Social prejudices are even more subtle, if you do not experience them directly. An example form personal experience is in order here. I was prompted to consider, and soon to adopt, feminism after a conversation with a female student in my first term at university. She happened to mention that she found it scary to walk the streets at night. I wasn’t sympathetic, and I told her she was being paranoid and nothing was going to happen to her.
It is crucially important that you understand that I was absolutely confident in this statement. To me, women hardly ever got harassed, to the extent that it was not something to worry about, just as you don’t need to worry about plane crashes, lightning strikes, or axe murderers. Of course, you know, and I soon found out, that this is definitely not the case.
My friend looked right at me and relayed a long list of horrifying personal experiences. Twenty-something total strangers asking her out, persistently, since she was fourteen. A man following her home, so that she had to walk around the block so he wouldn’t know where she lived. Lewd comments. Never knowing whether any of this would progress to something worse, and so always worrying that it might. And all of this happening on a roughly weekly basis.
I can honestly tell you that I have never been so shocked, before or since. Because as a male I never see this happening, let alone have I had anything remotely similar happen to me. I can barely even begin to imagine what it must feel like, and I shan’t even try to describe it here. The point is that this experience, which is to me an incontrovertible reason to be a feminist, is not available to any man, unless he is told about it.
This is the experience of every woman, all for the crime of possessing the "wrong" chromosomes. I have personally experienced rape, threats of rape, abusive relationships, name-calling on the street, pennies thrown at me, groping, carloads of entitled teenage boys driving slowly past while hooting and hollering dirty words that I didn't understand. I even got sexually harassed by a teacher in high school. When I tried to talk about it, way back in the day, kinder people would laugh at me and make bad jokes. The mean ones would accuse me of enjoying the attention, lying or blame me for "giving them the wrong idea". Ha!
These are normal experiences for women. Just because the women in your life don't mention it, doesn't mean it hasn't happened to them.
I never give this a thought, how being female means putting up with a whole lot of garbage, until I read about it on the internet. It's just a fact of life. It doesn't fill me with rage the way that it should. I simply come up with better ways of defending myself, just like every other woman. I deny the impact that this kind of crap has had on my life. When I deliver a pizza at an apartment by myself on a Saturday night, I ignore that nagging fear. Being a woman isn't just menstruation, boobs and flirting with old men for tip money. It's a complicated tangle of social prejudices and experiences.
I am not mentioning this just for the sake of having an internet pity party. I have two girls that are approaching puberty and I would love to think that there is some speech that I can give them or book that they can read that will protect them from the potential horrors of being female. I told them about the time in grade 7 when a boy stood behind me as I was rummaging through my locker and grabbed my boobs. I was outraged and elbowed him in the gut. He hit the floor and never touched me again. It's a funny story but fairly useless in the whole grand scheme of things.
The sad fact is that very few situations can be solved with an elbow to the gut. So what can I tell them? Is there any possible way that I can keep them safe? Or is this all blogular navel-gazing pissing-in-the-wind that amounts to nothing?
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