Followed
I was hot, with sweat
pooling in the cups of my padded bra. I was also grateful to be entering the
shade of the underpass to get to the other side of the road. We’d just gotten
lost – not majorly, but enough to feel tired and a little cranky and like the
boat ride across to the other side of town better be fucking worth it. It was
inconvenient, the way the hairs on my arms suddenly prickled as I saw him. But
something told me: pay
attention.
“Yo’, stand here with me
for a second,” I said to my friend, in amongst a throng of people in rush hour
pedestrian traffic. From beside a stall selling leather sandals I watched his
broad shoulders and the strap of his navy blue satchel disappear into the
crowd. “It’s probably nothing, but that guy who was beside you – I think
he was following us.” She craned to get a better look. “I’ll bet it’s just
coincidence, but…” I trailed off, suddenly feeling really stupid. Like I was
overreacting. Don’t we always presume it can’t possibly be as bad as we think
it is? That it is us, not them?
“Hey,” she said, rubbing my
forearm. “You’re right, it probably is nothing. But better safe than sorry,
right?”
“Right.”
I
knew what I felt, though.
We passed a minute or two,
and agreed to press on. Shuffling along the passage, the light at the other end
of the tunnel started to peak, and right there, in the middle of the steps,
casually on his phone but sat with a view of every commuter passing by, he was. Waiting.
“It’s him,” I whispered,
pulling her off to one side with me. “He really is fucking following us.”
We sped up, and then
suddenly she stopped. Turning on her heel he was right behind her – as he
must’ve been the whole goddamn time. The whole time around the market, down the
winding, bending streets of old town, lurking nearby as we bought baklava at a
roadside store and joked with the shopkeeper as honey dribbled down our chins
and forearms and he handed us wet wipes like we were naughty kids he had to
lovingly scold. I wanted to hide. Shrink. Disappear. I’d already seen an old
man grab a young girl’s bum as he walked by her that day. I already wished I
were more invisible. Less female.
“NO!” my friend yelled,
clearly and unwaveringly in his face. “NO. YOU HAVE TO GO.” The man look
mortified. Embarrassed. The tiniest part of me felt sorry for him, like maybe
we’d gotten the wrong end of the stick. Isn’t that fucked up?
“Go!” she continued. “GO.
GO. GO.” She continued to shout as I stared, unmoving, and he walked away into
the crowd again. He glanced back twice, as if to see if we really meant it.
She asked me, eventually,
after some stunned silence from us both, if I was okay. All I could croak out
was, “It never occurred to me to stand up to him.”
It really didn’t. I thought
my job in the face of fear was to run.
There’s not a single woman
I know who does not have a story like this one. A story about being touched
without permission in London, exposed to in New York. Followed in Rome.
Assaulted in South Korea. Cat-called everywhere from England to India to
America. Every female friend, work colleague, dinner companion I’ve ever had –
every last one - has felt the touch of a stranger’s fingertips or sting of his
derogatory words. Between us we’ve been fondled, coerced, intimidated. Worse.
They say a man’s greatest
fear is that a woman will laugh at him, and that a woman’s greatest fear is
that a man will kill her. I have a very real fear of sexual assault. I walk
home with my house keys between my fingers. Seldom make eye contact on the
street after a certain hour. Wear flats over heels because you can’t run in heels. I take deliberate steps to occupy less “space”, so that somehow I can
convince myself I am less of a target.
What I have never done is
speak up. Turn, like my friend did, and looked a man belittling me in the eye
to say, “No. That behaviour is not right.” And doing that, being part of an
exchange where I got to stand up for myself in that way – it’s changed
everything. It took seconds to rearrange the faulty parts of my thinking that
had me believe it is my fault if I feel uncomfortable. My fault for having red
lips or light hair or a vagina.
I know what I will do next
time – because, of course, there will be a next time. There will continue to be
next times until we all feel empowered enough to say, when it happens, loudly
and apologetically, “No. You do not get to do that to me.” That’s what I will
do. Speak up. For myself. For us all. And I hope it does drawn attention to
them. Embarrasses them. I hope that we can laugh in their faces, because if
that's as real as their fear gets, they've gotten off so very lightly.
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