What Were You Wearing by Savannah Sisk

          ​Danielle Henry CC




What Were You Wearing


I have always found the question of “what were you wearing?” especially ridiculous. Men often make extremely unprovoked passes on me at work. I work at a grocery store. I’m wearing an apron and a hair net. Really attractive, I know. . . 
You wouldn’t think that part of the job description of a cashier is “successfully do your job while a very creepy sixty-year-old man attempts to flirt with you,” but I can assure you that it is. 
Just the other day I was standing behind the register five hours into a shift, shifting my weight from foot to foot, when a guy who couldn’t have been younger than seventy walked into my line. I asked, “Hello, would you like your groceries in plastic?” He proceeded to not respond, and instead peer around at the other cashiers. 
“Um. Is everything okay?” I had the misfortune of asking.
He smiles. “Yeah, I was just making sure I had the prettiest cashier.” And then he winks.
I am sixteen. What’s worse, I look like I’m sixteen. My skin crawls; I duck my head and avoid eye contact. I do not have the freedom of a floor worker at Artesia; I can’t just walk away. I remain, speechless. 
This happens all the time. It’s uncomfortable. Not for him, just for me. He feels no shame or disgust or, in the worst of circumstances, fear. He has no idea what it is to be a woman, to be constantly disrespected, to be made so insignificant in another’s mind that they think treating you this way is acceptable. 
This example illustrates my concern well: Women, especially those in the service industry, receive completely unwarranted and very much so unwanted flirtation all the time. The problem? These men don’t respect women. It isn’t only older men- I was once told point-blank by a guy who couldn’t have been more than thirty that ‘washing dishes is for women.’ I scanned his Scrub Daddy and bagged it for him. If men did respect women, then incidences like these would not occur. The problem is not all men, but it is some men. Men who, no matter their age, have no idea what it’s like to be harassed. Worse, they don’t bother to try and understand what it’s like to be hit on or catcalled because they don’t have to. Their privilege renders them blind, these men whose flirtations do not come across as compliments. They are not ‘just being nice.’ No one smiling at you like that has your best interests in mind. 
In order to end this epidemic of disrespect, I ask the men of America to treat their women cashiers, servers, concierges, and floor workers with the utmost respect. Please, do not flirt with us. We are tired and we do not appreciate it. 
The next time you push your cart into the checkout line, unload your groceries, make polite conversation, and check out- just not the cashier. 
It should not be up to the cashier to confront the customer, to do what my coworker suggested I do “the next time this happens.”
I should not have to look men in the eye and say, “I’m sixteen, that’s disgusting.” They should already know that.

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Savannah Sisk is a sixteen-year-old woman living in the American South, where she spends the majority of her time daydreaming about ways to move to New Zealand. She has loved to write ever since she learned to hold a pen. Her work has been published in the Alcott Youth Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine and Across the Margin Literary Magazine. Her work is forthcoming in the Academy of the Heart and Mind Literary Magazine.