Not clothes but Mentality

Sometime around this month last year, my bestfriend and I were in Singapore for our trip together. We had taken the cable car just spontaneously and dropped down at an location unknown to us . It was around 9:30 at night and were walking down an empty road and we were terrified. We were wearing shorts and crop tops and since we have been bought up in India our brain says “En garde” if we see strange men around us. We kept walking down the street and men walked right past us like they couldn’t see us or they didn’t care who we are or what we were wearing, they didn’t care to turn their heads or stare and we felt a sense of calmness sweep over us. We were 15 minutes away from our hotel and we stopped at this bar called “The bikini bar” and as the name suggests, the women in the bar, the customers and waitresses alike, were wearing a bikini at 10pm at night. There were men around too but I didn’t hear even one of them say that she is wearing a bikini so she is asking for it. They just accepted that it’s okay for women to wear what they want without being subjected to character scrutiny. The concept of consent didn’t elude their minds. So everytime I hear someone say that rapes and assaults happen because she was out late at night or because she was wearing short clothes, I just wish to take them with me to the places I have been and the people I have met and show them that its not the small clothes that is the problem but the small mentality.