Some Guy Tries To Hump 'Fearless Girl' Statue And No One's Laughing
If this guy wanted attention for dry humping a statue of a little girl, he’s certainly getting it now
Photos of the Fearless Girl statue are still making their way around the internet, but this time, not for the intended purpose. The statue was originally placed on Wall Street on the eve of International Women’s Day to signify the need for more gender diversity in the workplace. So when a woman saw a man pretending to have sex with the figure of the little girl for a laugh, she decided to do something about it.
Alexis Kaloyanides, an architectural designer from Queens, was out with co-workers when they stopped by the statue Thursday night. “It was a beautiful night. There were about 15 or 20 people there,” Kaloyanides tells Inside Edition. “We started talking about the statue, a little girl about five or six years old proudly posed with the statue for a picture, it was just a nice moment. These three young men came along, and at first they were hanging off the bull… and then this one guy rushed up and started grinding against the statue of the girl, being lewd and totally inappropriate.”
Kaloyanides says the crowd immediately began yelling at the unidentified man, who started laughing and walked off with his friends. “There were people there talking about empowering children and women and for then to have this 20-something showing his entitlement, defiling the statute… it was utterly revolting.”
Kaloyanides was so upset she snapped a photo of the man and posted it to her Facebook page when she got home that night, writing: “Almost as if out of central casting, some Wall Street finance broseph appeared and started humping the statue while his gross date rape-y friends laughed and cheered him on. He pretended to have sex with the image of a little girl. Douchebags like this are why we need feminism.”
Kristin Visbal, who created the Fearless Girl statue, said she hoped women who saw her would see “that they can stand firm and hold their ground and deal with it.” Visbal was right, but likely not for how she originally intended her statement. We’ve all had to deal with a guy like this at work or on the street and been made to feel like we need to laugh it off. That if we don’t laugh it off, it is our problem, not theirs. Society makes the ‘boys will be boys’ excuse which indicates a man’s actions, however minor, shouldn’t have consequences.
Here’s the problem with the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality; when someone uses this rationale, they lump all men in with the destructive few. “We make excuses for it, because the alternative seems unachievable. But sexism is no excuse for sexism. Men are not inherently violent, degrading and predatory and women are not inherently victims,” Bronwen Clune summed up with perfection. It does all of us a disservice to dismiss any class of people this way.
To pretend to have sex with a statue of a little girl in front of other families isn’t just inappropriate, it’s obscene. Kaloyanides says, “This young man likely has a mother, a sister perhaps, a girlfriend, a wife — who knows? I’m getting tired of making excuses and laughing it off. I for one am not gonna laugh it off anymore.”
None of us should.
