On Sunday afternoon I was grocery shopping at Trader Joes along with everyone else in town. In the first aisle, I see two women talking to each other about their children. The women are in their forties, they are talking about teenagers. They are happy to see each other, busy moms extending the shopping trip to chat close together in front of the chicken breasts packaged in plastic wrap.
As I round the second aisle, I hear a man talking to a woman in a bantering tone just this side of flirtatious. I wonder if they know each other. They are talking about olives, and he asks her what her name is. Ok, I guess people do try to pick people up at the grocery store, whatever.
When I get to the checkout counter there is a line. No surprise. The women in line ahead of me is tall, about six feet, and pretty, with curly hair. She’s in an animated conversation with the checker, who is a very enthusiastic young gay man. I guess her age at 18 or 19.
The man who was hitting on the woman in aisle two is in line at the next cashier over, just to my right. He walks over to the tall young women in front of me, broadcasting avuncular harmlessness. He’s sixty if he’s a day. He approaches her also as if he knows her, making something meant to pass as a joke. And then he slips his arm around her waist. In and out, a practiced snaking movement, so quick you could have imagined it. Then he turned back to get back to his place in line. As he turned, I saw an expression of sly pleasure on his face, a swift leer of triumph. That’s why he shops at the busiest time of the week.
The tall woman didn’t look distressed. She looked used to it, practiced, adept at not making a big deal, being pleasant. It’s safer. I’m sure that happens to her all the time, with her bouncy hair and big smile. We are socialized early to take what men dish out. When the older man put his hands on her, she was talking to the cashier in that animated way of young people sharing some information – I think it was about a band. She wrote down a name on a white napkin for the cashier. She looked happy. Then he was there, the dirty uncle, slipping his hand around her waist. It was unexpected, and so quick. To move from happy to harmed can take a minute and at the end of the minute he was done.
I don’t want to assume that any woman can’t take care of herself. I was watching, and ready to step in if he had kept it up, if she signaled that low key distress one woman will flash at another woman when she’s in trouble. It’s low key because it can’t be loud, that might not be safe, but we can see the distress nonetheless, those of us who are looking.
I’m a big fan of Dan Savage, and listen to the Savage Lovecast every week. He repeats the quote that men are afraid that a woman is going to laugh at them, and women are afraid that a man is going to kill them. He says it often to remind other men how different it is to be a woman. And I appreciate it every single time.
I’ve often joked that white men get all up in arms about ageism because they never experience real discrimination until they’re old. And then they are shocked shocked that it exists, that they are judged on something over which they have no control, their age, and judged unfairly.
But there’s no time in their lives that most men are going to know what it is like to move through the world with the constant threat that a man is going to put his hands on you.
The move to a conference room when a man slips his hand into the small of my back as if I have been struck blind and need to be guided into the room. The man slipping his arm around the young woman at the cash register. The touches and adjustments and bumps in any crowded public transit.
Sometimes it’s just that, hands on your body you didn’t want on your body. Sometimes those hands go on to rape or violence. Sometimes women die. Trans women have it worse than cis women.
When I was in my late twenties, I dated a much older man. He became more and more controlling, and I got afraid. I was talking to my sister on the phone, and I told her, “Well, we should see it from his side.”
“You’re my sister. He doesn’t have a side.”
I left him. He started stalking me. I told my boss, and she took it so seriously that I took it seriously. I remembered him telling me that he had stalked his ex-wife. He didn’t call it stalking, of course. They had been divorced for over a decade.
I took out a restraining order. He showed up to the court hearing with two lawyers. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, so I showed up with my sister, who was a law student at the time. I was terrified. But apparently clear because the judge handed down a restraining order in perpetuity.
A few years ago, I got a letter from a lawyer asking me to rescind the restraining order, because it was causing delays when this man crossed the border into and out of Canada. It was inconvenient for him.
When I left him, I didn’t tell him where I was moving. I had a friend come with me my first night there, a big male friend, because I was afraid the ex would find me in the little cottage out in the country. Later that night, my ex called to tell me he watched me through the windows of my A frame house as my friend and I unpacked. He must have hidden in the woods across from my house, in the dark, watching me.
I threw the letter from the lawyer away, thinking that the few moments of discomfort at the border were a fitting karmic check for the ex who crouched in the woods at night looking into my windows and taunting me.
I was afraid of that man for years. He is not the only man who terrified me. I’m telling you this because most of the women I know have stories like this. Most of us have lived with a low grade hum of terror in the back of our minds, holding onto our keys as we walk to our car, slipping our hand around the can of mace in our purse.
I understand my demographic. If you are a man who is reading or listening to this, you’re not the kind of man who is going to lay his hands on a young stranger in line at a grocery store. But it might be helpful for you to understand what it’s like to move through the world in a female body at work.
Most of us have had men policing our bodies any time we are out in public. I’ve had men tell me to smile more as I’m on a bus coming home from work. Women are told what they should or should not wear. They have men tell them they shouldn’t eat if they are heavier and that they should eat if they are thinner. Should I cuss or say something cutting I’m asked if I kiss my mother with that mouth, and told I’m a bitch.
The implicit message is that men own public spaces, and the sole aim of women is to decorate their public spaces in a way that is pleasing and palatable to the men.
Women are touched in unwanted ways all the time in public. Groped on public transit, rubbed up against. I’ve had bosses reach past me to get into a cash drawer and slide their hand and arm along the side of my breast. I’ve had my ass grabbed on the street.
By the time a woman gets out of school and into the professional world she’s had those experiences many times. It’s a constant. It becomes an implicit narrative that many of us carry in our mind. I’m not safe. I need to be hypervigilant.
When you consider how many women experience sexual assault and rape, many also carry sexual trauma around being touched by men.
I’ve told this story before, but once I worked at a place where the male owners would celebrate a new hire by bringing the person into a small space in the office and jumping out at them in their underwear. They thought it was funny, quirky, creative. I thought it was offensive. They didn’t care.
I tried to appeal to their business interests. “If we do this to a woman who has been sexually assaulted, it could be traumatic. We could get sued.” The owner looked at me and said that considering the percentage of women who have been sexually assaulted and how many women they had done this to, the probability was that they had already done this to a woman who had sexual trauma.
“And we haven’t been sued yet,” he said, as if that proved his point.
If a man’s idea of bad is being mocked and a women’s idea of bad is being killed, then you can see how that might skew a man’s ability to understand the impact his actions could have on a woman.
And since I am, in this case, most likely preaching to the choir, I would invite the men who are reading this to take this frame into all of their work interactions. Could what I am doing be considered policing a woman’s expression, tone of voice, clothing, appearance or behavior?
Do I ever get into a woman’s personal space without meaning to – leaning over her desk to reach something? When was the last time I touched a woman at work? Do I do the small of the back hand steer thing?
And what might that bring up for her if I do? Act accordingly. And teach your male co-workers.
And women? Keep looking for that low flag of distress from another woman, and be the one ready to look back, to stand up, to say something. I’m here. I’ve got you. You are not alone.