Photo by Salaam Assah
Far more often than not, a generalization will obscure exactly that which it means to elucidate. “Women are like X, men are like Y” will certainly tell you something about the person making the statement, but it is likely to provide little wisdom about your brothers and sisters, and perhaps less than none about any of those individual males and females you happen to encounter.
So it was that a Tumblr post I found myself reading seemed rather unpromising when it invoked a lament of “how hard it is to be a woman,” as if it is inherently hard for all females to be female and there are no areas of life where one might convincingly argue that males have the tougher part.
That, however, was the last ineloquent statement in the post. And considering what author Lola Binkerd had undergone immediately prior to writing those words, she could easily be forgiven such a slip, especially since she had just passed through a realm of experience wherein it is genuinely and inarguably far more difficult to be of her gender than of mine.
In the post—which has gone a bit viral (read it here)—Binkerd documents a harrowing experience she had while riding the Blue Line from Long Beach, being verbally accosted twice because she was not receptive to pick-up lines. The first encounter, which rose to a level of harassment, was bad enough (though not uncommon, as Binkerd exasperatedly explains). The second raised the stakes to verbal assault.
Being male comes nowhere near making one impervious to threat. But it has always been readily apparent to me that, in this aspect of life, women exist on a different plane, a perilous place.
I’m no optimist. I feel sure I could be attacked just about anywhere at any time.[1] But most attacks are crimes of opportunity. Whenever I venture outside my home, I am making a gamble—even if a small one—with my safety. If I were to attempt to calculate the odds of being attacked every time I consider going out into the world, I would not need to factor in my gender, since a potential attacker will never see my maleness as providing additional opportunity, let alone as being an aspect of my person specifically worth targeting.
Binkerd is forced to play the same game with different, gender-biased odds. She cannot ride the train (or walk the streets, or fetch her car from a parking garage) with the confidence that her gender will not be used against her. It might. It has been.
I suspect I am physically stronger than Binkerd, but were the tables turned it would make no difference. The imposition women suffer in this realm is more a matter of perception than reality. There is a perception not only that women are weaker, but also that it is more acceptable to aggress against them. It would be wrong to say men as a gender hold this view; it would be equally inaccurate to say it is held by only a few possessors of a Y chromosome.
Binkerd’s piece touches on not only brutish sexism, but also on the more subtle—and in some ways more insidious—sort she encounters regularly as she sits on the train, reading a book she uses partly as a prop to ward off unwanted advances—a strategy that often fails in the face of male aggressiveness.
“If I stop reading the book I enjoy to talk to you, random stranger, you hit on me or just stay way too close to me,” she writes. “If I tell you to leave me alone, you get mad at me. Because I somehow, as a woman, owe you conversation.”
You can witness this insidious sexism in some of the responses to her piece. “I’m sorry, but this post just screams of whinyness and self-victimization,” says one of Binkerd’s readers “[…] Have you ever considered that sometimes people are just friendly? Is it so hard to be friendly back? Maybe you just look really approachable. If you can’t bothered to be social why don’t you wear some headphones?”
We get some idea of just how insidious this sexism is when we realize this response was from a woman. “Women like this are the reason men become afraid to interact with us,” she continues. “Stop being so offended by harmless flirting. Be flattered!”
Why do even some women believe it is incumbent upon a woman to “be friendly back”? Why is there a belief that more is required of a woman than to make her feelings known? Presumably it has something to do with the patriarchalism that still dominates society. We have come a long way from the days when women were considered chattel, but apparently not so far as to recognize “I want to be left alone” as an automatic and perfectly justified end of the conversation.
That’s an overgeneralization. Giving my species the benefit of the doubt (a move I find hard to make—perhaps I’m uncharitable; perhaps people suck), most of us—male and female alike—understand that another’s wanting to be left alone is none of our business, and that the only appropriate response is to comply with her wishes. But disgusting shows of disrespect for our fellow humans are played out all the time.
Binkerd has eloquently documented what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such disrespect. Her exposition on the issue should be enough to compel all who encounter it to realize that the blame for such experiences lies completely on one side.
But from some of the responses she has received, we can see that it isn’t enough. So I guess we need to keep talking.