out who will remind you that you're a girl, no matter what you do online.

I've often been told "I'd rather make a sandwich in the kitchen, where I belong, than play video games with others". There have been worse expressions. So I am no longer impressed by sexist comments and hostile to women, I don't hear or see them anymore. But is that okay?

When I was little, unknown men sent me embarrassing pictures, wrote to me privately and asked me to "find friends". I didn't reply, but I didn't even dare to ask anyone if I was doing the right thing. , or what I should have done or what answer I should have given them. When I think about it now later, it becomes clear to me that these people need to get psychiatric treatment, or they need to be punished legally.

Swearing and harassment related to the body

Catcalling: I have experienced this since I was in elementary school. No matter what I was wearing, shorts or long jackets and tracksuits, the question was the same: "What are you hiding under these clothes, cat?"

When I was a child I was afraid. Later I began to react to car horns and other forms of harassment. Once I realized that it was not my fault and my clothes, it was their fault and what they had in their heads.

When I answered them, the threats with wood began: "Hey, you want wood? You want wood and you don't know where to get it! It's your own fault! In a way, it was my fault again.

When I was 12 years old, something bad happened to me. I was waiting at ten o'clock in the morning on a street corner for a classmate to come and make the way to school together, when a car stopped near me, the driver rolled down the window and asked me "Where's the doctor?"

"Which doctor?" I asked him. And he took off his pants and underwear and showed me his private part. I screamed and ran to my mom. She took me around the neighborhood to identify the car. My mom thought I should if it had been someone young from our neighborhood.

We couldn't find the car or the person, and when they told me to go to the police I backed off. I was ashamed, and it was my own fault, wasn't it? I cried for a week straight. At that age I didn't want to know what a man's private part looked like, much less in that kind of way.

I was often touched, whistled at or patted on the back, on a sunny day, in crowded places. When I grew up, I started to defend myself, I started to go after young men and men and ask them why they do this or that. Almost everyone took the run.

Like my work, there are probably hundreds and thousands of women and girls in Romania who have such experiences every day. Those "less fortunate" are raped, beaten and even killed. They are put in the prison of the rapists, or they do not know their rights, or they are afraid.

However, it is still "shameful" to talk about such things in our society.

I would like all women to speak openly about the attacks and harassment they experience. And talk openly about what makes them feel bad, and not feel guilty. We live in the 21st century and it's no longer "shameful" to talk about those things that happen to us, supposedly because we "ask for them ourselves"./ dw