who teaches women to fear?

[hammercock]

I've been tracking the responses on cereta's post "On men and rape" since there was only one page of comments. I know a bunch of my own friends have been reading, and some have been participating. There's been a lot of food for thought in the post and in comments, and it's frankly one of the most well-moderated, least acrimonious LJ discussions of this sort that I've ever seen. Anyway, I was reading vvalkyri's recent post on the topic and made some comments that I think are worth preserving in my own space -- specifically on the topic of who teaches women to fear -- so here they are. It doesn't even have to be specific people telling women to live in fear. The whole culture tells women to live in fear. You can tell your daughters all you want that they shouldn't, and they will still hear it from other sources. I hope they will listen to you, but you're going to have to work like hell to counteract the rest of society.

My parents never specifically taught me to live in fear, but these are all incidents from my own life:

• When I was, I dunno, 9 or 10? something like that...my brother and I had a teenaged male babysitter one night. He invited me to sit on his lap that evening. I did, feeling very strange about it, and I sat ramrod-straight, not relaxing against him. He didn't do anything at that time. A couple of years later, I heard that he had been arrested for child molestation.
• In 9th grade, I was walking home alone and a man in his early 20s stopped me, ostensibly to ask me a question. Then he tried to get me to linger and make conversation with him, and finally offered me a ride home. I'd been suspicious of him from about the 3rd sentence he'd spoken to me, and then he mentioned that he'd stopped on a side street because he'd seen police around on the main roads nearby. I declined his ride offer, and got away as fast as I could.
• Another time in high school, my best friend, little brother, and I were out for an evening walk on Thunder Hill Rd. in Columbia, in an area most would consider safe. A car full of teenaged boys started following us and making catcalls and leering. We ignored them as they passed, but then the car turned around and started coming at us. We ran as fast as we could between the nearby houses, where the car couldn't go, and ran as fast as we could all the way home.
• During the 2 years I lived on campus at SUNY-Albany, I frequently walked between quads alone in the middle of the night to visit friends, but only because the paths were wide, straight, and brightly lit. I also had a job at a pizza delivery place during first semester of freshman year. The quickest route to that job was a walk across a large athletic field that was almost completely unlit at night. Rather than walk home alone after my shift ended at 10 p.m. or so, I would catch a ride with anyone happening to make a delivery to campus. In second semester the owners wanted me to stay until midnight, but were not willing to guarantee me transportation home. I quit that job in favor of one in my quad's cafeteria, because I felt that risking my safety was not worth a minimum-wage job making pizzas.
• As a commuter student at UMCP, I never parked in the remote parking lots if I could help it when I knew I would be on campus late; if I couldn't, I always got someone to walk me to my car. There were too many possible places for potential assailants to hide on that campus, and assaults did happen there.
• All throughout college I made it a policy never to get drunk in large groups of strangers, such as at frat parties (yes, I went to a few). You know what the nickname was for the little sisters of the frats at SUNY-Albany? "Little mattresses."
• [This one I just remembered to add.] While attending UMCP I worked part-time at the Burlington Coat Factory in a dying mall in Jessup. The mall began hosting an indoor flea market on weekends as the shops closed one by one. One of my coworkers, a 16-year-old high school girl and a little slip of a thing, had gone out to the flea market during her lunch hour. When she returned, she shakingly told me about one of the vendors having just made a series of extremely vulgar remarks to her. A little later, while I was vacuuming the floor and she was staffing the cash register, this man came into the store and took advantage of the noise and distraction of my vacuuming to approach my coworker. I saw him talking to her, but I couldn't hear him and I didn't immediately grasp that this was the guy she meant. When I was finished with my task, I went over there and he walked away. She was absolutely petrified. It turned out that he had been telling her all kinds of disgusting things about what he wanted to do to her in his car after she was done with work. I was livid. I rang the security guard immediately, told him what happened, and the guard took her to the back office, got the man's description and a statement of what he'd done, and then he went out to the market and Had Words with him. I think he got banned from the mall after that.
• I can think of multiple times, starting in middle school, going through high school and college, and while travelling abroad when I have been randomly groped by men. Most of them were complete strangers. All of those incidents were in public places. One of those incidents took place in broad daylight on the streets of Istanbul, right in front of the rest of my family and a bazaar full of people.
• I was once fairly coerced into kissing someone I didn't really want to kiss, in a public place (a con, actually), at a time when I was in considerable physical pain from a recent car accident and didn't really have the energy to say no and make it stick.
• I have been followed around a con by someone who would not take the hint that I didn't want to talk to him, who waited for me outside the women's bathroom door after I'd spent the previous 5-10 minutes hiding from him in there, and who would not leave me alone until I asked a male friend to pretend that he and I were an item.
• Last September, while I was spending a week sitting vigil over my dying cousin at Sloan-Kettering Hospital in Manhattan, it was getting late and I wanted to go "home," which that evening was the apartment of a friend of my cousin's, about 20 blocks south. I was going to walk, but my mom (a native Brooklynite) argued with me about it and made me promise to take a cab instead, even gave me money to pay for it.

These are just my experiences, which don't even take into account all the women (and a few of the men) I know who have been molested and/or raped, either by strangers or by people they had been raised to trust, or by their partners. I know quite a lot of them, to my great sorrow.

So, I've rarely been told, specifically and explicitly, to live in fear. My experiences, and those of people I know, told me that I should at least consider being fearful (or at least very, very cautious) in certain situations, and nothing that I've experienced was even "that bad," though none of that should ever have happened at all. I wasn't molested as a child. I've never been raped. I still walk around my neighborhood at night, and I walk around Manhattan at night, often alone. But when I do it, I keep my wits about me.

I don't consider myself to live in any particular fear, by the way. I just recognize that women are constantly being bombarded with signals that we should be afraid. And that sucks.