I Don’t Need Feminism!

Or anyone else to explain my experiences to me

There seems to be this notion in some circles that there is an abstract ideology called Feminism that has been infecting otherwise happy and reasonable women and in a cult-like manner, indoctrinating them to be angry, scared, and full of victimhood. This apparent cabal of sexually frustrated spinsters and angry lesbians routinely get together and cook up plans to divide society and foster hate for poor defenseless men.

At least that’s what you might believe if you listened to some of these people. The hate-crazed cultists must have some strong magic at their disposal because this country is rife with angry, trauma-filled women who have had just about enough! Read even one article about what the Kavanaugh hearing stirred up in the women of this country and there really isn’t any question about whether or not it was organic or due to some kind of indoctrination.

“At the street level, #metoo, woke, and feminism degrade into constant low level anxiety about being murdered.”

That’s a comment made recently by a Medium friend of mine; someone who I have had numerous detailed and, I thought, productive conversations with over the past couple of months. And yet, that’s what he actually still believes — that it is feminism that is causing fear and not fear that is creating the need for feminism!

Meanwhile, The World Health Organization has this to say about women and violence as a global issue of concern:

Violence against women is not a new phenomenon, nor are its consequences to women’s physical, mental and reproductive health. What is new is the growing recognition that acts of violence against women are not isolated events but rather form a pattern of behaviour that violates the rights of women and girls, limits their participation in society, and damages their health and well-being. When studied systematically, as was done with this report, it becomes clear that violence against women is a global public health problem that affects approximately one third of women globally.

By compiling and analysing all available data from studies designed to capture women’s experiences of different forms of violence, this report provides the first such summary of the violent life events that many women experience. It documents not only how widespread this problem is, but also how deeply women’s health is affected when they experience violence.

Women run a constant low-level threat assessment sub-routine. It’s mostly sub-conscious because it’s going on all of the time automatically.

“What was that sound? Is someone trying to break into the house?”

“There’s a guy walking towards me on an empty street. How is he looking at me? What’s his demeanor and body language? Does it seem likely that he will try to talk to me, harass me or accost me? Should I cross to the other side of the street?”

“There’s only me and this man I don’t know about to get into an elevator. Does that seem like a safe thing to do? Does he seem like someone who will try to touch me or say something to make me feel uncomfortable?”

“I need to go to my car after dark. Can I get someone to walk with me? Is there anyone hiding in the parking garage waiting for me? Do I have my keys out and held between my fingers in case I need to use them to defend myself? Should I carry mace?”

“If I tell that guy no, how will he react?”

Tiarah Poyau was a 22-year-old graduate student and aspiring accountant when she told a man at a dance party to “get off” after he started to grind on her. His response was to shoot her in the face. Iowa college student Mollie Tibbets was killed by a man she told to leave her alone when he approached her while she was jogging. A Detroit mother of three was killed because she refused to give a stranger her phone number. A New York woman had her neck slashed when she declined her attacker’s offer for a date.

I don’t need Feminism to interpret these stories for me. Although I’ve never been worried about being seriously harmed for telling a man no, I have had plenty of experiences of feeling unsafe around men that started before I even had breasts.

No-one taught me to run this endless threat assessment program. I learned it the hard way by being female in a world where that is not a safe thing to be. I learned it at about age 10, which is when most girls begin to be harassed in public. These are children, not even fully into puberty in most cases, but we live in a world where many men think they are some kind of “fair game.” Have a look at the #FirstHarassed on Twitter for a plethora of eye-opening stories of harassment beginning at a young age, but also the often violent backlash from trolls and haters towards the women (and some men) coming forward to speak about their experiences.

And the real problem of harassment is not just that it’s unpleasant and often traumatizing in and of itself to be treated in that way. It’s that you don’t know if and when it’s going to escalate into groping, accosting or rape because it often does. Whether or not escalation occurs, the fear of potentially being groped, followed or raped means that street harassment often has negative psychological effects, including depression, sleeplessness, anxiety, and chronic stress.

I don’t need Feminism to tell me that I need to always be mindful of my surroundings and the other people in them. I learned that myself, the hard way at a very young age. This is a world-wide concern, even though women in many other countries face an even wider array of overtly life-threatening situations.

In the 1990s, Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin — both law professors — criticized the major international human rights treaties for directing themselves toward the “protection of men within their public life and relationship with government”. Human rights treaties, they said, simply ignored the “ways in which being a woman is in itself life-threatening”.

Professor Charlotte Bunch pointed out the lack of any human rights treaty outlawing violence against women globally. This, she argued, indicates “female subordination runs so deep that it is still seen as inevitable or natural, rather than a politically structured reality maintained by patriarchal interests.”

Sure, men have to take some precautions to try to not end up as victims of crime also, but there are no “safe” neighborhoods for women. The things that happen to them happen everywhere. There are no “safe” people either, up until those people have proven over time that they actually can be trusted. To make a baseline assumption that someone is safe is very dangerous. Most women are assaulted, raped, abused, and killed by men who are in their sphere by invitation and not by total strangers. These are quite often men in suits, with nice cars, with good jobs and college degrees; men that they are working with, dating, or otherwise interacting with on a regular basis.

I live in a nice town where folks are friendly and it’s safer than many places. I don’t lock my doors during the daytime, although all the other women I know do and several will not even open the door to a delivery man if they are at home by themselves. They aren’t feminists for the most part. A couple of them are Trump voters. Maybe they watch too much news and CSI, but they also all have multiple stories of their own about the times that they were followed, harassed, groped, assaulted, and raped. And that’s not just in my neighborhood or town. What #MeToo really showed is that the vast majority of women have had some kind of experience with sexual violence. It’s only now that we are beginning to talk about it more openly that we can really see that. And that’s a good thing. You can’t solve a problem that you don’t acknowledge even exists, and we as a society need to keep acknowledging that this is a real and pervasive problem. A problem that feminism did not create and that you don’t have to be a feminist to have experienced.

I don’t walk around in a state of terror, and I’m not asserting that most other women do either. But that doesn’t mean that the threat-assessment sub-routine isn’t constantly running and with good reason. Most women don’t experience feminism as a political ideology. They experience it as the natural outgrowth of their lifelong experiences with being treated as childish, weak, unintelligent, and on earth for the pleasure and enjoyment of men. None of which means that they hate men or think that all men are evil rapists — they just hate being treated in that manner by the ones who do treat them that way, and they hate never feeling truly safe most of all. Being called names and treated like an ideologue for not wanting to live that way probably ranks right up there too!

Half of all murdered women will be killed by current or former domestic partners. 1 in 6 women will be raped or have it attempted. Children face harassment and the emotional and psychological scarring that comes from it starting at a young age. I don’t need anyone else to tell me that’s not the society that I want to live in and it seems absurd that anyone at all would find that unacceptable, much less some kind of extremist political statement to say so!

Edit: Because some men (and one woman) keep telling me that my experiences aren’t universal, I’m going to keep a running list here of every time that I read a story like mine because I read them often.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.