-Essay-
ROME — If only I were able, I could paint a portrait of him. Blond, clear eyes, and an Invicta backpack on his shoulders. Mid-30s. Not particularly tall or thin. I wonder if the image in my head really matches what he looks like.
[shortcode-Women-worldwide–Sign-up-box]
I had met his gaze, along with that of dozens of other people, inside a crowded subway car. It was just after 10 p.m., I had finished a journalism workshop, and was heading to the home of a friend who was hosting me in a city where I don’t live, in a neighborhood I had never visited. And where, more than a decade later, I have never returned.
I got out of the metro and took an underpass. The direction was obligatory, I believe, or in any case I hadn’t bothered to find another way. It was dimly lit, with car headlights to my left, tall grass and weeds to my right. With one hand I held the phone to my ear, with the other I swung a closed umbrella, holding it by the lanyard.
I could hear footsteps behind me, and every now and then I had the perception that they were getting closer. Normal, I thought. Too close, it’s what I didn’t want to think. A voice in some remote area of my brain was telling me that as long as I talked on the phone I would be safe. And so, even that one time, I would get away with it.
Instead we hung up, and within seconds those too-close steps became a hand grabbing me by the waistband of my pants. The blond guy with the backpack was pushing me toward the dark side of the street. I screamed, a lot, and hit him with my umbrella. Then I ran, I couldn’t tell how far or with what legs.
For quite a few years after, I avoided underpasses and preferred to take miles of alternative roads instead of walking through them. That made me furious.
The guilty feeling of not having done enough
I often think back to how I lived that experience. For a while, I told practically no one about it. I told myself that it was better not to create unnecessary worry, all in all it had gone well.
Had I perhaps returned his glance on the subway?
Part of me also thought that I somehow shared the blame. After all, I had not sought a different path than the dimly lit one. The course had ended in the late afternoon, but I had lingered around until evening. Had I perhaps returned his glance on the subway?
I had grown up with the belief that male violence was an inevitable fact of life. My task as a woman was to do everything to avoid it. In case I failed to do so, the fault would be mine. A few years later, I would learn that this socially accepted cognitive dissonance is called “rape culture.”
Rooted everywhere
In the landmark 1993 book: Transforming a Rape Culture, it is defined as a series of “beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women.” A rape culture “condones – physical and emotional – terrorism against the women as the norm. In rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, as inevitable as death or taxes.”
From a very young age we are taught that we must protect ourselves. From the wolf, from the monster. From “malintenzionati” (bad guys) was the most commonly used expression in our family.
Among the memories of my adolescence there are certain Saturday afternoons spent dressing up with my girlfriends before going out. With my parents there was an unspoken agreement: I could wear whatever I liked, but it was better if I wasn’t “too naked,” if the plan was to go downtown on a Saturday night. The short skirt and low-cut T-shirt were fine for house parties or quiet evenings. If I was going out, it was better not to put myself in the position of not having done enough.
These recommendations made me feel uncomfortable. Yet, I perceived them as common sense, and so did my peers. We never talked about it, but we knew that we had to protect ourselves, limit ourselves, place ourselves in some kind of risk management. And so we did, and we keep on doing.
A silent pact
We walk with keys clutched in our hands two blocks away from the front door, talk loudly on the phone or pretend to do so, watch each other’s backs, keep the music low or listen only from a headset, share the location with trusted people, choose the brightest street even if it is longer, change sidewalks if we pass someone, feel relief if it is another girl.
A regular part of this silent pact is the notion of: “text me when you get home.” It has been a form of care that I have experienced since I was a teenager. I cannot count how many times over the years I have said, written, read, heard this phrase, greeting someone late at night. They were always women, the only ones who could understand instantly and without need of explanation the subtext of those words: feeling like potential prey, dodging it this time, too.
It’s a certification of the mechanism of fear that inhabits so much of our movements.
What my teenage friends and I never confided in each other, because we didn’t think it was appropriate, is that the sensation of feeling like we were being preyed upon disgusts us. We didn’t know what was said about it to males, but we had the doubt that “don’t rape” was not among the recommendations. It wasn’t written, advertised, mentioned anywhere that we were to be left alone.
That is why “text me when you get home” still provokes ambivalent feelings in me: an act of concern and care for each other, but also a certification of the mechanism of fear that inhabits so much of our movements.
When Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by a policeman in London in 2021, she was on her way home from a dinner with friends, it was 9:30 p.m. Everard was 33 years old, she was dressed without any skin exposed, and had chosen the longest street because it was better lit. She had talked to her boyfriend on the phone shortly before she was attacked. It was all done the proper way, yet someone objected.
After her death, British politician Jenny Jones proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for men so that women would be safer. An uproar ensued, from women and men. In those days, Arwa Mahdawi wrote that it was in fact as if women already had to abide by an imaginary curfew: “Those who rise up at the idea of a male curfew should perhaps ask themselves, with some critical spirit, why we are not equally upset when women are told to adapt their behavior in response to male violence.”
Women and the verb “avoid”
Since adolescence, writer Rachel Hewitt explained some time ago, girls’ public space is significantly more restricted than that of boys. If you’re 14 and female, your daily movement map is one-third of what it is for male peers.
Patriarchal society is built on women’s fear.
A man has complete freedom to experience the urban space, with no time limits or need for much planning. Instead, a woman’s ability to move is linked inseparably with the verb “avoid”: to avoid a certain street, to avoid crossing a glance, to avoid going to a certain place at a certain time by public transportation, to avoid stretches on foot. Avoid underpasses.
At the root of this continuous security assessment work lies fear. Often categorized as a feeling linked to some gender fragility, women’s fear is instead a device that is not only firm and accepted, but also serves a purpose. Fear, argues Professor Leslie Kern in her book Feminist city: Claiming Space in a Man-made World, limits women’s lives and keeps them “dependent on men as protectors,” relegating them to the private space of the house. According to researcher Federica Castelli, women experience a kind of “self-expulsion” from a public space designed in the male image, traversing it as guests.
Patriarchal society is built on women’s fear. And it is a feeling that is anything but irrational. Girls are constantly warned not only by family members and acquaintances, but also by the media. It is a unified-voice refrain that repeats: you are free to go where you want and when you want, but then don’t complain if something happens to you — we told you so.
Every now and then on social networks someone does an experiment and asks women and girls, “What would you do if men did not exist for 24 hours?” The most popular answers are always the same: walk alone at night, wear anything, dance and get drunk without worry, sleep outdoors.
