I had a scary experience last night with a man and had a complete breakdown about it. It’s not that the interaction was THAT bad, but I feel like I have so many shitty interactions with men every day that it just weighs on me so heavily. I never have bad or scary or threatening interactions with women on the street, at the office, or while driving, but it happens, without exaggeration, every time I go outside. Men don’t understand the frequency at which this happens. It’s literally every single day. At every single place. On every digital platform. It’s extremely exhausting. Whenever I say this to a man they tell me to just rise above it and not think about it, as if I’m not already doing that 99.9% of my life. Sometimes it just gets to me and I crumble.
I was driving last night down a narrow, poorly lit road and three men walked across the street really, really slowly, wearing all black and making a point to slow down when they were in my lane, just to be assholes. I honked once lightly because I was being petty and I was annoyed. Two of them continued to cross the street and got on the sidewalk, but one stopped in my lane and made me slam on my breaks so I didn’t hit him. He stood in front of my car screaming at me at the top of his lungs, making huge gestures with his arms, livid at me. I tried to just crank my wheel and go around him, but he jumped in front of my car. This happened two more times. I sat there with no emotion on my face because men only want a reaction out of you – to intimidate you. The street was totally fucking empty and I was alone with this crazy man screaming at me and jumping in front of my car. I burst into tears as I drove away.
This wouldn’t have been as big of a deal if I hadn’t had two similar experiences in the last month. I was outside Trader Joes and a guy was asking for money. I told him I don’t carry cash, sorry, and went inside. It was super busy and he was speaking to every single person that came out of the store – not just me, not just women. I walked to the side of the building to wait for my brother, and the homeless man slowly, slowly edged around the side of the building, moving 6 inches at a time, until he was standing right next to me, staring at me. He seemed to have his faculties about him and was not acting intoxicated or erratic at all. As soon as he saw me make eye contact with my brother, he scurried away. It makes me so angry that a 16 year old boy garners more respect on the street from other men than me, an adult woman. I walk with my brother regularly and never get cat called, but when I leave him in a coffee shop and walk away for a few minutes, the same men shout things at me.
Back to Trader Joes. I shop, take my brother home (our dad lives nearby and he just came to shop with me), get my car, and pull out of the parking lot. I’m stopped at a light at a very busy intersection with lots of traffic going every which way. I see the homeless man slinking over to my car. He stands inches away from my locked door and taps on my window repeatedly with his fingernails. I completely ignore him after I gave him a stern look. He’s talking to me and standing in front of my mirror so I couldn’t just drive off. I felt completely trapped. There were men in cars behind me that this did not happen to.
Yesterday, the same day as the car incident, a man I don’t know DMed me on Instagram after I posted a photo of myself in a bra and pants and asked me to do a photoshoot with him. I said I don’t do that with men, thanks anyway. This happens fairly regularly. He asked me why and I linked him to an article about Matt Hickey, a guy in Seattle who posed as a photographer and would ask girls to model for him and then rape them. He’s in prison now. He sent me a soliloquy about how it’s a shame men aren’t chivalrous anymore. He sent me several paragraphs trying to convince me to model for him. He claimed to have a portfolio, but none of the photos were his, and none of the companies he claimed to work for existed.
On Sunday night I went to my regular CODA 12-step group. My first night there a guy started talking to me in the lobby. He was there for medical services but thought CODA might be a good fit for him too. He mentioned he just got out of prison after 35 years. I kept my distance and went to my meeting. The next week he was at the meeting with me and he made me very uncomfortable. He didn’t follow group rules and acted erratically, with body spasms and clear issues with addiction. I grew up in a house of severe addicts, the defining factor that has led to my codependency and abusive relationships, and being around actively using addicts makes me spiral into panic attack after panic attack. I decided to go to a different meeting because his presence made me uncomfortable. I started going to a different meeting. The same man showed up at that one, not following the rules and just generally making me uncomfortable. I realized you must do something pretty awful if you’re in prison for 35 years so I looked up a sex offender registry in my neighborhood. He was in prison for four counts of child rape and molestation.
He only went to meetings about 60% of the time so I kept going. Last Sunday night, he showed up and he was very, very intoxicated. Borderline belligerently drunk. He was talking out of turn and could barely sit up. He was not speaking coherent sentences. This is an extreme trigger for me and I could not handle it. I went outside to have a cup of coffee and calm down for a minute. I decided that part of CODA is not giving other people power over your own life and that I needed to take my power back from him and go to the meeting. He continued to make me extremely uncomfortable. Fifteen minutes before the end of the meeting, the man began staring at me very, very intensely without blinking or moving. I turned my body away from him (we were sitting kitty-corner with one person in between us) and looked away, but he didn’t stop. His body was angled towards me and it was making me extremely anxious. At the end of the meeting we have to hold hands and say the serenity prayer. I felt safe because there was a person in between me and the man, but they ducked out at the last second and left, so I was supposed to hold his hand. I touched his wrist with one finger but couldn’t stop thinking about the horrific, life ruining things his hands did to someone. I jerked my hand away from him and as soon as the meeting was over I ran out into the street. A group member who I trust a lot ran out after me and asked if I am ok and I just burst into tears. He told me that this wasn’t something I have to fight through – I can just go to a different meeting. He noticed him staring at me and felt it was disgusting and entirely inappropriate. I feel disgusted that this vile human has taken my meeting from me and now I have to change my routine because of him, but it’s what I need to do to take care of myself.
This was just a few days in my life and doesn’t account for every interaction I’ve had. It doesn’t account for the courier at work three times my age holding his hand on mine for a few seconds too long when I was grabbing the clipboard from him. It doesn’t account for the homeless kid screaming “SLUT” at me when I walked out of work the other day. It doesn’t account for the dozens of weird DMs I’ve received about my body. It doesn’t account for the man that asked me to take out my headphones and stop working at the coffee shop the other day so he could talk to me and ask me out. It’s exhausting.
This is all riding on the coattails of a weird event last summer. A guy had been dming me on instagram alternating between negging me and making fun of me for being white (which is fine and doesn’t bother or offend me but was weird and out of nowhere). He began talking deeply about mental illness out of nowhere and it made me uncomfortable so I blocked him. Nine months later I woke up in the middle of the night to a phone call from a number I didn’t know. I answered, and it was a man demanding to know what happened with us and why I was ignoring him. I assumed he had the wrong number because I was not seeing anyone and I was very, very confused. He texted me, gaslighting me and refusing to tell me who he was, saying he was with a high school friend of mine, angry that I had blocked him (I never had his cell phone number in the first place). He told me that he was angry that he saw me at a bar with another guy in January, nine months prior to the phone call. I have never seen this man in real life in my life. I was very concerned and weirded out. I hung up on him and texted him “you are making me uncomfortable. please do not contact me again. I don’t know what you are talking about.” he fired back about how i’m “performing wokeness” and being a “typical white feminist”. I checked my Instagram DMs before falling asleep and had a DM from a friend saying that they were concerned because a man cornered them at a bar and demanded to know why I was ignoring him. I have no idea how he knew who they were.
I posted on Facebook about this and the response was overwhelming – of my 500 friends on facebook, over 30 other women had had similar or worse experiences with him. He admitted to one that he “had problems with consent”. After calling me, he called two other random women and yelled at them. I posted it in a feminist Facebook group and two dozen other women came forward from his hometown, claiming that he is extremely predatory and uses feminism and activism to prey on people – if white women (and he only went after white women) politely turn him down for a date or tell him he’s making them uncomfortable (he told several women he enjoys making them uncomfortable) he says that he did emotional labor for them and they’re being performative and they need to go on a date with him because if they don’t it means they are racist and a bad feminist. I don’t think this worked on any of the women that came forward, but I can see a baby feminist or someone who is not as aware thinking that he has authority and he’s correct. There were also a few people who told me that I was being racist by outing him and that to be a good ally I should keep my mouth shut and let the community deal with it. I posted several times asking for people to help him, for men to reach out and offer support or resources for him. No one did.
After warning people about this man for a few months, I received a text from a friend in his hometown stating that he had been arrested for sexually assaulting a woman on a bus. When the woman ran off the bus, he followed her, slamming her up against a wall and attempting to rape her. He has been charged with four counts: kidnapping, sexual assault x2, and assault with intent to cause physical harm.
I’m wary of all men. I don’t trust any of them – guilty until proven innocent. It drives me crazy when people (men) are offended by this. I often use this analogy to try and help them understand: you walk to school every day and ride past 10 houses with angry, snarling dogs outside of them. All the dogs try and bite you through the fence. This happens every day for years. One day, you walk by a dog on the street and you flinch. All you know is dogs trying to come after you, and this one looks and sounds like the rest of them, so why wouldn’t it come after you too?
I was about to go on a rant about this here but thought I would just reblog this thing I wrote for my personal blog because it’s way easier.
Men
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