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Not even a mile in your shoes, just trying them on, and I still got blisters
There was a man in the train station today who was drunk. He was in his early 20s, heavyset, about 6'1", and sitting down with my hair and my eyeliner and my tight jeans and my big jacket and my pretty face, he thought I was a girl. He came up to me and sat right down without asking, putting his bag in such a way that it blocked me from getting up without shoving it out of the way. He leaned close, getting way in my personal space. He smelled bad. He said you know, too many people don’t appreciate short hair and glasses on girls. I think it’s adorable.
My first response was to tell him to get bent, you drunk fuck, I’m not a goddamned girl. But I caught myself. I realized that his accident had, just for a minute, taken away my privilege, even though I knew I still had the safety of being able to “reveal” at any moment. I decided to not correct him, to experience as close as I could the casual harassment that I read about so often on your blogs. So when he asked me my name, I kept my voice quiet, soft, and just said Andy, not Andrew. I let him assume that it ended in an i.
He said his name was Alan Lucas, that George Lucas was his great-uncle, did I know who that was? I looked like a geek girl, with my computer, but he couldn’t help but notice it was an HP running Windows 7. I really should use Linux. He could set it up for me. He tried to take it from my hands. I didn’t let him, and he promised he wasn’t going to hurt it like I was a three year old. I said no thank you again, and I realized that I was intimidated by him in a way I wouldn’t have been if I had been interacting with him with both of us aware of my gender.
He offered me a drink from a nasty half-full bottle of flat coke heavily laced with some kind of cheap whisky. I said no thank you. He said one little drink wouldn’t hurt, that he was being generous, that this was really good whiskey, $400 a bottle. He said he had a contract with the US government to make top-secret new weapons and was a genius computer engineer like Tony Stark, then laughed and asked me if I’d seen the Avengers, asked if I thought Thor was a hottie, or was I - he leered, and his teeth were stained - more the Black Widow type. Because if I was, that was cool. He was cool with lesbians. He’d slept with a lot of them. He was good with his tongue. He wagged it at me.
I showed him my left hand, where I wear the ring on my ring finger in memory of Brittany. I said I’m not interested. He ran a hand through my hair and told me not to be a bitch, he was just being nice. I said I was working on something, would he please leave me alone. His face twisted up as if I’d randomly come up to him on the street and kicked him in the balls, and for a moment, I was very afraid, because I knew absolutely that he was simply deciding what he wanted to do to me with utterly no concern for whether it was ok or not, because by wounding his pride and turning him down, I’d warranted whatever vengeance he chose as the injured party. Finally he just grabbed his bag, knocking over mine and almost knocking my computer off my lap very much on purpose and stomped off, grumbling very loudly that you try to be nice to a girl…why do they have to be such fucking dumb bitches, fucking dyke sluts, deserve what they get.
I still don’t understand what it’s like to live with that every day. I can’t. I won’t. There is absolutely no equivalence between five minutes in a train station where I could have revealed my gender at any moment and being trapped not only in a culture where it’s constant but where if he’d go further, you’d be blamed, whether you’d ‘pissed him off’ or 'lead him on.’ I can’t understand really what it is to have to calculate everything you do by that paradigm. But even that little glimpse was incredibly eye-opening, and made it all so much more real.
And I’m sorry. As a guy, I’m so sorry that you have to exist in that reality, and I’ll try to do everything I can to change it.
Tagged: rape culture, street harassment, nice guys, feminism, supernatural meta, meta
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Andy gets harrassed by an Avengers fanboy
(Anonymous) 2015-04-16 06:14 am (UTC)(link)Not even a mile in your shoes, just trying them on, and I still got blisters
There was a man in the train station today who was drunk. He was in his early 20s, heavyset, about 6'1", and sitting down with my hair and my eyeliner and my tight jeans and my big jacket and my pretty face, he thought I was a girl. He came up to me and sat right down without asking, putting his bag in such a way that it blocked me from getting up without shoving it out of the way. He leaned close, getting way in my personal space. He smelled bad. He said you know, too many people don’t appreciate short hair and glasses on girls. I think it’s adorable.
My first response was to tell him to get bent, you drunk fuck, I’m not a goddamned girl. But I caught myself. I realized that his accident had, just for a minute, taken away my privilege, even though I knew I still had the safety of being able to “reveal” at any moment. I decided to not correct him, to experience as close as I could the casual harassment that I read about so often on your blogs. So when he asked me my name, I kept my voice quiet, soft, and just said Andy, not Andrew. I let him assume that it ended in an i.
He said his name was Alan Lucas, that George Lucas was his great-uncle, did I know who that was? I looked like a geek girl, with my computer, but he couldn’t help but notice it was an HP running Windows 7. I really should use Linux. He could set it up for me. He tried to take it from my hands. I didn’t let him, and he promised he wasn’t going to hurt it like I was a three year old. I said no thank you again, and I realized that I was intimidated by him in a way I wouldn’t have been if I had been interacting with him with both of us aware of my gender.
He offered me a drink from a nasty half-full bottle of flat coke heavily laced with some kind of cheap whisky. I said no thank you. He said one little drink wouldn’t hurt, that he was being generous, that this was really good whiskey, $400 a bottle. He said he had a contract with the US government to make top-secret new weapons and was a genius computer engineer like Tony Stark, then laughed and asked me if I’d seen the Avengers, asked if I thought Thor was a hottie, or was I - he leered, and his teeth were stained - more the Black Widow type. Because if I was, that was cool. He was cool with lesbians. He’d slept with a lot of them. He was good with his tongue. He wagged it at me.
I showed him my left hand, where I wear the ring on my ring finger in memory of Brittany. I said I’m not interested. He ran a hand through my hair and told me not to be a bitch, he was just being nice. I said I was working on something, would he please leave me alone. His face twisted up as if I’d randomly come up to him on the street and kicked him in the balls, and for a moment, I was very afraid, because I knew absolutely that he was simply deciding what he wanted to do to me with utterly no concern for whether it was ok or not, because by wounding his pride and turning him down, I’d warranted whatever vengeance he chose as the injured party. Finally he just grabbed his bag, knocking over mine and almost knocking my computer off my lap very much on purpose and stomped off, grumbling very loudly that you try to be nice to a girl…why do they have to be such fucking dumb bitches, fucking dyke sluts, deserve what they get.
I still don’t understand what it’s like to live with that every day. I can’t. I won’t. There is absolutely no equivalence between five minutes in a train station where I could have revealed my gender at any moment and being trapped not only in a culture where it’s constant but where if he’d go further, you’d be blamed, whether you’d ‘pissed him off’ or 'lead him on.’ I can’t understand really what it is to have to calculate everything you do by that paradigm. But even that little glimpse was incredibly eye-opening, and made it all so much more real.
And I’m sorry. As a guy, I’m so sorry that you have to exist in that reality, and I’ll try to do everything I can to change it.
Tagged: rape culture, street harassment, nice guys, feminism, supernatural meta, meta