v-s.net v0.6

Thursday, 2:51 pm in The Soapbox

So after the Boobiepocalypse yesterday, and in honour of April apparently being Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I bring to you some essential reading from cereta.

Most men, I believe, really don’t get, either intellectually or viscerally, the degree to which the awareness of sexual assault permeates women’s lives.

[…]

It is a very rare day that I don’t make at least one decision based on the awareness of sexual assault. Most of them are by now instinctive, and few of them are based only on that awareness, but it is a factor.

If I am home alone, my doors are locked. I have several times gotten up from a nap to check and see if I did indeed lock them. This is in part because I’m usually upstairs, and might not hear someone coming in and stealing my iPod, but it’s also because that same person could come upstairs, and no one would hear me. About once every other month or so, I think I hear someone downstairs, and I have to decide what to do about it.

[…]

These are just day to day life. And I have none of the extra awareness that might come from actually experiencing sexual assault. All of this is just self-defense classes in gym, programs in the dorm, things that happened to friends or on campuses. More importantly, all of this is, “Why was she jogging in the park at night?” and “Why did she go up to his hotel room?” and “Well, she shouldn’t have gotten drunk.” All of this is from hearing that I’m supposed to know which of the guys who hits on me at the bus stop will decide that dinner and a glass of wine means I owe him sex, even as the statistics scream at me that there is no way of knowing, that it’s the guy I’ve known my whole life and trust implicitly that I have to watch out for.

[…]

And then they turn around and call me paranoid and untrusting and man-hating.

Through all of this, I’ve watched men I care about and respect struggle with what to do, with how at the very least not to be part of the problem, let alone part of the solution. And I think that’s important, because for all that we frame rape as a women’s issue, it’s mostly not women doing the raping […] In the final analysis, it’s men that have to change.

Quoted From: cereta

I’m paraphrasing extensively here, and I absolutely implore everyone to go read the original, and to read the comments; just ordinary women talking about ordinary, everyday occurrences. Those situations that stand out like flares in your consciousness that this is it, this is the moment it could all go wrong.

For me personally, I’ve had four such encounters that I can think of clearly. The first one was the Marshmallow Man encounter. I’ve probably written about it before, but it involved walking home from a bar in first year university with another girl. We were both new to the town, knew there was a train station ‘nearby’ but didn’t realise how far ‘nearby’ actually was. Neither of us were drunk; we’d left the bar early precisely because we weren’t drinking, and hanging out sober with drunk people is pretty tedious. There was an unlit, open field in our path; crossing it were were approached by a guy with a box of stolen marshmallows who followed us across the field. He was friendly, in a slightly over-enthusiastic way, and kept offering to walk us to the train station. I joke about it now, but…

But it was the singularly most terrifying experience I’ve had in my life. Bar none. Walking across that field I honest to gods did not think I was going to make it home that night. At least not in one piece.

The next two encounters involved cars. The first time, I took a lift with gnosis and another boy I knew from lectures who lived in the same dorm as I did. We’d know each other for maybe a month or so, and for those of you who haven’t seen him – and I feel terrible about bringing this up, because it’s hardly his fault – gnosis is huge. It wasn’t exactly as if I felt explicitly threatened by either of them – I wouldn’t’ve gotten in the car if I had been – but the entire ride I was flooded with the realisation that if they tried to do something, there was no way I could stop them; a feeling that was only compounded by gnosis’s physical size. And all the while I felt horrible for even thinking it. Because gnosis is my friend.

But the feeling is still there.

It was still there when, a few months later, I took my first car ride alone with ~Mat [h]. And it made me so angry on their behalf, that I could think such hideous things about these men, but…

But.

It was a different feeling that hit, a month or so ago, I was out walking – in the middle of the day – with my mother and a (female) neighbour in a highly public place and we were followed for several hundred meters by a man who kept attempting to engage us in conversation. Instead of fearful shame this one was impotent rage at this blatant violation of our persons, and the way in which none of us knew what to do. How dare this freak make us feel like that!

And these are just the Big Incidents, the things that stand out. They’re not counting the times I’ve been home alone and heard a noise downstairs. Not counting the times boys have yelled obscene things at me out of car windows. Not counting the times men have catcalled me as I’ve walked past them in the mall. And I hate them – every one of them – for making me feel unsafe with all the other men, the ones who do deserve my trust.

So.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, really. I don’t have some kind of pithy catchphrase to wrap everything up with. Just awareness. Because maybe this is a woman’s most shameful secret; this fear and rage and impotence. Because we know – every minute of our lives – that if you actually tried something?

We couldn’t stop you.

• Tags » feminism, life, women
• Comments By » ~Jem [h], rivenshadow
• Mood » raw