If You Like a Guy, Tell Him. Only Then Will Women Be Free.
Sadie Hawkins Day — traditionally celebrated on Nov. 15 — was the one day a year when it was the girls who pursued the boys, instead of the other way around. It was big back then, if less so now.
I always envied the girls who seemed so peaceful waiting for boys to talk to them; I wasn’t of that tribe. My mother used to shake her head and say, “Just let them come to you,” but I was no good at biding my time. In sixth grade, I asked a boy I liked if he liked me; in freshman year of college, I asked a man I was attracted to if he felt the same. In each case, I felt that something was wrong with me for having brought up the topic. I was too much like a guy, I thought. But even then, I was asking them about their desires, not speaking my own.
As I got older, I developed other methods for getting a man to make the first move: bumping into him as we walked together, shivering with unfelt cold, standing fetchingly on steps that would bring me to his eye level — all so he’d be overtaken with desire and, for God’s sake, kiss me. So much work, this active passivity — but I never considered kissing any of them first. After all, what worse insult can a man give a woman than “She wanted it,” a phrase that carries its own sneer.
So the reason that afternoon is still so bright in my memory, why I can still feel the metal chain of the swing in my hand, see Matthew’s smile: Sadie Hawkins was a day of respite from pretending not to want, or from distorting my want into a hint.
Until it is no big deal for a woman to say, “I want,” as well as “I don’t want” — until heterosexual women no longer feel the need to wait for the man to propose or to invite us to the prom or to kiss us on a beautiful summer evening when we want to kiss — we leave ourselves at the mercy of men’s desires.
Sadie Hawkins should be any and every day we choose.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opin ... n-out.html