Some weeks ago, as I left the gym at 9 pm on a Thursday, stalker in tow, a strange thought occurred to me. Why was I being stalked? Why was a random stranger from the gym now following me down a dark street to my car, asking me if I am single and why I won't be his friend? Was this normal? Quizzically, I ran to my car, immediately locked my doors, drove home, and spent the next 24 hours staring at my bedroom ceiling, wishing I'd never been born.
I never went back to the gym again.
While maybe not appropriate for an 11-year-old, this movie introduced a new concept to my life. The idea that even the smallest actions have impacts; that nothing exists in a vacuum. Like when a butterfly flaps its wings in Chicago, and Tokyo is destroyed by a meteorite. Haters will say these are unrelated.
The fact that small actions and ideas can incite larger, sometimes unintended consequences makes men like the one who followed me out of the gym all the more scary to me. I guess it just causes me to wonder what has happened during his life to make him think what he did was normal or OK. Has he heard or observed other men acting like this? Or has he just been raised in a world in which women are objects; without agency, opinions, and preferences?
This man was a complete stranger. And when he cornered me outside of the gym that night his first words to me were: "are you single?". That was clearly the only thing about me that was important to this man. Not my name, my age, what I do for a living; it was only my apparent availability to him that mattered.
The absurdity of some random man ambushing me outside the gym to ask me if I’m single was the implication that if I answered yes I was automatically available to him. And while I understand that the best way to get rid of men is to tell them that your dad is a police officer / prison guard and your boyfriend is a WWE heavyweight champion / serial killer, I just wished that I could tell him that whether or not I am single is entirely irrelevant.
In the past year or so I have lost count of all the times random men on the street have come up to me asking questions they have no business asking. If I'm single? Where I'm from? If I'm Italian? If I can show them where to buy an umbrella? If I like pears (???) ?
Maybe they were not all sex traffickers as I generally assume. And mAYBE that one guy just really needed an umbrella. However: I still resent the fact that I should be open and willing to interact with any random man who sees me on the street and feels like talking to me. But this is a universal experience for women. We are expected to at least pretend to be happy to engage with strangers on the street. To be unwilling to do so can appear impolite or socially inept. And the threat of appearing this way feels like its own kind of trap: and it functions as a means of controlling women's behaviour and responses.
When you grow up in white middle class suburban New Zealand it might be easy to think that you don't need feminism. And for most of my youth I wasn't astutely cognisant that there were any extra difficulties that came with being a woman. Perhaps it wasn't until I was 15 years old, and studying The Handmaid's Tale in English class, that I gained some clarity. In the same year, Elisabeth Fritzl was discovered after 24 years being kept as a prisoner in her father's basement. It was a big year for my personal & abrupt realisations about the mistreatment and abuse of women by men.
Over the last few years I have reflected more and more on womanhood and society. With every example or experience of misogyny, I felt that I could see connections, draw lines between apparently isolated events, like a map of the constellations. I imagined that every sexist comment or action by a man was made because he had witnessed a man do this before him. It's like, on one side of the world a man makes a sexist joke, and on the other side of the world, a woman is raped and murdered. (Haters will say these are unrelated.)
And it is true that women experience varying magnitudes of oppression depending on where they are in the world. Sometimes it feels selfish to complain about my own experiences when there are women in Saudi Arabia who aren't even allowed to go outside. In a world where female genital mutilation, child brides, male guardians, honour killings, etc, etc, exist, is it wrong to be dissatisfied with my own personal freedoms ?
But no matter where you are in the world, it is hard to be a women. Countless studies show gender discrimination in workplaces, wage disparities, societal stigma around periods / breast feeding / female body hair / & so much more. And women are raped and murdered by men in every country in the world.
A few years ago I listened to a Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, called 'We should all be feminists'. Until I listening to this Ted Talk I had not heard feminism, its importance and its meaning, so aptly and perfectly described and summarised in a 30 minute speech. I remember clearly a part where she says she was first accused of being a feminist: 'I don't remember what this particular argument was about, but I remember that as I argued and argued, Okuloma looked at me and said, "You know, you're a feminist." It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone, the same tone that you would use to say something like "You're a supporter of terrorism."'.
With this, I recalled when I was first introduced to the concept feminism. I was too young at that time to understand it well, however, I do remember the implication that feminism was something for ugly women, who don't shave, and who cannot find a man to love them. Feminism was a negative word when I learned it. It felt like a warning, of something to avoid. I think that this was a ploy, to make feminism into something unattractive, it was as though to call yourself a feminist was to call yourself ugly and unlovable.
But as I got older I changed the way I thought about feminism. I realised; if I didn't support my own rights, who would? And the world changed too. Even over my own lifetime I have observed societal change in the realm of women's rights. But change happens frustratingly slowly. Sometimes I feel that I will be long dead by the time women have equal rights, if ever they do.
Recommended link:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We should all be feminists
This man was a complete stranger. And when he cornered me outside of the gym that night his first words to me were: "are you single?". That was clearly the only thing about me that was important to this man. Not my name, my age, what I do for a living; it was only my apparent availability to him that mattered.
The absurdity of some random man ambushing me outside the gym to ask me if I’m single was the implication that if I answered yes I was automatically available to him. And while I understand that the best way to get rid of men is to tell them that your dad is a police officer / prison guard and your boyfriend is a WWE heavyweight champion / serial killer, I just wished that I could tell him that whether or not I am single is entirely irrelevant.
In the past year or so I have lost count of all the times random men on the street have come up to me asking questions they have no business asking. If I'm single? Where I'm from? If I'm Italian? If I can show them where to buy an umbrella? If I like pears (???) ?
Maybe they were not all sex traffickers as I generally assume. And mAYBE that one guy just really needed an umbrella. However: I still resent the fact that I should be open and willing to interact with any random man who sees me on the street and feels like talking to me. But this is a universal experience for women. We are expected to at least pretend to be happy to engage with strangers on the street. To be unwilling to do so can appear impolite or socially inept. And the threat of appearing this way feels like its own kind of trap: and it functions as a means of controlling women's behaviour and responses.
Over the last few years I have reflected more and more on womanhood and society. With every example or experience of misogyny, I felt that I could see connections, draw lines between apparently isolated events, like a map of the constellations. I imagined that every sexist comment or action by a man was made because he had witnessed a man do this before him. It's like, on one side of the world a man makes a sexist joke, and on the other side of the world, a woman is raped and murdered. (Haters will say these are unrelated.)
And it is true that women experience varying magnitudes of oppression depending on where they are in the world. Sometimes it feels selfish to complain about my own experiences when there are women in Saudi Arabia who aren't even allowed to go outside. In a world where female genital mutilation, child brides, male guardians, honour killings, etc, etc, exist, is it wrong to be dissatisfied with my own personal freedoms ?
But no matter where you are in the world, it is hard to be a women. Countless studies show gender discrimination in workplaces, wage disparities, societal stigma around periods / breast feeding / female body hair / & so much more. And women are raped and murdered by men in every country in the world.
*
With this, I recalled when I was first introduced to the concept feminism. I was too young at that time to understand it well, however, I do remember the implication that feminism was something for ugly women, who don't shave, and who cannot find a man to love them. Feminism was a negative word when I learned it. It felt like a warning, of something to avoid. I think that this was a ploy, to make feminism into something unattractive, it was as though to call yourself a feminist was to call yourself ugly and unlovable.
But as I got older I changed the way I thought about feminism. I realised; if I didn't support my own rights, who would? And the world changed too. Even over my own lifetime I have observed societal change in the realm of women's rights. But change happens frustratingly slowly. Sometimes I feel that I will be long dead by the time women have equal rights, if ever they do.
Recommended link:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We should all be feminists
