Maybe I'm having a midlife-crisis. Maybe all this rage I'm feeling is normal. Maybe I've just had forty-four years of living with sexist rubbish and I've finally reached breaking point. But, reached breaking point I have. I am occasionally lying awake, seething about the world I find myself living in. That can't be right.
Recently the daughter of one of my colleagues set off for her first term at university, leaving my colleague and his wife with an empty nest (their eldest, a son, already being in his final year at university). Wife is a bit of a worrier, which position I have a great deal of sympathy with, and I rashly expressed the opinion that I felt she would probably worry more about Daughter leaving home than she had done about Son.
"Why would she worry more about Daughter?" I was asked. "Isn't that sexist of you?"
I let go with both barrels. I reminded my (all male) colleagues that they didn't have the faintest inkling of an idea of what it's like to be a young woman, let alone a young woman away from home for the first time, faced with large numbers of (probably inebriated) young men. In fact, I leapt up and drew a line down the white board and presented them with Jackson Katz's challenge,
What steps do you guys take, on a daily basis, to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted?Unsurprisingly, and in keeping with the young men who were originally asked this question, they had no ready answers. And I then began to enumerate the ways that I, and other women, avoid being assaulted on a daily basis. The ways in which avoiding being assaulted is something we actively and regularly think about. I pointed out that one of my friends, in our quiet little village, was not going to come to the pub with me because she was too afraid to walk down the unlit lane from her house on her own. I cycled to her house and we walked together. At the end of the evening I took a small tour of the village to escort first her, and then another friend home, before cycling home myself.
Yes, we are afraid to walk home alone at night. And no, this is not right.
This experience was followed swiftly by reading about a thought-experiment proposed on Twitter: if you are a woman, how would your behaviour change if men had a 9pm curfew?
There were two tragedies in the responses to this:
The first was the pitiful nature of the ways in which women's lives would change. We would go out running after dark. We would go for more walks. We would feel safe putting headphones on after dark. We would do our grocery shopping in the evenings when it's quieter at the shops. We would go to the cinema without worrying what time the film finished and whether the carpark was properly lit. Tiny freedoms that most men simply wouldn't think twice about. Tiny freedoms that in fact it turns out many men don't think about, and didn't realise women were living without.
The second tragedy was the number of angry men replying about the outrage of threatening men with a curfew, and that women were just being hysterical by being afraid, and that a generalised fear of men was just as bad as racism. Seriously. Women are afraid to go out at night, and the retort is to ascribe our behaviour to an ancient Greek idea of our uterus being so out of control that it wanders around our body causing widespread derangement. Way to go angry men. Missing the point quite spectacularly, and decrying even the the faintest inkling of a suggestion of a thought of playing with the hypothetical idea of any restrictions to male freedoms, while attacking women whose lives and freedoms are already restricted every single day.
And finally, I was reminded by this thought experiment of my own school days, when in our early teens, we had Personal and Health Education lessons (or whatever they were called then) at my terribly nice, all-girls, private school. We were told all about periods, and sex, and drugs (but not rock 'n' roll). We were given rape alarms. We were told how to hold our keys so the blade pointed between our knuckles, ready to gouge the eyes of any attacker. We were told how to make sure we didn't look appealing enough to rape. We were told how, if attacked from behind, to scrape a heel down the attacker's shin and grind it into his foot bones. We were told never to cry "Rape!" or "Help!" if we were being attacked, but instead to yell "Fire!" because the world of self-interest we were being raised in could not be expected to respond to attacks upon our person, but would rouse itself if there were a wider threat.
And over the past few days, as these memories have flooded back, I have been asking myself how my teachers could live with having to teach impressionable teenage girls how not to get raped? Why were they not marching through the streets demanding equality? Why were they not breaking down the doors of the nearby boys' school to demand the boys were taught how not to rape? Why were they not teaching us to burn society down and start again*? How could they be complicit in making us believe that rape was our fault if we didn't avoid it? Where was their outrage? Where was their fire? Where was their fury?
Maybe it was in the same place as mine, simmering along, with no outlet. I am filled with rage, with fire, with fury, and yet it is an impotent rage, because the truth is - what can I change? How can I defeat the sense of entitlement that some men have over women and their bodies? What can I honestly do? Maybe all I can do is issue a call to arms, shamelessly stolen from the film 'Network',
All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!' So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE! I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!...You've got to say, I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
* I fear the answer to this may lie in two places. Firstly, undoubtedly our teachers were teaching us as they had themselves been taught. They too had been raised to assume that it was up to women to avoid rape. And no doubt they wanted to keep us safe from harm. The second reason may have more to do with the demographic of the school. I cannot imagine the plethora of Establishment barristers, doctors and bankers represented amongst the parents being delighted to have their daughters turned into societal fire-starters. You may think I malign them, but this was a school at which I was branded a communist for supporting the Liberal Party, so it was not a place where breaking free of the shackles of a conservative society was encouraged. I'm delighted to say that many of my friends have grown up to be perfectly normal members of society.
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