They went away, eventually
A recent YouGov survey found that 86% of women aged 18-24 in the UK have been sexually harassed. This statistic shocked me: did the other 14% not understand the question? To live in fear of harassment or assault is such a universal female experience that many of us don’t even think about it, having learned to accept it from an absurdly early age. It doesn’t break you but it shapes you, like a rock face getting battered by strong waves.
She provides ten examples from her own life.
Aged seven: my friends and I are in the park when a bush next to us trembles. A man climbs out holding his penis towards us, as if he’s offering a special on the menu. This is the first time I’ve seen a penis, and it is disgusting and terrifying, an impression it takes decades to shake.
Her point in the piece is that all women have experienced this kind of thing. Interesting to think about how that shapes their feelings about sex.
Aged 33: I am having a one-night stand and suddenly he puts his hands around my neck and squeezes. This is how it ends, I think. In some guy’s flat in Harlesden. “I can tell you like it,” he whispers in my ear. When I sneak out the next morning, a man comes up to me on the street: “I can smell your cunt,” he snarls.
…
Aged 42: I take my children to Clapham Common for Sarah Everard’s vigil. Bath-time schedules mean we miss the later arrests, so we only see the flowers, the sunset, the women, all of us knowing we are no different from Everard, only luckier.
How to explain any of this to a pair of five-year-old boys? “A woman called Sarah got hurt,” I told them beforehand. “Why?” they asked. “Because men are bigger and stronger than women, and some are bullies,” I said. The boys make signs: “I don’t like bullies” and “Be gentle” they read, and we tape them on to sticks and go to the common. One of them asks if a bully ever hurt me. Not really, I say. I was lucky. They went away, eventually.
Eventually.
Why?
As a gay man, even at age 61, it still shocks me to read shit like this. Why the fuck do men treat women they are attracted to this way?
Imagine if I walked up to a man on the street and said, “I can smell your foreskin.”
Imagine if I burst out of the bushes at a ball diamond and showed my pecker to the little boys there.
I mean, what. the. fuck???
‘Why the fuck do men treat women they are attracted to this way?’ Incorrect premise. Men making sexual threats are not attracted to us. These men use what they know is the most disturbing language and behavior to women to either make us submit or drive us out of ‘their’ spaces. And yes this is a routine experience. Due to the bravery of one of my female colleagues, who had the guts to tell her story to an audience of men at a management meeting, our company is now considering addressing some risks female staff routinely face. One of the things I’ve said about this initiative is that we treat these risks like any random risk–like slips trips and falls. I pointed out that in every single incident an individual man has consciously chosen to behave in this way. These are deliberate acts to threaten, and often attack, women, to protect their spaces and their prerogatives.
And please don’t think gay men never exhibit this behaviour. They have as much at stake as straight men in preserving male spaces and male supremacy.
I think some sexual harassment is about sex as well as cruelty and dominance…but yes it is a very peculiar kind of “sex,” when it can be called harassment.
It’s about sex, maybe, but it seems like some men need to dominate and humiliate women. Like Harvey Weinstein. I mean, he was a successful producer, I have not doubt there were enough women that wanted to have sex with him. He needed to show them who was stronger, who had more power, who could make them bend to his will.
A lot of men seem to have a burning need to humiliate women. When a man looked at me and licked his lips (when I was young enough that men looked at me and licked their lips) in that manner where they run the tongue around the lips, I never got the feeling it was as much about sex as about making me feel dirty, humiliated, and maybe even scared. It was about “get the hell out of the school cafeteria, bitch, this is my territory” or “what are you doing in my space? Suck my dick.” That sort of thing, not “suck my dick” like please give me a blow job, but like “suck my dick” meaning you are worthless and you’re in my way.
“Boys will be boys.” It’s inevitible. We’re considered a force of nature, an act of god, like weather and earthquakes. JFC.
Boys will be boys, but unlike my asshole male cat they can choose to rise above. They just opt not to.
I’m not even a woman, and yet even I will never run out of stories about shockingly inappropriate male behaviors. Some examples off the top of my head:
There was the coworker at the store house where I was working at the time who openly bragged about keeping a list of all the female employees, ranking them by their level of attractiveness and how much he enjoyed jerking off while thinking of them. He could often be heard telling female coworkers things like “You have dropped two places on my list lately. Better lose some weight if you want to keep up your rating”. Although his behavior was well known to everyone, I don’t think he ever faced any consequences. Instead the women were expected to just suck it up.
Then there was that other coworker (later, at different job) who insisted on telling me (without being asked) about that woman he slept with who kept shouting “no!” and “stop!”, and how he just ignored her cries and kept at it. Of course the punchline of the story – uttered with great pride – was how she later said it was “the best shagging of her life”. While I’m far from convinced that he didn’t just make up the whole thing, what’s so telling about this story is how he obviously expected me to be impressed by what was basically a confession to rape.
There was also the ex-friend I saw slamming his then girlfriend violently against the wall at that party before walking out in rage. By then his “moods” were already famous among those how knew him, but he never got physically violent with other men. Some time later this same couple were on holiday with another friend of mine. This latter friend later told me how they had been to a pub and she had left early to go to bed. She awoke to the sound of the door to the couple’s room slamming shut after this guy had violently pushed his girlfriend out of the room. My friend then had to spend the rest of the night trying to calm down the girlfriend who was sobbing hysterically and repeating over and over “He’s going to kill me”.
Finally, less dramatic, but still quite telling, my studies in renewable energy engineering were in their final stages, and we were rehearsing for the final presentation of our project. To be as well prepared as possible, all the different groups (typically 3-4 students per project) would work together: One group at a time would present their project while the rest would be in the audience and provide questions and feedback. As I recall, one of the other groups consisted of 3 guys and one girl. The guys would all be given feedback on their content, while the first comment directed at the girl was basically “It’s so refreshing to hear a female voice!”
Interesting followup on sexualisation of threats to women:
https://debuk.wordpress.com/2021/03/29/whats-in-a-frame-misogyny-hate/