I wrote this is 2010, after a man, who had found me on a dating website, “done some recon”, and started reading my blog, made a sexual comment on a post. Here it is, excerpted and slightly edited for clarity:
I think every woman has had some experience where she has felt sexually threatened—it puts 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 a few 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.
In 2009, 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.