This, on the other hand, did not make me want to smile. This is a piece from the Guardian, about the author's experience of travelling home from a show with her 13 year old daughter.
Quote:
It was pretty late when we boarded the train, and the carriage was almost full of other theatregoers on their way home. My daughter was sitting on my right and the only free seat was on my left. After a couple of stops, a man got on. It was hard to tell, but he was probably in his 30s. He cast his eyes around the carriage before declaring, quite loudly, that someone would have to move. “I want to sit opposite her,” he said, staring at my daughter.
I could feel her physically recoil beside me, hardly able to believe that he was talking about her. She looked at me wide-eyed and didn’t speak, but grabbed my hand with her smaller sweaty one. I reassured her that it was OK. “There’s a seat next to me,” I told him.
No one else in the carriage spoke or even looked at us. He sat down very close next to me and proceeded to stare across at my daughter, craning to see round me. “What’s your name?” he asked. She didn’t reply.
“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” he said.
I told him quite clearly that she did not wish to speak to him and that I would like him to stop. Again, no one else said or did anything to help or support us.
For me, this was a first. The first time I had been out with my newly teenage daughter when she was sexually harassed. I felt ashamed about not knowing whether she had already been subjected to something like this before, when I was not with her, and I felt nervous to ask – she looked so fearful.
I also felt a sense of responsibility or fault. She had been late home from school, rushing to get changed and, as we left the house, I had grabbed a tailored jacket for her. It belonged to me and she wore it over a short, navy H&M dress, with socks and Doc Marten shoes. Her legs were bare. Maybe I should have taken a moment and insisted she wore tights? Or a longer skirt? Or trousers? So, already I was experiencing feelings of guilt and shame, and the harassment was not even aimed at me.
The incident also felt threatening and isolating. By now, we were four or five stops from our destination and my daughter had hold of my hand very tightly. I told the man we were going to move, but he got up himself and moved further down the carriage as a couple of seats had become vacant.
Now other passengers started to look up at us, one offering a tiny smile. Although the man had moved away, my daughter seemed to feel no safer and asked if we could leave the train before our stop and walk the rest of the way home, but we didn’t.
So we were both, in our own ways, caught in a position of feeling the need to alter our behaviour, either in practical ways, or through the internal dialogue with which we are saddled every day. Girls should dress differently. Or put up with the inconvenience of changing their travel plans. All in order to suit a culture that makes women feel bad about their own choices.
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There's quite a bit more, but one passage really stood out to me:
Quote:
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I want to tell my daughter that men are wonderful, supportive, as full of complexities and joy and love as women are. I am sure she knows this anyway. But I also see that she is beginning to experience alternative ways of imagining men – menacing ways.
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http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...in-front-of-me
It's a peculiar experience, being harrassed as a young teen. It can be threatening, it can also make you feel grownup. Often it is a combination of the two. I doubt there are many women who have not experienced some form of harrassment as youngsters. This was a particularly extreme example, but I recall several experiences from when I was around 12 years old, that definitely made men seem a much more dangerous proposition.
It's funny how you learn to navigate it - like any other social landscape, it forms part of how you see the world. I don't mean that it warps you - just that the risk and danger is an ordinary part of the world you are in.
Men, of course, have their own ordinary dangers to which they become accustomed and which they naturally take into account and navigate. But I thought some of the guys in particular might find the insight into a particularly female experience of interest.