First Sign Of Dawn
by JOSIANE CURTIS
I was in 4th grade the first time I remember being told by a man to smile. I was out to dinner with my mother and friends of hers, and I was in a bad mood because she’d forced me to wear a dress. I was an early and hardcore adopter of the silent treatment, and I refused to order food and sat tight-lipped at the table for the entire meal. (I was not always a joy to be around – I’ll admit.) After delivering the table’s entrees, the server, a middle-aged man, bent and whispered into my ear, “You’re a pretty girl, but you’d be a lot prettier if you smiled.”
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When I was a sophomore at UC Santa Cruz, I lived about a half mile from the beach, in a house with three other girls. I was a full time student and worked full time, nights and weekends, at a restaurant on the wharf. During the week, I took mostly early morning classes, and then had a break in the afternoon before work. Most weekdays, I filled these free hours with a jog.
Along with my running schedule, my route was consistent. I ran a half mile down Swift Street, a straight-shot due west from my house to the beach. I turned left on Westcliff, and then ran another two miles along the popular ocean-side pathway to the famous lighthouse at Steamer’s Lane. I stretched in the field by the lighthouse, safely surrounded by tourists and families and surfers watching the waves below. Then I would jog the two miles back to Swift, where I walked the last half mile home.
A few months before the school year ended, I started seeing a dark colored pickup truck regularly on the final stretch of my run. As with most things, once I had noticed it, it seemed to appear everywhere, almost every time I ran, if not driving slowly beside me then parked somewhere along Swift Street, idling with the driver at the wheel. Each time, I stiffened my shoulders, clenched my jaw and flared my nostrils, and looked down at the ground in front of me, a conditioned response to unwanted male attention that I’d mastered before I even entered junior high school. I ignored it as much as I could for as long as I could, uncomfortable but unsure – it might just be coincidence.
One day, after I’d seen the man in his truck well over a dozen times, I stopped walking at a corner a few blocks from home, looked up, and glared hard through his windshield, as if to say, Okay, yes, I see you, okay? WHAT. It took a few seconds to see what he was doing, to realize this is what he had been doing all those other days. He was masturbating. I remember his face, smiling. His arm, moving up and down. His eyes, meeting mine, before rolling into his head as he leaned back in his seat. The word disgust, despite the way it feels in your mouth, salty, despite the ugh of it, isn’t a strong enough word for what I felt.
Somehow, I got home (did I run around the block first, afraid that he might, by now, know where I lived? I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything between the initial realization and home except for that feeling, disgust, that gag reflex of a word, ugh). I opened my front door, relieved to find my roommates home but unable to tell any of them what had happened before running straight to the bathroom and vomiting.
Mostly, they were horrified. One of them commented on what I was wearing.
photo by Bing Wright
It was around 3:00 p.m. on a spring day in central California, and it was hot outside. I was wearing black bootcut leggings from Old Navy and a long-sleeve unisex t-shirt from the Santa Cruz Wharf to Wharf run. When my roommate pointed it out, I was baffled, more by the fact that I thought my clothing choice was conservative than the fact that she thought it mattered: Long pants! A long-sleeved t-shirt! I wasn’t even showing any skin! But your pants are skintight, is what she said.
Reporting the incident didn’t ever cross my mind as an option. My option was to wear baggier clothes, to change my running route, to run on a treadmill at the campus gym instead of along the ocean. Or to just ignore it, to not let it bother me, as I was told to do by one male friend, because, was this man in the truck actually dangerous? He was a pervert, sure, but was he actually causing me any harm?
Women are warned early in our lives not to walk alone late at night in the wrong parts of town. We are taught to grasp keys between our knuckles if we think we’re being followed, to never invite a man we don’t know back to a private location. We are taught to yell “fire” instead of “rape.” But this man, like the many who had told me to smile or cat called before him, made me feel violated in a public place, in broad daylight, in the midst of an activity that was supposed to make me feel strong. And what’s worse, in the days that followed, a number of the people I confided in not only made me question whether I was overreacting to his actions, but made me wonder whether I might have been responsible for them myself.
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The summer after I graduated from college, a girlfriend and I spent a few months traveling around Costa Rica. On our first day of a week-long visit to the town of Arenal, we took a zipline tour by an American expatriate now living and working in the popular tourist destination. After the initial paid tour, he offered to show us around to “secret,” “locals-only” spots over the next few days for free. We accepted, finding false safety in the bond of our shared native country, our home language. He seemed respectful and knowledgeable and kind, and made us wear our seat belts when he drove us around. He took us to secluded hot springs where he pointed out sloths and started call-and-response conversations with howler monkeys. So on our last night, we let him take us out to a local bar, and when he drove us back to our hostel, we invited him and a friend to come back to our room. At some point, his friend left, and Shannon went to sleep in her bed across the room, and the tour guide kissed me. I let him kiss me, but then I wanted to go to sleep, and when I asked him to leave, he got angry and refused. I remember how the air got cold, fast, the way people on paranormal activity TV shows say it feels when a ghost enters a room. He pushed and then held me down on the bed, his body on top of mine, his hard penis pressing into my thigh. I fought, but quietly. I didn’t want this to be happening, but a part of me also didn’t want to wake Shannon. Yell fire, not rape. Would she ask why I had kissed him, or point out what I was wearing?
I used all my upper body strength trying to push him off. He flexed back, and I remember, though he was not that much bigger than me, that he seemed effortless in his control over my body. By 22, I’d often contemplated the possibility of having to defend myself against a man, and I’d always thought I’d be able to. Until that night, I’d thought of myself as strong. I was wrong.
As he removed a hand from where it pinned my shoulder to unbutton his shorts, I whispered, “Please. Please leave.” He flinched for just a split second, maybe something about the way my voice went from defiant to terrified, changed in that moment from a woman’s to a little girl’s, and I managed to slide out from underneath him. I jumped across the room to Shannon’s bed and shook her awake.
photo by Bing Wright
I was stronger, physically, but Shannon was a few years older than me and much more brave, a spitfire. Without hesitation, without needing an explanation, she held me behind her like a mother bear and let out a string of every swear word she knew. He stood on the other side of the bed, between us and the door. He didn’t try to touch me again after that, but he wouldn’t leave. He answered with his own string of swear words, and then shrugged and sat on the edge of my bed, and eventually he fell asleep there while Shannon and I hovered, not sleeping, four unblinking eyes watching his chest rise and fall until the first sign of dawn through the window, when we gathered our things quietly, turned in our room key, and got on a bus to the next town.
I made a number of decisions which helped lead to that situation, decisions I shake my head at in hindsight. Part of me wants to assure you, I learned my lesson. I take responsibility. But a part of me wants to point out that through repeated, omnipresent instances of assault and abuse and rape, the pervasive “lesson” is always one that women are supposed to learn, in order to avoid being victims. Never invite a man you don’t know back to a private location. Wear baggier clothes. Where, what, is the pervasive lesson directed at the men who would commit these crimes?
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In the wake of the horrifying shooting in Isla Vista, the hashtag #YesAllWomen emerged. Women share instances of fear, harassment, assault, and abuse. Scrolling through the posts, I can relate to every single post, in sentiment if not in experience. This is comforting, in some ways, but it is also overwhelming. The stories, though honest, and disturbing, and heartbreaking, are not unique. They are everyday occurrences in the lives of all women. There is more, always more where that came from.
By the time the #YesAllWomen hashtag had gone viral, #NotAllMen, a preexisting hashtag used as a counterpoint to feminist arguments, had become active in response. Although the #YesAllWomen tag was in no way created to generalize or vilify all men, I want to try to understand this defensive response. To this day, I do question the rationality of my kneejerk reaction, a stiffening of my features and body, when I pass a man alone on the street. I try to balance being prepared, should I need to be, with not offending anyone who means me no harm or disrespect. I’ve been rude to men who were simply being kind. I’ve glared at drivers of cars that slowed beside me, who simply needed to ask for directions. I’ve flinched when friends put a hand on my shoulder to get my attention. I’ve felt guilty for assuming the worst.
I think of my male loved ones, some of whom are the most kind, gentle human beings I could ever dream up. I try to imagine what it must feel like to know you might unintentionally cause fear simply by being male, through no fault of your own, through nothing you personally have ever done. The first thing to understand is that this fear is not an example of misandry; it is a byproduct of patriarchy. And although I can acknowledge how bad it must feel to be inherently feared simply for being male, it is still worse to be inherently afraid simply for being female.
photo by Bing Wright
There are male members of our government who know absolutely nothing about the biology of the female body, but believe that they should be able to enact legislation dictating what a woman can do with it. There are attorneys who bring into question the clothing a woman was wearing as a means of defending the man who raped her. There are high school dress codes that restrict girls from wearing shorts, tank tops, and even leggings, teaching young girls that they are to blame for their male classmates’ inappropriate behavior. There are women who feel that the only way to deflect unwanted advances by men is to claim to have a boyfriend, and there are men who will treat this as the only deflection that doesn’t make a woman a bitch. There are men whose response to the #YesAllWomen hashtag is yeah, but women feel entitled to men’s money, as though it is the same thing; men who can’t see the problem with comparing a bank account balance to a body, a life. There are also a terrifyingly high number of men making rape and death threats in response to #YesAllWomen posts, if ever there were a case en pointe argument that we should be talking about misogyny.
Elliot Rodger, not all men, is to blame for the deaths of the six people he killed. But his rage was rooted in a belief that he, as a white male, had a right to be given sex and love by women – rather than believing that it is a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body. In his words, it was a crime that he was deprived sex and adoration by women – rather than it being a crime to kill six people. Elliot Rodger is to blame for what he did. But it is ignorant, lazy, and a disservice to the lives he took, not to examine his self-professed motives within the larger context of misogynist violence. He comes from a nation with a heavily racist and sexist history; one with a murder rate ten times that of other Western nations and where 90 percent of homicides are committed by males; one where one in five female high school students will be physically or sexually abused by a dating partner and more than one in three women will experience rape or violence at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetime; one with a government that allows a 22 year old with often-vocalized misogynist beliefs and documented violent tendencies to own three semi-automatic handguns.
There are men I am friends with and men that I love, who are happy to shrug and say, yes, it’s a shame, but not all men are like this one. And while I wholeheartedly agree that not all men are like this one, it is lazy not to at least examine what role historic, systemic white male privilege played in this one white male’s feelings of entitlement to women and their bodies. Acknowledging historical elements of patriarchy and institutionalized white male privilege is not the same thing as blaming or hating all men.
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Maya Angelou was a novelist, a memoirist, a poet, an actress, a professor, a singer and an activist. She was a champion for civil rights, including women’s rights. She was a victim of incest and rape. “She told a story that wasn’t allowed to be told,” wrote Tayari Jones. She helped make it safe(r) for women and minorities to tell their stories.
Since the shooting, women everywhere are telling their stories, unoriginal as they may be. Stories of being made uncomfortable by unwanted, unwarranted cat calls. Of being told by men to smile. Of feeling for keys inside our bags. Of wearing baggy sweats and hooded sweatshirts to go running in 80 degree weather. Of wondering if saying yes to a kiss means we relinquish our right to say no to more than a kiss. Of fearing what might happen if we do say no. Of listening to men, not just those we pass on the street or strangers hiding behind Twitter handles, but men in our government, express feelings of entitlement over our bodies. Of wondering all the ways we might be responsible for the crimes of which we are victims.
One of my favorite Maya Angelou quotes is, “When you know better, you do better.” The scariest thing about the Isla Vista shooting, for me, is that I don’t really know if Elliot Rodger knew better. He was a member of a very active community of men who believe that a woman’s sole purpose in this world is to bend her body to a man’s will. Most women, and yes, most men know better than that. But to shrug and say, it’s a shame, but not all men are like this one, isn’t doing any better. Telling the stories is doing better. Listening to the stories is doing better. Continuing the conversation, beyond computers and in our communities, with elected officials, with our loved ones, and especially with our children, is doing better. Let’s start there.
Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about tiny things and his second cigarette. Her work recently appeared on The Rumpus here.
Photographs by Bing Wright.
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