I am not an "opportunity"

I was walking with a male friend the other night to get to a particular shop. We were following the maps on his phone and it led us the quickest way which just happened to be through an alley. It wasn’t a particularly threatening looking alley, and there were a lot of people around at either end but there was no one inside. Just garages and dustbins. Instantly, I made a nervous joke; “aaaand this is where we get mugged”. His answer surprised me. He said,

            “Oh. I didn’t even realise this was an alley”.

Now, acknowledging that being raped in an alleyway is not statistically the most likely scenario when it comes to sexual assault, I still couldn’t help but think, ‘how lucky for you, that you don’t have to assess your particular levels of vulnerability at various times in various locations. How lucky that you don’t have to walk around the block – however far that might be - in order to avoid certain areas that I feel, as a woman, I’ve been trained to identify and avoid. How lucky that you don’t ever feel threatened by something so simple as an alley, or an empty carpark, that there probably won’t be someone lurking there who might view your temporary isolation as an opportunity’. 

A conversation yesterday with a female friend brought up another point.

            “If I go out for some drinks with friends and a man approaches me, it should be enough for me just to say ‘thanks but no thanks. I’m not interested’. Why is it that the only definitive way to make him go away is to tell him that I have a boyfriend? My own unwillingness should be enough. It shouldn’t take the threat of treading on another mans ‘turf’ to make him stop. He should stop out of respect for me, not my boyfriend”.

I went out with a group of girls about a month ago. We went out to dance.

Not to pick up.

To be with each other.

Some of these girls had crossed the country to be with me that night and I wanted to dance with them. Not random men on the dance floor.

As expected, some men came up and tried to dance with us, and I don’t begrudge them that at all. This is modern pickup culture and people meet all the time on the dance floor, but on this particular night we weren’t interested and we made that very apparent.

We were in no way rude. We simply kept to ourselves, dancing in a tight circle, and when men came up to us, we simply moved somewhere else to dance.

After about an hour a man came up to my friend and poked her in the chest.

“You bitches think you can just walk in here? You think you’re so much better than everyone else? Just cause you’re a woman and just because you have a vagina, you think you own the world? You pack of stuck up bitches. You think you’re too good to dance with us”.

I’m not normally an angry person, but those words made me see red. Because how dare he feel that he was entitled to anything from us? How dare he feel cheated because…god forbid, some women didn’t want to dance with him. Somewhere somehow, in his screwed up version of the world, the fact that we were dressed up and out to have a good time automatically meant that we should in some way be putting out to him and his friends. Because… duh. That’s what short dresses and make up mean, right?

All these incidents by themselves wouldn’t have been enough to make me write this post…because the sad thing is that they’re everyday occurrences. They are things that women deal with on a daily basis that I’d bet some men don’t even realise (and I only say some, because I also know that I have many very sensitive and thoughtful men in my life).

But I decided to write this post because two much bigger incidents happened to me this year, and I’ve decided that remaining silent about them doesn’t serve to help, educate or change anything. If I had to go through them then I’d at least like them to affect change in some way or form.

One evening, a few weeks ago I went down some stairs the fast way and ended up doing some serious damage to my ankle. There was only one person who saw it happen and he came straight over to help me back to my room. I was leaning heavily on him the whole way, utterly unable to put any weight on my ankle. As far as movement was concerned, I was pretty helpless. When we got back to my room I thanked him and said goodnight but he insisted on coming in with me and helping me take off my shoes. So I let him in and I limped to my bed. I heard him close the door behind us and even through my pain it registered as a strange thing to do. He helped me take my shoe off and made a show of looking at my ankle. Suddenly he was sitting beside me, stroking my hair, telling me how beautiful I was. At that point I realised that somehow despite being crying, injured and helpless I’d turned into an opportunity for him. So I stood up and on one foot, hopped over and herded him to my bedroom door. I opened it …and he reached around me and closed it again. I ended up pressed up against my door with this guy trying to put his face in my chest. Thankfully (and purely because I’m a tall, reasonably strong woman) I managed to open the door again and throw him out of the room.

I confronted him about it the next day and his reaction was.

“Oh don’t stress about it. I’m sorry. I was drunk”.

No.

A few months ago, a best friend of 10 years utterly betrayed me.

I was at a party at his house and decided to stay the night on a mattress in the living room. When I woke up there was a camera lying next to me. I was the first person awake, so to pass the time I decided to look at the happy photos which had been taken during the previous evening. What I found instead were several pictures of me, asleep, with my friend standing over me, holding his penis up against my body and face.

No.

I want to make one thing here very clear;

It is not my responsibility to make sure I am not harassed or assaulted.

I am not obligated to wear (or not wear) certain things in order to deter harassment or assault.

I am not obligated to have to behave in a certain way in order to deter harassment or assault.

I should be allowed to walk down any street, at any time, without weighing up my likelihood of being raped.

I should be afforded the respect of being able to say no.

These are my rights, and no matter what I do, what I wear, or where I walk, I should never be considered anyone’s ‘opportunity’. 

The responsibility to make sure that I am not harassed or assaulted lies with those who identify that they could.

It is our responsibility as a community to change this culture, to tell these stories and hold those responsible accountable. To educate our sons, brothers and friends about what the close women in their lives go through, and hope that sometimes even a conversation about this can make changes for the better.

I am not a distant blogger or columnist. I am not an article in a newspaper or an extreme, ranting feminist. I am your friend and colleague and in some cases, family, and these things have happened to me in the past six months alone. I would like to also make a point that they have not happened because I work in a male dominated environment. These events occurred outside of work, in the regular civilian world.

I realise, of course, that this entire post is directed to the wrong audience because I believe that my life (and my facebook) is full of quality, respectful, kind men - the men reading this blog post. But if this post generates one positive discussion between people who may not have realised how inherent and deeply ingrained this behaviour is in modern society, then I feel like I have justified the time it took to write it. If one person can address these issues with a boyfriend, brother or friend, then that makes me feel like these events at least had some sort of purpose.