Picture this: you’re scrolling through Instagram. Everything is chill on your feed, a normal mix of dog videos and reposted TikToks when all of a sudden, the algorithm decides to pull up a grainy Reddit screenshot where some man explains why women suck and should be in the kitchen. Gasp! A blood-curdling scream cuts through the air; you’ve just fallen victim to what I like to call: jump scare sexism. The example I just gave is common enough. We all have at one point or another been lulled into a false sense of security and then been startled by a sudden reminder of everyday sexism. We all know that those things exist but we don’t always see them: like a horror movie villain lurking just out of sight until it pops out at you, then you can’t forget it exists anymore.
Honestly, horror movies are a pretty good analogy for sexism. There’s psychological horror; going to a straight bar sort of reminds me of watching Midsommar, you feel like something is off, maybe it’s in your drinks, maybe it’s the guys in the corner looking at you weird. Either way, you make sure to walk extra quickly and keep an eye over your shoulder on the way home. There’s body horror; getting unprompted opinions on what features make you hot or not and having your body be twisted into something foreign and outside of your control. And of course, there’s jump scare horror: walking down the street, romanticizing life, and then hearing a catcall, seeing a dude on the sidewalk ahead of you, looking at you like you’re meat.
These things don’t happen very often (at least in my experience) but I think that adds to the suspense. It’s like living in a haunted house and going for a while without any paranormal activity. Like, you know the ghosts are still there, but what are they up to? When are they gonna pop out next? At least in horror movies, it’s clear to everyone who the problem is. No one tries to say that being chased by a psycho killer isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. People never say, “well maybe if your skirt was longer, you wouldn’t have been possessed.”
Just like horror movie protagonists, women don’t wake up expecting to be jump scared by sexism. We’re living other plot lines until we get ripped out and forced to briefly live our miniature horror movies. A vast majority of the time, everything is okay, but there’s always that small chance that it won’t be, that we’ll end up a headline. It’s spooky stuff. I think that people tend to forget the beginning of horror movies too often, that the characters’ have whole lives before the movie starts, and they’ll have one after the movie ends. When your day is interrupted by a catcall, when you feel like you might be getting followed on the way home, you just have to shake it off. Hey, it’s not that bad, right?
