I wrote this, originally, back in 2010, for the UK fanzine Journey
Planet and their issue focusing on sexual harassment. It seems germane
to the current discussions.
I don’t remember when I
learnt that my body was not mine alone. That knowledge, that I am partly
public, has been with me for years and years and years. I absorbed it
in the comments of family and friends on how pretty – or, more often
plain – I was. I drew it in from the pictures on the television, the
Slimcea girl who was showing herself to the world, perfected through
self-privation.; the Playtex girdle woman who knew that hours of
discomfort was better by far than being seen to be imperfect; the
Harmony girl on whose hair men always remarked. I knew it from my
mother’s comments on actresses and models and friends. My mother is a
kind woman, and her comments were seldom cutting, and yet I knew all the
same from her that X wasn’t as pretty as she might be, due to the size
of her hips, or that Y dressed badly for her shape. I knew it through
the girls at school who were harsh in their judgement of everything –
openly their enemies, privately, their friends, most privately of all,
perhaps, of themselves. I’m so fat, I’m so plain, my nose is all wrong,
I’m flat-chested, my boobs are too big. Not one of us was content with
herself and nor were we encouraged to be. We were female in public,
there to be seen and to remarked upon. Sometimes boys were remarked on
also – for size, for hair colour – but it was only certain boys, not all
boys. It was not all the time. There was no Slimcea boy, no girdle guy,
and the Old Spice man was an adventurous surfer. People did not touch
my brother in the same ways they tried to touch me, and they did not
caution him that his behaviour must be modulated at all times to avoid
the wrong kinds of attention from the opposite sex. Boys have powerful
impulses. You mustn’t lead them on. It was a double warning: my body was
not only mine, and it was up to me to police it at all times lest it
cause problems. We are taught, all of us, from early on, that the female
form is both desirable and dangerous. We are taught to feel ashamed of
it or awed, covetous or intimidated, despairing or resentful. Girls are
taught that it must be controlled and disciplined, pummelled and
starved, before it can become acceptable – ‘figure faults’ must be
corrected, different parts must be displayed or covered, stripped of
hair, dyed, strapped in, or out, or down. Yes, some of us opt out of
some or all of this. But whatever we do, there will likely be comments.
And
you’re wondering, out there, what all this has to do with anything,
you’re wondering, and maybe saying, ‘well, men have body image issues
too, and people yell things at them too’, and all that is true enough.
But what I’m saying is this: we are taught as a culture that women are
to be looked at, and both sides accept this. And this inevitably affects
the ways in which we behave to ourselves and to each other. The female
body is culturally packaged and sold back to us, not as it is – the
shape of a person – but as something separate, something at once less
and more, and it’s this attitude that leads to the Open Source Boob
Project nonsense of a year or so ago (the promoters of that seemed to
have forgotten that breasts come attached to people). Being female is an
action, in every moment and every space, it is loaded, immanent with
meaning, coded, complicated.
When I was nineteen, a man I knew
though fandom stalked me for about 6 months. I did not know it was
stalking, though I knew it was worrying and distressing and undesirable.
I didn’t know it wasn’t my fault. Some of that was down to
circumstances – stalking had not at the time been widely discussed and I
had no label for it. Part of it is down to my own education: I didn’t
know what to do with the situation, how to deal with it. I’m not sure I
told anyone, apart from my boyfriend of the time.
He blamed me
for it. I must have done something to make this happen. I spent 6 months
feeling scared and culpable, trying to avoid the stalker and
simultaneously feeling that I ought to be extra nice to him, because
somehow I had made him do this, I had brought this on myself, while all
the time inside me all I could hear was fear and revulsion and a desire
to get him as far from me as I could. Another young woman might have
reported him, made a fuss, made threats: I wasn’t that woman, I hadn’t
been told that was allowed.
I’m lucky: that man didn’t hurt me.
In the end, he found another young woman who was actually interested in
him and entered into a long relationship with her. But all these years
later, I wish that 19-year-old self had known she was allowed to make a
fuss, to summon college porters, to threaten him with the wrath of
college authorities. Because I didn‘t have to endure that, I didn’t have
to hide in my room like that for all that time, it had never been my
fault. He was attracted to me. I was not attracted to him. That should
have been the last of it. But my context – and that old boyfriend –
convicted me of being female in public, contributory in my own fate.
I was lucky.
I’m
not even sure I should write that, though my head is full of sentences
which start that way. I’m lucky, I’ve never been raped. But what about
the man – a different man, around that same time – who insisted on
spending the night in my room despite my protests, and on handling me
despite my protests, because he was unhappy and I owed him? What about
the man who verbally coerced me into sex? The man who forced me into his
car? The man – a complete stranger who openly groped my body in a con
lounge? The man who informed me I would be providing him with sex due to
my hair colour? What about all those men who looked and saw my shape or
my clothes, saw Woman, but not Person? Was it luck that meant none of
those situations got out of hand? Lots of time, no, it wasn’t, it was
other people – the good guys and gals of fandom who came over and
intervened, who protected and helped, who helped me when I didn’t know
how to help myself. Sometimes it was… I don’t know. Not luck, just a
sense that I had to get through this and out the other side.
Not
all the situations I’ve listed above happened within fandom, but all of
them happened. I’m not particularly pretty: I was just sometimes in the
wrong place. It’s a sad fact that most women have had brushes with this
kind of thing. Which is not to say that all men are bastards, all men
are abusers, all men are the enemy. Nothing is that simple. Nothing is
that easy.
And fandom can be extra-complicated, because it
constructs itself as a safe space in many ways. It’s often said that
fans include a fair number of people whose experience of wider society
has not always been kind, and who are perhaps thinner skinned or less
comfortable with some forms of socialisation. A lot of people expect to
be more readily accepted within fandom. (I’m not 100% sure that this is
true: fandom can look pretty unkind sometimes. But this is not the place
for yet another discussion of the Myth of Fannish Tolerance.) Fans can
be more touchy-feely with one another, they may dress a little (or a
lot) oddly. It can be hard to see where boundaries lie. It can be very
easy to cross those boundaries by accident. It happens. But there is a
huge difference between accident and intent. And that’s where the
difficulties arise. That’s when safety for one person becomes danger for
another.
If you dress like I do – I have done – then it will
draw attention of all kinds. I accept that (and the only time I resented
it involved a hotel employee who was hoping for a bribe). I accept that
if I wear a short skirt, someone may comment and the comment may not be
complimentary. I accept that I may be asked for contact or more. I
dress as I do because it’s how I am, who I am. And I accept the
consequences.
Up to a point, and here it is: it’s still my body,
my self. I’m still a person, under the clothes and the flesh. I have
the right to say no. I have the right to say no and walk away. I have
the right to say no and walk away and to have that respected. It was the
chant of the Reclaim the Night marches: Whatever I wear and wherever I
go, yes means yes and no means no. It ought to be easy.
It
isn’t, of course. People get confused, or resent what they see as
rejection. People misinterpret, they hope, they imagine. We all do it.
But the thing is that once that ‘no’ is established, that should be the
end of it. My reactions are my responsibility. Yours are yours. I didn’t
owe that young man who stalked me anything, but he didn’t understand
that, and for month on month, he made my life unsafe.
And it really is that simple. It’s okay to ask. But no is no, and that should get to be the end of it.
Endnote: I’m 50. I’m average looking. These days, I’m fairly sharp-tongued.
I’ve
yet to get through a single con without someone behaving
inappropriately to me. Touching, backing into corners, talking to my
(modest) cleavage, asking creepy questions, standing too close. I am, I
repeat, 50. I’ve been with the same man for nearly 26 years and we are
usually together at cons. And men go on doing this, sometimes in front
of him.
This is not how the world should be.
You can find more of this discussion by looking for the #sffragette hashtag on twitter
Meanwhile, here’s the beautiful cover, by the very talented Paul Young, and the blurb: