Regardless of how you’ve personally experienced it as a woman, rape culture is a complex, multi-faceted issue that we’re all doing our best to understand. Which is why it’s so impressive that one 14-year-old girl was so perfectly able to articulate its nuances in a seriously on-point spoken word piece.
Canadian student Kayley Dixon performed the earth-shattering three-minute spoken word piece this week, and managed to touch on everything from what it’s like to grow up under leering gazes from men to how women tend to take responsibility for their assault, rather than assigning blame to the offender.
“We were 13 years old when we would walk down the street and had men look from our feet to our face, and we'd listen as they completely replaced our identity from human to object,” she says in A Touch of Sexual Assault.
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The moving video of her performance has garnered thousands of likes and shares on social media, not to mention an outpouring of support from women of all ages.
If you only take away one thing from Dixon’s words, let it be this: It’s time we started talking about our shared experiences and bringing them out of that shame-tinged gray area.
Macaela MacKenzie is a journalist who writes about women and power. She covers women’s equality through the lenses of sports, wellness, and the gender gap across industries and is the author of MONEY, POWER, RESPECT: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism. Mac was most recently a Senior Editor at Glamour where she directed all health and wellness coverage. Her work has appeared in Elle, Glamour, SELF, Bustle, Marie Claire, Allure, Women's Health, and Forbes among other publications.
