Male Violence

The #MeToo Moment I Kept Secret for 13 Years

And the man who masturbated in front of me

The day I enrolled at university will forever be tainted by a man who followed a friend and I down a busy boulevard while masturbating.

This is the first time I’m writing about it; and it’s only because of reading Virginia Woolf’s classic essay A Room of One’s Own.

On a scorching August day, a friend and I enrolled at the University of Bucharest; the moment was a dream come true after the stress of national exams and the dullness of months spent in libraries, preparing for the university entrance examination.

Forms filled, signed and stamped, we decided to stroll down one of the historic avenues of Bucharest; like many others in the city, it was teeming with people, drowning in car honks and taking shade from 19th and 20th-century buildings. Feeling exhilarated by our bright futures, we stopped to spoil ourselves with a sweet nothing. While queuing for our treat, however, I caught out of the corner of my eye the blurry figure of a pepper-haired man getting uncomfortably close to us.

Turning around, I saw him opening his flier and getting his penis out. Confused and revulsed, I grabbed my friend and scurried away. The man followed us, shouting obscenities. Turning to look how far behind he was, we saw him masturbating. He then followed us for another 10–20 meters; in desperation, we hopped on the first available bus.

“Turning around, I saw him opening his flier and getting his penis out. Confused and revulsed, I grabbed my friend and scurried away. The man followed us, shouting obscenities.”

We felt ashamed. And guilty of provoking this man. And angry at our guilt. Not to mention abandoned by all the people who had witnessed the scene unperturbed. It was only months after that we could say — “huh, who knew, walking and masturbating are not mutually exclusive in perverts.”

I didn’t tell anyone about the incident for a long time. What I did do was wash the clothes I was wearing — long, wavy blue pants and a red blouse, my favourite outfit that summer — and hide them in the darkest corner of my wardrobe. Anything baggy became my uniform for months, much to my mother’s concern. Nights turned sleepless, outings avoided, men distrusted.

Although 19 at the time, everybody mistook me for a high school sophomore. And the man looked so ordinary: a blur of navy green and grey clothes, a laptop bag on his shoulder, another unassuming presence in a city of more than two million people.

“I didn’t tell anyone about the incident for a long time. What I did do was wash the clothes I was wearing — long, wavy blue pants and a red blouse, my favourite outfit that summer — and hide them in the darkest corner of my wardrobe.”

With my blood-red summer clothes and my youthful enthusiasm, I felt the guilty one. Surely, I was flaunting something.

I was a shy and gawkish teenager, insecure about my body and uncompliant of conventional beauty standards. Looking in the mirror equaled counting flaws: my humped nose, small mouth, fluffy cheeks, and big ears squashed any crumbs of self-esteem salvaged from high school. Any boy who took an interest was promptly rejected; who could possibly find me attractive? Instead, my studies and friends were safer grounds on which I could walk unchallenged and unhurt.

But something happened in my senior year. I started experimenting with clothes and accessories, polishing both my style and my wit. The oppressive atmosphere of an almost all-girl class was ending and plans for university inching closer every day. It was a time of possibilities; I was on the cusp of reinvention. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s aspirations for women everywhere, I was building a room of my own in the heart of the city I loved.

A childhood in the countryside had extended and limited my horizons. Weaselly village roads were my playground; long, lazy and unstructured were my days, rising at the first specks of light, running the dusty streets with my friends, reading afternoons away. I felt freer and wiser than those corseted urban kids, who either looked pale and gloomy or arrogant and mean.

“Cross your legs; Don’t show too much skin; Is that what you’re wearing?; Aren’t you too young to have a boyfriend?”

But an undercurrent of danger, an uneasiness followed me: whispers of “she’s a girl, she shouldn’t stray too far from home;” forbidden times and forbidden places, that were never forbidden to my younger, male cousins; scorn for other girls who wore the “wrong clothes.” If growing up a girl in Romania were a song, its lyrics would be: Cross your legs; Don’t show too much skin; Is that what you’re wearing?; Aren’t you too young to have a boyfriend?

That changed in the big city; to mark my first year of high school, my parents gifted me a book explaining sex and sexuality to teenagers (condom included). They wanted me to know that being a girl was not a liability. But the seeds of “You’re a girl, you should know better” had already been planted.

That day of enrolling at university was supposed to be one of celebration. As written elsewhere, my family strongly supported my education. Without a question, university was in the cards; I wanted nothing more than to spend as many of my young adult years as possible reading, writing and learning. The fact that I was studying in one of the first countries in Europe to open universities to women, way back in 1866, made the experience extra special.

Unlike the women in the time of Virginia Woolf, and unlike many girls and women all over the world today, I had few barriers to education. Woolf devotes many pages in her essay to the obstacles — some trivial and some significant — that she encountered on a visit to the University of Oxford: as a woman, she could only walk on the common gravel and not on the sacred turf, the purview of male scholars; she was also forbidden from entering libraries, unless accompanied by a university fellow or in possession of a letter of introduction.

That in many countries barriers to female education have been removed is a long overdue achievement. But it’s not enough. The day my friend and I enrolled at university was also the day we were reminded that our freedom to exist stopped at a man’s right to pleasure, that walking down the street carries risks for women, and that our bodies are not our own. They are the canvas for someone else’s fantasies.

Every day, girls and women experience #MeToo moments — from leering looks and catcalling to inappropriate touching, sexual harassment, abuse and rape. As women, we learn from a young age to police our behaviour when we are navigating the public spaces between those rooms of our own, whose walls the outside world keeps on dismantling.

“The day my friend and I enrolled at university was also the day we were reminded that our freedom to exist stopped at a man’s right to pleasure, that walking down the street carries risks for women, and that our bodies are not our own.”

This is why we need so much more than a room of our own. We need to reclaim public spaces as safe spaces for girls and women everywhere. And we need men’s help to make it happen.

In concluding her essay, Virginia Woolf imagines what would take for women writers to come into the world. What she wrote applies to what would take for women to feel safe in the world:

“Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part (…) that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.”