I’ve been in deep thought the last couple days. I know what you’re thinking, but I stretched first to avoid injury, so I appreciate the concern but I’m fine.
My best gal pal Jessabean, wrote an eloquent piece on her blog about feminism. The article links to several other blogs and articles specifically on cat calling and if you have the time I highly suggest taking the time to review all the different perspectives.
The question, “am I a feminist,” struck a cord with me. I’m a little surprised women have to ask themselves that question.
But that topic will be covered (probably extensively) another day.
Today I want to talk a little bit about the underlying theme of the aforementioned posts. Sexual assault.
These thoughts of feminism were sparked from an earlier conversation about cat calling, specifically in DC. Now I live in the DC metro area and have, myself, been cat called. Sometimes I think nothing of it, sometimes it irritates the shit out of me, and sometimes it scares the hell out of me. I’ll give you two examples.
The other day I was in Old Town, Alexandria, getting ready to cross the street to meet at friend at Chadwicks, I was waiting for traffic to cross and as a car drove past me, the guy in the passenger seat looked at me and said “muy bonita.” I’m not sure if he knew I even heard him, or that I spoke Spanish, but I gave this incident very little thought. Since his car was moving, I was in a public place surrounded by others and it was daylight, I didn’t feel threatened at all.
On the other hand, one time I was walking toward the metro and walked in front of a row house where several men were sitting on the porch. It was just after 9, it was sorta dark, and it was a quiet street. From the porch one of the guys yelled to me “We need a swing like that on this porch baby!” I kept walking and pretended not to hear him as his friends laughed. I guess the guy wasn’t satisfied because he came down off the porch to follow me yelling “Hey,” at me as if to get my attention. I continued to ignore him. He jogged up to me and put his hand on my shoulder to stop me. It scared the shit out of me. I turned around really quickly and put my hands up defensively. I guess he got the hint because he put his hands up in and backed away from me calling me a “crazy bitch” under his breath.
Now I imagine the women reading this post find my reaction to the guy touching me to be justified, probably a lot of the men too. But there are some out there that would see me as overreacting to a guy trying to get my attention. But the point men often don’t see is that we as women see every cat call incident as a possible threat.
Why do we react to a guy calling out “hey baby” as a threat? The answer is not simple. Female sexuality has been taught to us (us = women) as something we should protect. We are told as little girls that boys only want one thing and that its our responsibility as women to protect our virginity. Now I don’t actually think this is a good thing to teach our daughters, I think sexual empowerment is liberating and helps develop a balanced psyche, yet, I still recognize that some evil men might use my sexuality as a weapon to hurt me.
A woman is raped every 2 minutes. EVERY 2 MINUTES. Now I’m not trying to say men aren’t raped, they are and while only one in 50 female rape victims report the crime it’s estimated that the under-reporting for male victims is even higher. I’m not saying men aren’t victims, but most of the male victims are also children (under 16) and that brings about a whole other topic about pedophilia and child abuse.
We, women, are taught from a very early age that rape is a possibility of our lives. One of my favorite feminist books Cunt! A Declaration of Independence, by Inga Muscio goes into a little detail about this unspoken female awareness of sexual assault. Muscio is a night owl and often writes into the early hours of the morning. She describes in one of her chapters about the relationship she has with a woman in her building. This woman works the graveyard shift is often just getting home around 3:00 am. When Muscio needed to run out to the 24 hour corner market to get supplies for her all night writing sessions she’d call the woman and tell her where she was going and that she’d be back in fifteen minutes. The woman never inquired why Muscio was calling to tell her that piece of information nor did they ever discuss what was to be done if she didn’t call her. She just knew, just like we all do.
I’ve done this myself, especially in college. I would call my roommate (who happens to be unquietheart from the linked blog at the top of this post) when I was leaving something late on campus to let her know I was going to be home soon. I wanted her to know where I was and what time I’d be there in case I was attacked on my route home. This may seem dramatic, but sexual assault happened often on our college campus and while I didn’t live in fear that it would happen to me, there was no shame in taking precautions.
My freshman year we had a peeping tom hit the Village (a group of 8 dorms or so) where I lived. He would peak at girls in the shower. We had been warned, but didn’t think much of it. Then we got the report that he had reached into one of the showers and grabbed a girl on her buttocks. That had me pretty concerned. Then a night sometime later I hear my suitemate scream from OUR bathroom and ran to investigate. She had walked in to find a man standing on a sink looking over into the shower on her roommate. He fell at the sound of my suitemates scream, but escaped before campus police arrived. From that day until the guy was caught we had a buddy system. We dragged a chair into the bathroom and took turns sitting in the chair to keep watch while one of us showered. To this day my gal pals will still sometimes call me to let me know where they are and when they will get there. I never question them and always stay up until I get that “I’m home,” phone call or text message. It’s what women do for each other, it’s the unspoken rule that we all know and never talk about.
Posted by notnancysinatra 
Posted by notnancysinatra 