The Polite Victim: How Millennial Women Came of Age in a Culture of Misogyny and Subservience

by NoSorry Parent Lisa

(Trigger Warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault.)

Young women coming of age around the turn of the twenty-first century entered the world to a very clear set of messages governing our perception of ideal femininity. From Paris Hilton’s whimsically soft and breathy whisper as she moved sultorily in skin tight miniskirts, midriff on display, to Britney Spears’ becoming the dream of young boys everywhere as she sold sex in both fashion and musical lyric alike. Always happy, always flirty, and always fun. 

Young millennial women were taught both how to look, and also, how to be looked at. Those lingering gazes? We accepted them. Those lurid comments? We awkwardly ignored them. Those unasked for touches? We pretended them away, side stepping slowly and cautiously out of reach, a smile plastered across our faces. Those overtly aggressive advances? We politely declined, at best. But many of us froze in our tracks instead, unsure of what to do, knowing that our refusal might make for either an awkward or a potentially downright dangerous situation.

As young adults, our society taught us how to behave. On our radios as we crawled into bed for the night, Howard Stern instructed us unequivocally that women existed to be objectified, to be joked about, and to be the objects of the male gaze and of male criticism and of male judgement and of male jokes. It was okay in 2005 for Stern to brazenly tell a visibly uncomfortable Emma Bunton (“Baby Spice”) that “You’ve got a hot little body. I can see you in girl-on-girl action, I can see you with two guys. I could see you doing a lot of things,” and then letting her know that her outfit is “turning me on a little bit.” Did she ask for this? No. Could she have told him to stop? Not without consequence. 

President Donald Trump himself played heavily into the misogynistic banter rampant around the turn of the century. When asked about Lindsay Lohan in 2004, he observed, after commenting on the freckles on her chest, that “She’s probably deeply troubled and therefore great in bed. How come the deeply troubled women - deeply, deeply troubled - they’re always the best in bed?” Lohan was freshly eighteen-years old at the time of these remarks. 

Even when turning on presumably innocent television shows geared towards young people, we were inadvertently subjected to episode after episode of teenage girls and young women being objectified by the main male characters. Rampant in shows like “Boy Meets World,” “Saved By the Bell,” and “Two and a Half Men,” males were the active participants, while females functioned over and over again as the passive objects of the male gaze and action. They certainly dazzled as they walked past the boys with their sexy outfits and sleek hairstyles, but these female characters were lucky if they got so much as a name, much less any kind of role longer than a single episode as the latest fleeting object of male desire! Now imagine being a young, impressionable girl absorbing the latest social messaging being spewed at her through her television. What do you think the lesson for her is?

 So many of our leaders - cultural, economic, and political - all treated women with such blatant disrespect, and did it so ubiquitously, that young, impressionable women could hardly help but internalize the messaging. How do you become a cool girl? You allow for the disrespect! How do you become a desirable girl? You dress for the male gaze! How do you become a well-liked girl? You shut your mouth and smile sweetly, no matter what somebody is saying about, or doing to you. And guess what? The truth is, being a polite, sexy, quiet, cool girl is not a victimless state of being. We as young women were rarely equipped with the words to speak our minds. We were not trained on how to stand up for ourselves in uncomfortable situations. We were not granted the confidence to defend our bodies or our rights. And we were the reapers of the consequences.

Ask me how many of my female friends escaped their teenage years and twenties without being the victim of some type of sexual assault, and I could give you an answer by holding up no more than one hand’s worth of fingers.  Women between the ages of 16 and 24 are four times more likely to be raped as compared with the rate for all women (U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2013), and as of today, nearly 30% of women have been subjected to…rape” (World Health Organization, 2025). This statistic doesn’t take into account the unmeasurable incidents of unwanted hands on the female body, the unasked for kiss, the disturbing full-body press in a crowded public space, the unsolicited indecent exposure directed their way, or the grossly inappropriate comments they are forced to overhear. Women face sexual exploitation and sexual boundary crossing at different levels of severity all the time, and it is not insignificant that the women most likely to experience assault are at the early blooms of their adult lives.

A society that trains its young women to be a demurely polite, passive recipient is a society that does not care for the welfare of its young women. Being untrained in how to defend oneself is precisely how so many of the women I know, myself included, found themselves being assaulted. Once, when I was on a public bus as a twenty-one year old, I leaned my head against my seat and began to take a nap. Soon after I began to doze off, I felt a hand on my thigh. I would like to say I immediately yelled “Stop! Get away! Move somewhere else!” But I didn’t. I played dead while a complete stranger put his hand up my skirt and under my underwear. When I saw he was not going to stop, I pretended to wake up and told him quietly and politely, “No,” moved my legs away, and immediately pretended to fall back asleep so I wouldn't have to see this stranger’s reaction. I didn’t know what to do. I was intensely uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to make a scene. You had better believe that within the space of a minute, his hand was right back up under my skirt, and it took another person on the bus telling the man to stop for him to get up and take his exit at the next stop. In the grand debate of fight or flight in the heat of a terrifying situation, my body chose to freeze. I had no training, no backbone, no understanding of how I could react in any other way. I was taught only to be polite, and so I was as polite as I could be, given that I was being sexually assaulted. 

Would it not have been wonderful if we, as young women at the turn of the century, had been taught a different message? Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if some of our role models, themselves young women, had been given the knowhow to stand up for themselves and set a standard for young women everywhere? We were all trapped in this system of misogyny together, though, and we had no clear way out. Our female role models themselves smiled politely and uncomfortably as late night talk show hosts, comedians, and politicians commented on their bodies just as much as the rest of us did in our own personal lives.

I can tell you this, though: the rate of sexual violence begins to drop off at around age 25, the time when women become more established in their lives and identities. They are less susceptible to outside messaging, and they have come to increasingly trust their own instincts and intuition. They begin to care less about what people think about them, and therefore are at the beginning of that glorious time in life where they don’t feel like they have to say sorry for every little thing, they can stand up for themselves unapologetically, and they move through the world with increased confidence.

I wish the younger me had known that I could do this. I wish the younger me had known that I did not unreservedly owe people politeness, or deference, or passivity. I wish the younger me had been told over and over and over again that it is okay to say no. That it is okay to make other people uncomfortable, because in doing so, I am choosing myself. Our culture of obsequiousness is not victimless. We sacrifice ourselves as victims in order to preserve the peace of others, and it is not okay. We millennial women have traversed these difficult years and have learned some hard lessons. 

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could pass down our years of knowledge and wisdom to the young women coming up into the world after us? I would tell the young women of today that they should choose themselves, every time, no matter how disappointed or uncomfortable that might make the people around them. That they are worth the discomfort of others. I would tell them that their worth does not lie in the number of fire emoji comments on their social media posts, or in the number of honks and hoots they rack up as they walk down a street, and to battle so hard against the impulse to let these external messages dictate how they feel about themselves. I would tell them that “No” is one of the most powerful and useful words in our entire language, that it serves to protect and defend our own bodies and minds. And I would tell them that the word “No,” when used to enforce their own boundaries, never, ever needs to be preceded by a “Sorry,” nor punctuated by a “Thank you.” 

Just, No.