Maybe a couple more things.
All right, seven more things….
First, thank you, Rachel, for being devil’s advocate. Her points: (a) Was what Marty said so bad? (b) Do I really want to hear only comments that make me comfortable?
Second, my response: (a) Not really, but I realized I was feeling a little wonky about having a dude I’ve never met, who found me on a dating site, make sexual comments on my blog. (b) No. I do want to hear everything. I also want to be able to ask for what I think I need. Doesn’t mean I’ll get it, but I want to ask.
Back to 2(a) for a second: Why was I uncomfortable?
I think every woman has had some experience where she has felt sexually threatened—not that that’s what it was in this case, but it does put us on edge. It makes us more sensitive to the next comment, touch, sound, movement.
The son of my music teacher, when we were both about 9 or 10 and waiting in the car while his mom ran into the grocery store, started poking me in the chest and, when I covered myself, poked me between my legs. When I protected that part of me, he’d move back to the top. I kept telling him to stop. He laughed. I didn’t tell anyone that until two years ago, when all of a sudden, it bubbled up and spilled out in a deluge of tears.
Guys groped me practically every day in the Mexico City subway when I lived there. One pinche cabrón came up behind me, stuck his hands down the sides of my overalls into the front of my underpants.
In 2002, in a crowded NYC number 6 train, a young man pressed his hard-on up against my ass and started breathing in my ear. I was pinned up against the door and couldn’t move.
Just last year, a dude followed me, jerking off, as I was hiking Occoneechee Mountain with my dogs.
There’s more, but I’ll stop. And I won’t even bother enumerating the verbal assaults I’ve received, though they are often no less scary.
My response, as an adult, to these experiences is to scream things like, “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? YOU’RE FUCKING SICK!” Except on the 6 train. Get this: I could see his reflection in the window, and I was pretty sure I had met the guy. I don’t know why that made me feel even more powerless, but it did. I just evacuated the car at the first possible moment.
So there you go. Was that seven things?
All I’m saying is that there’s a reason I reacted the way I did. At least I didn’t scream profanities at Marty.
P.S. It occurred to me after I described Marty as “intelligent, well-written, sometimes funny, sometimes inappropriate, and a mite pretentious” that that was a pretty apt description of me too.
nope. not a description of you. because the words you used don’t mean the same thing.
you are describing what it is like to be an attractive woman in america.
except you are more aware than most of your feelings and able to articulate them. there’s a male female power trip that has being going on since the first woman said “EXCUSE me? i don’t think so, mister.
and no, i am nota man hating lesbian. (well… but that’s beside the point)
what i am saying is not that it is ever excusable behavior, but that it is taught both visibly and invisibly, breathed into boys from birth on. superiority. a sense of entitlement. that’s what makes the ones who grow out of, or past it so special. when you find them you hang onto them, friend or lover. they went through a lot to get where they are and this makes them special.
ok.
that’s my 2 cents.
Ug, I had the crowded bus hard-on nastiness too, in Budapest, so we jumped off which turned out well cause we were going completely the wrong way. Frottage, bad. Not going to Pest when one wants to be in Buda, not so bad.
I’m being blase here but the topic, when boiled down to the subjugation and abuse of half the population by the other half, is of course infuriating. It is rage-making stuff, an evil piece of evolutionary madness now perpetuated by custom and culture. We’ve come a long way, babies, but light years left to go. So if we need to err a little on the side of screaming profanities when we are made uncomfortable, that’s probably a good thing.