In my experience, men have no conception of what it is to be a woman. No matter how hard I might try to explain it, they cannot imagine the way we walk through the world and the vast and shocking difference in the things we are forced to think about and do on a daily basis, and for our own safety. Recent experiences in my life have led me to an almost uncontrollable need to speak on the topic of violence against women. While it is something I have been forced to think about for a long time, it really intensified at the death of Sarah Everard.
Everard was a 33-year-old woman living in London who, on March 3, 2021, was kidnapped and murdered when walking home from a friend’s house. This led to a series of vigils and protests about the violence against women that is so common.
I have found that many of the men in my life have no ability to understand this issue. Even godly men that I love have no capacity to understand the depth of what women go through simply for existing. I have lived a relatively privileged life and have certainly been shielded from a great of deal of sexual harassment that so many women are subject to but, to put it in perspective, if even someone as sheltered from these things as I am has these experiences, what must other women who live in less safe environments experience? My hope is that sharing my experience and my anger on this issue will help both men and women to understand the urgency and horror of this problem.
In my late teens, one of the things that most drove this point so painfully home for me was that when I wanted to go places more than an hour or so away, or to anywhere remote, my parents started requiring that I take my little brother with me. My little brother, who is five years my junior, is 6’2”. I understood that my parents wanted to protect me, and that their concerns were probably valid, but everything about that was wrong for me. It was my job to protect my brother, not the other way around. I was clearly older and more mature—why did I have to bring him along for my own safety?
A few years later, I remember sitting in a professor’s office listening to him tell me about how he had backpacked all over Europe for six months after he graduated college. His descriptions were stunning, and I wished so badly that I could do something similar, when the realization hit me—I would quite literally die if I did something like that.
I am fiercely independent and I love to do things alone, whether making a Walmart run or finding a waterfall in the middle of nowhere. But the older I got, the more I realized that I had to be afraid to be alone. Soon I realized that I could not make spontaneous Walmart runs at 11 p.m. without intense discomfort and fear of the men in the parking lot and the way they stared at me. I have to lock my doors the instant I get into my car, check the backseat, carry my keys between my knuckles when walking alone, and avoid going places alone at night. In the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, the police issued a statement urging women to not go walking alone at night. In response a member of the House of Lords, Jenny Jones, suggested instead a 6pm curfew for all men. Her suggestion was not entirely serious, but it pointed out the double standard for that exists, women essentially have a curfew if they want to have some semblance of safety. A woman is murdered by a man and women are issued restrictions. As an article in The Guardian put it: “We’re used to women’s freedoms and women’s bodies being up for debate, you see. We’re used to women being told to modify our behaviour as a reaction to male violence. Women may not be under a formal curfew but you only need to look at the disgusting victim-blaming that went on with Sarah Everard to see that we’re under an informal one.” According to RAINN, in the U.S. a woman is sexually assaulted every 73 seconds, and this is for assault alone and does not include other forms of sexual harassment.
It would take far too long to catalogue the list of gross things that random men in public have said to me, men who have patronized me and treated me like I was stupid and incapable purely because I am a woman. Once a coworker said something incredibly inappropriate to me right in front of my (male) boss, and my boss said absolutely nothing. I have had middle-aged men accost me in parking lots claiming they wanted to “help” me and refuse to leave me alone, even inquiring if I had a “boyfriend or husband” that I could call to fix the minuscule dent in my car that would take me five minutes to fix on my own.
The list goes on and on; and I am sure it is minor compared to what many of the women I know have suffered. Despite the fact that women now have more rights under the law than they have ever had at any point in history, still we have to suffer all of this. And anytime a woman gets angry about these realities, she is dismissed as “crazy” and “hysterical.” The anger of women points to real and horrific problems in our society and desperately needs to be listened to.
To those who refuse to recognize the depth of this issue, I would say this: “Every woman you have ever met has been sexually harassed at some point in their lives. Every woman you will ever meet has been sexually harassed at some point in her life.”
Most don’t realize this because they see this harassment as part of everyday life, just a fact of reality. But this is not okay. Women should be able to live their lives, walk home alone and go running whenever they feel like it without being forced to feel afraid.
What are you doing to fix this problem? Are you actively advocating for the women in your life? Are you constantly seeking to let the strangers on the street know that you are not a threat to them? Are you calling out your friends who speak poorly of women or trivialize their issues? Are you asking the women in your life how you can do better and how you can be a part of fixing the problem?
More and more I have found myself growing angrier and angrier about this issue; it is an anger that I have bathed in prayer. But this should not be happening. The activities of my life should not have to be so radically different from those of my baby brother. I am tired of being talked over, neglected and ignored. I am tired of reading about men such as Milton, Freud, and Rousseau, and many others who horrifically demeaned women and just accepting it and praising them anyways.
This is not a problem that we should be having---this is all wrong. I am disgusted by the fact that my experiences are far from the worst ones out there. This is wrong. And you need to be actively striving to make it better each and every day.
Title photo is from UK News.