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I hemmed and hawed a lot about whether to post this, because even after all this time it's hard to write and I'm going to feel crappy for a while after I write it. I also know that as soon as the text appears on the screen people who are hostile to me, or to feminism, or to women in general, are going to get to work minimising it, and that's hard to know when you're actually doing yourself a certain amount of damage to put it out there. But anyway. I really feel the need to take this out of the realms of the theoretical, which is where I think it is for a lot of people reading this. I want people to understand that we're not just pulling stuff out of our arses here, that misogyny is very real, very active, and has real and serious consequenses.
Between the ages of 15 and 17, I attended 6th-form college. I started a year early; at that time in my life I was still quite an ambitious person. Throughout the entire time I attended that institution, I was continually sexually harrassed. Let me be very clear as to what I mean by that. I'm not talking about wolf-whistles or "hello, darlin'" from the lads at the gate. I'm not even just talking about guys yelling "suck my dick," although I heard plenty of that too. I'm talking about daily threats of violence including sexual violence. I think it's fair to say that during term-time I was threated with rape at least once every day. The people harrassing me weren't just teenaged boys, they were also adults in their early 20s.
The harrasment would start at the bus stop and continue for pretty much the entire hour it took to get to tech. I'd get a bit of a breather once I got to the lab. Most of the blokes on my course were all right (although as one of only 3 girls in my year I learned to put up with lots of discussions of women's bodies, sexually explicit songs and jokes, ect. That stuff didn't really bother me after a while). The harrassment would kick off again when I stepped out of the building, when I'd have to run a kind of gauntlet to get to the cafe. I was pretty much safe from the bullshit until I had to get the bus home, when it would start all over again. I started wearing a Walkman pretty much continuously to shut out the threats and insults.
I would also say that I was subjected to homophobic abuse. I feel awkward saying that because I'm not actually gay, but people thought I was or affected to think so and I came in for a certain amount of stick for it. This would range from mild annoyances, like a guy sitting down near me in the cafe and slowly reciting words beginning with L until he got to lemon (slang for lesbian) at which point he and his mates would all crack up, to stuff about cutting up lemons, cutting up dykes, and 'jokes' about lesbians.
I was never actually physically hurt, although I did get shoved and bumped into a lot harder than was strictly necessary. I learned not to sit in an aisle seat in the refrectory if I could help it because people would contrive to hit me with heavy sports bags, and my coat aquired some mysterious slashes on the bus one night. Even so, I was scared most of the time. This affected me physically; already a migrane sufferer, my condition got a lot worse and required stronger medication, and I began throwing up most mornings. I developed an eating disorder; by the end of the second year, I would go for weeks eating nothing all day except one stick of gum, ritually broken into 3 pieces, and three cups of tea. I became obsessed with making myself as unsexy as possible; I'd wear layers and layers of clothing, even in the summer. Long skirts, loose baggy jeans. At 16, I was diagnosed with clinical depression.
In all that time, nobody was ever disciplined for the harrasment. The worst offender was merely 'talked to', which actually made matters worse. It was tolerated, shrugged off as normal or okay. I didn't do anything to provoke these guys--I didn't know them, never spoke to them, apart from the time I broke down in tears and screamed at them to leave me alone.
Anyhow. I could have walked away, I suppose, but I stuck to my guns and finished the course. Not sure it was really worth it. Between the blackouts, the migranes, the fact that I wasn't eating much and was puking with terror every morning, I underperformed academically. I did okay but I did not do well enough to get into university. From being the kid who worked so hard to get into tech a year early, I drifted into unemployment followed by a succession of crappy minimum wage jobs. I've never really freed myself from the depression, and I still relapse into the ED sometimes (although that's mostly under control). There was other stuff going on in my life that contributed to all this, but I kind of feel that I'd have done a lot better if it wasn't for that bloody tech.
The experience I've described above is by no means the only, or even the worst, experience of misogyny, sexism, or abuse in my life. I've picked this one out of the mess because it's relatively clear cut and hard to excuse or dismiss. |
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