Laura Bates

I__ fifteen and I feel like girl my age are under a lot of pressure that boys are not under. I know I am smart, I know I am kind and funny, and I know that everyone around me keeps telling me that I can be whatever I want to be. I know all this but I just don__ feel that way. I always feel like if I don__ look a certain way, if boys don__ think I__ __exy_ or __ot_ then I__e failed and it doesn__ even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I__l still feel like nothing. I hate that I feel like that because it makes me seem shallow, but I know all of my friends feel like that, and even my little sister. I feel like successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won__ be. What if my boobs don__ grow, what if I don__ have the perfect body, what if my hips don__ widen and give me a little waist, if none of that happens I feel like what__ the point of doing anything because I__l just be the __at ugly girl_ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not.I wish people would think about what pressure they are putting on everyone, not just teenage girls, but even older people _ I watch my mum tear herself apart every day because her boobs are sagging and her skin is wrinkling, she feels like she is ugly even though she is amazing, but then I feel like I can__ judge because I do the same to myself. I wish the people who had real power and control the images and messages we get fed all day actually thought about what they did for once.I know the girls on page 3 are probably starving themselves. I know the girls in adverts are airbrushed. I know beauty is on the inside. But I still feel like I__ not good enough.

...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.

A slut isn__ a person, it__ in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she__ done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it__ a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and __onquests_ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.

If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.

Tired of cold callers asking to speak to the 'man in the house', now I put them on to my 6-year old son... he sings them 'Sexy and I Know It'.

Yes, for the love of God young women, come along _ learn your limits. Or, rather, know society__ limits. How dare you think you have the right to go out wearing whatever you like _ how foolish and ignorant of you to expect not to be assaulted, you brazen hussies! What do you think this is? A free country?

Just got called a slag by two guys sitting outside the University of York library. A slag for books?

This is a battle that we will win. Because women are wittier, brighter, stronger and braver than a misogynistic and patriarchal world has given us credit for.

Women who lead, read

This is not a men vs women issue. It__ about people vs prejudice.

How can I believe the people that say women have equal rights? When the worst insult a man can be called is a woman, girly, a twat, a cunt, that he needs to 'man up' and the list goes on. My gender is not an insult. I'm tired of all this shit.

When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator.

This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.

As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?".

One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.

The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.

The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up...You really need to learn to take a compliment.

The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.