Ok, so before we get into this, some disclaimers:
- I’m getting into this because I really want to believe that we, as the young, hip, full of shit, touchy feely generation, can make a genuine and concerted effort to do better. For ourselves and for others. A big part of doing better starts with being real about what you need to fix. I’m going to be very real with you.
- I am not going to be present in most, or most likely any of your actual life situations. If a guy is coming at you with a fucking knife, or you feel impending violence on deck, that’s not the time to get witty. That’s when you fucking run. And if you’re white, probably when you call the police.
- This is 100% anecdotal. It’s shit that’s happened to me. It’s a tactic I’m trying out. There’s no scientific study. There hasn’t been a peer review. I’m just spitballing here. Take this with a grain of salt. It’s not fucking gospel. I’d rather you toss it out than try it in the wrong situation and end up dead.
If you think I’m being overdramatic, here’s a handy list of over a dozen women who died because they didn’t make themselves available for some total lunatic’s sexual and romantic whims.
“Before you are old enough to understand anything other than that you fucking like Go-Gurt, people are already impressing upon you that your body has very specific uses.”
It took a 2 second Google search to find that. It’s not some deep dark secret. It’s not some illuminati shit. An American is sexually assaulted about every minute and a half. From the time you clicked on this until now, probably 1-5 people have been sexually assaulted, depending on how fast you read.
Every 8 minutes, one of those Americans is a child. By the time you finish reading this, more people of all ages than you could comfortably fit in a minivan will have been sexually assaulted. This country has a huge problem. Enough people are wandering around harassing, groping, raping, and killing people of all ages, at will, out of sexual entitlement and resentment, that in the time it takes you to listen to your average pop song, 3-4 people have experienced one of the worst things imaginable.
And if you want to read this as me going out of my way to shit on men point blank, I’m really not. When referring to the victims and even the perpetrators in these cases, I have kept it very fucking open ended for a reason. While more women are sexually assaulted than men statistically, it’s also happening to males of all ages in staggeringly horrifying numbers. Bisexual women and trans people statistically face a pervasive threat of sexual violence higher than any other group.
Especially for men, this is largely treated as an impossibility or a hilarious joke because our culture is fucking disgusting. Many people don’t even recognize that bisexual or trans people are valid or real human beings, let alone that they are dealing with this shit.
Let’s be clear, I am 100% going out of my way to shit on rapists, sexual abusers, and harassers, and those who enable the continuation of this culture either actively or passively. In my case, all of the active aggressors have been male, while those who have been complicit, by either ignoring it or actively taking the side of the aggressor, have been a diverse cast of players. I used to be like that and didn’t even know I was doing it. We’re taught to do it and not even think about it.
That’s my experience. That’s where I’m coming from and talking from. If that pisses you off, feel free to send me hate mail or whatever, I guess.
I hope that’s very fulfilling for you.
I think many people who were assigned female at birth understand the specific struggle I’m talking about. Before you are old enough to understand anything other than that you fucking like Go-Gurt, people are already impressing upon you that your body has very specific uses. If you are lucky, all of this is subtle and non-violent. You get some baby dolls and are told that it’s practice for when you have babies one day, or something. For about a quarter of female children, it is not so subtle.
Every time a man appears to be following me in the dark, even if we just happen to be going the same way, I feel panic. When men aggressively shout sexual shit at me on the street, or otherwise demand my attention, time, and try to get personal information from me, and I have to find some kind of way to de-escalate the situation without compromising my safety, I feel horrible panic.
“I didn’t just want to get men to stop harassing me, but I wanted them to feel violated and uncomfortable, as they have been doing to me since I was a child.”
All my life it’s just been more and more and more of this shit. When I was a kid and spent most of my time outside covered in dirt, digging for dinosaur bones I would never find with a shitty plastic shovel, men were already making weird sexual comments about me and touching me against my will. By the time I started elementary school I was already constantly enraged by the total trampling of boundaries I was being unsuccessfully conditioned to accept and weigh my worth against.
As you can imagine, I was a fucking delight as a child.
It doesn’t take much for all those headlines, all those statistics, all those dead women, and my own fucked up experiences to flash before my eyes as an adult. To be real, I’ve experienced some shit. When I was in college, a seemingly chill dude I knew through the local music scene, who was supposed to come by to hook up, went out and got drunk instead. When he hit me up in the middle of the night, asking if he could come by drunk to fuck, and I told him not to bother, he fucking threatened to come by and “bring his boys” with him because I was a tease and I had it coming.
I didn’t fucking go back to my apartment for days. I wondered if he was gonna use me to add to our country’s rape statistics for my age demographic.
It never fucking stops. And every time some dude does a different shade of the same shitty thing, it all comes back.
A few months ago, an Uber driver bombarded me with uncomfortable questions about my sex life and then asked me if I lived alone. I got so freaked out I bolted out of his car at the next light we stopped at and walked a mile back to my house.
As I walked home in the rain, angry and freaked out because this motherfucker had my address, I really reached a breaking point.
I asked myself how I can stop this from happening to me, short of not appearing to be a woman anymore.
While it should not be the victim’s responsibility to prevent their own abuse, because people shouldn’t walk around torturing each other, they can, they do, and they will.
A single person cannot change cultural evils, but they can understand them, and in some cases, play with them.
If you want to combat something, first you must understand it. If you want to cheat at a game, you first must know the rules.
When men get weird and inappropriate with me on the street, or men I know and sometimes even thought I could trust, take weird and damaging liberties with me, they have centuries of violence and a whole culture that tells them they are entitled to my time and body backing them up. While I don’t think that any man who has yelled at a woman on the street “I would yank all over them tiddies” actually ever got to “yank all over them tiddies,” that didn’t fucking stop the guy who yelled that at me twice a week at least for a semester from howling at my tiddies like he was a werewolf under a full moon.
I think a lot of the dudes that do shit like that don’t even know the scope of what they are doing.They have been conditioned not to see women as complex people, and have grown up in an environment where reducing women to flesh sacks with holes you can dump cum into is just how it is. In moments where men do shit like that to people, they aren’t really recognizing them as an individual. They transform their victims into an empty thing they are asserting dominance over.
I wanted to steal that moment of dominance from them. I didn’t just want to get men to stop harassing me, but I wanted them to feel violated and uncomfortable, as they have been doing to me since I was a child. And I wanted to do it in a way where I would not end up fucking dead.
I have come to think that the kind of men who do shit like that to other people have bought so unthinkingly into hypermasculinity, that they have an incredibly large, soft, and vulnerable Achilles Heel. They have most likely become so emotionally constipated and repressed in the pursuit of an unattainable masculine ideal that they are an unexpected emotional experience away from utter fear.
I theorized that all it would take is a genuine outpouring of vulnerability and emotion, which many men who behave in this way are probably completely unprepared to handle, to get them to back away, faster than if you pulled a gun on them.
So, what does this look like in practice?
About two weeks ago, a man blocked my way while I was waiting for the light to change and traffic to stop so I could cross the street. I was on my way to Planned Parenthood because a few months ago I got an IUD, specifically to spite the American Right.
Anyway, I had headphones in, because I always walk around with headphones in, even though I rarely listen to music in public. That’s how much I don’t fucking want people to talk to me. I am an exhausted, deeply fucked up, unsociable motherfucker. I wear headphones and large dark sunglasses constantly. I am a no eye contact and no conversation zone.
Despite that, this dude tried to talk to me, saw that I had headphones in, and then kept poking me in the shoulder and trying to force eye contact until I took them out. When I did, he rapid fire complimented my (objectively gross) physical form, told me I was “gonna have to get to know him better now,” and then asked me if I had a boyfriend.
I looked at this dude and thought about everything I wanted to accomplish, to emotionally violate those who would so casually violate me with complete honesty.
I replied, “No. I have horrible emotional and psychological problems and am not good looking enough for anyone to ignore them long term. I will probably die without trusting another person.”
If you think that is an insane thing to say to a stranger, is it not also insane to walk up to a stranger, touch them, physically block their way, and make personal demands of them?
He let out a totally confused “What?” and I repeated exactly what I had said.
Motherfucker looked like the hand of a primordial god struck him. He shifted from foot to foot, his eyes bugged out, and he looked at me in sheer terror like in all his time spent harassing women it had never occurred to him that it’s a shitty thing to do.
He felt stuck in a conversation he did not want to have, with someone who made him deeply uncomfortable, and was not respecting his boundaries. He didn’t know what to do.
For the first time in my life, a man who had harassed me on the street apologized. He grunted out “sorry.” and fled.
Not every man I have done this to responds so well. Most of them who carry on like this seem pretty much incapable of any self-reflection, and decide that I’m too crazy to be worth it, and back away of their own choice.
This is also fine. They’re not wrong. It also leaves me totally unharmed and free to live my life with at least one threat neutralized. I have been doing this all year; a total of about 5 times, and no one has threatened me, attacked me, or demanded anything of me.
Our culture, which fosters and encourages these behaviors in men, has led to many women being insecure, existing constantly on alert, and being actively traumatized. I am all of those things, and on a base level it feels really good to tell these people all sorts of things about myself I have been taught to be ashamed of and hide. Why should the shame lay with we, who have had to live with what has been done to and ingrained in us, and not be felt at all by those who do have taken those actions and uphold those terrible standards?
Again, if a man is chasing you with a knife, we are probably past the point of flipping the script. There’s a time to get revenge, and there’s also a time to fucking run. But, next time a dude won’t fucking let up, consider trying out some brutal and raw emotional honesty™ and inappropriate vulnerability© to get him gone, instead of just standing there silently praying that he gives up quickly, or lying about an imaginary boyfriend.
Put him in his fucking place. A place far away from you.
If you are a victim of sexual assault you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline, available 24/7: Telephone: 800-656-HOPE (4673). You can also talk to someone online at https://www.rainn.org/
There are resources for you if you have been sexually harassed. You can find them at- http://www.feminist.org/911/harass.html.
Support Isadora’s writing on our site by subscribing to our newsletter on this link, Subscribe here!
Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane