When I was 7, I gripped my beautiful mother's hand, squirming as catcalls followed her all the way down a Chicago street.
Three years later, I was playing in our front yard when a car full of teenage boys stopped, telling me how pretty I was, asking if I had an older sister.
Throughout my childhood, my father's clients would call the house, telling me I was so polite I should be a secretary, a fine aspiration for a girl who wrote novellas and got all A's.
By the time I was 15, those men would ogle me. A couple drunkenly propositioned me. Everywhere I walked, from the halls of my high school to my job at the local library, I felt like a piece of meat.