I’m sitting, hiding, in a small meeting room at work,
because I don’t want anyone to see what I’m writing. Well, not right now, and
certainly not till it’s finished. This is difficult to write for many reasons.
I want to strike the right balance, not to appear ‘too angry’, make ‘too much
of a fuss’, or be ‘too negative’, but still get my point across. I want to do
justice to how I feel, and to how my experiences have affected me, but I don’t
want to blame anyone. I want everyone to know, and I want no one to know. Most
of all it’s difficult because recalling these stories is incredibly stressful-
more stressful than I’d thought it would be.
So, in the interest of balance, here’s where I’ll start. I
am aware that living in 21st Century Britain, I am literally one of the
luckiest women to have ever lived on the planet. I’ve had a spectacular
education, endless opportunities in my career, a wonderful family, and really
supportive friendships. I have civil liberties, I’m supported by a wonderful
welfare state, am able to travel, and dance, and go to the theatre, and live a
largely free, happy and fulfilling life. For that I am incredibly (incredibly,
incredibly) grateful.
Nonetheless, I have been moved to write this piece because
despite all of this progress, we still do not live in an equal society. We
still treat our young girls and boys differently, we place expectations on them
solely based on their gender, we nurture them differently, and exclude them
from each other’s worlds. Worse, when our girls become teenagers, we start to
treat them as sexual objects, and place them in a scary and threatening world.
I don’t know how much convincing you need on this point; I think it’s fairly
comprehensively covered in the media.
I want to share my personal experience because I’ve come to
realise how important it is that girls understand that they are far from alone
when it comes to sexual harassment. It’s not something ‘other’ that’s happening
to ‘those girls’ it’s happening to us, right now, and it’s really wrong. My story
is far from extraordinary, and I know that many women (my friends included)
have gone through far worse. Above all this makes me incredibly sad.
My first memory of sexual harassment was when I was when I
was about thirteen, when an older boy grabbed my chest when I was walking home
from school. It really hurt, but I didn’t tell anyone, it was too embarrassing.
As an older teenager I remember learning to cross the road rather than walk
past leering builders, or any group of guys. At 17 I had a pint of beer thrown
in my face because I wouldn’t grind up against some guy in a club. It’s a rare
occasion that I can go for a run without someone shouting out at me ‘keep going
sexy’. I’ve been undermined in the workplace, with men openly drooling over me
in meetings. I’ve been told that my boss only likes me because I am a young
pretty girl, rather than because I’m good at my job.
The main problem with what I’ve talked about so far is the
relentlessness of it. In these moments I don’t feel unsafe, mainly just angry
and bored of it all. But it's become inconsequential, barely worth a mention. I
think a lot of women feel like that. Harassment is just part of life. It’s the
times where you feel in danger where the real damage is done.
I was at a conference in Germany when a guy approached me as
I was walking back to my hotel. We got chatting and he invited me out with him
that night. When I told him that I had plans he became more insistent and kept
following me. He was moving closer to me and I kept backing towards the wall,
he wouldn’t leave, and touched me around my waist. Luckily I was able to duck
into my hotel to escape him. I didn’t like that he knew where I was staying,
and I was fuming.
Deep breath.
On the way to work one day, on a crowded northern line, I
saw a guy help a woman onto the tube. I’d assumed it was his girlfriend from
the way he touched her on her waist and lower back. Kindly, he then let me on
before squeezing in behind me. When I say that the tube was crowded, I mean it
was about as packed as you can imagine- let’s say ‘arse to groin’ to paint a
picture. That would be: my arse, his groin.
It wasn’t long before a started to feel movement ‘down
there’. At the time I didn’t know what to think. I guessed he was getting
aroused, and I thought about how embarrassing it must be for him. I certainly
thought that he would find the opportunity to rearrange himself at the next
stop, or get off the tube. But the next
stop came and went and I found him back in the same position. Or worse,
somehow. Instead of just a bit of movement ‘down there’, I was starting to
think that this might actually be a full hard-on. The girl he’d helped on the
tube was giving me strange looks. Assuming that she was his girlfriend, I
thought she had seen what was going on and was getting annoyed with me, I
smiled back as if to say ‘sorry, I’m not doing it on purpose’. In hindsight I
see that she was giving me the look of a worried fellow traveller. It wasn’t
‘stop grinding my man’ but ‘are you alright?’
At this point he’d started breathing heavily down my neck, I
still thought that he must have been trying to get himself under control, and
that he would be feeling mortified, especially with his girlfriend right there.
But his heavy breathing continued, and so did his erection.
I honestly don’t know why I didn’t force myself away. I
mean, it was crowded, but if I’d shouted loudly enough ‘would you kindly take
your erect dick out of my arse’ I’m sure someone would have moved out of the
way for me. I think it must have been a mixture of shock and disbelief, a lack
of quick thinking, and perhaps a lack of courage too.
I was so pleased to get off the carriage, I remember the
swell of fresh air, and the sweat I was covered in beginning to dry a little. I
remember noting how unusually sweaty I was, it was even rolling down my legs. I
wasn’t until I got to my desk at work and attempted to hitch up my tights that
I noticed the long streak of cum down the back of my leg.
I had a nine o’clock meeting so I just cleaned it off and
got on with the day. I reported it to tfl, acknowledging that they probably
couldn’t do anything about it, but that I’d like a response, or some
recognition that it had happened. They didn’t respond. My friends told me to
report it to the police but I really didn’t want to, I didn’t fancy going
through the whole story, and I knew they couldn’t do anything about it.
These stories are just a small taste of my experience,
edited low-lights, there are many more I could share. But, as I said at the
start, my story is not extraordinary, it’s the common lived experience of women
in this country. As I’ve shared my experiences with my friends, they’ve come
back to me with countless more, most of them repulsive. Sharing these stories
empowered me somehow, it made me realise that I was not to blame, that I
certainly wasn’t encouraging it, and that I didn’t deserve it.
Individual stories might not seem that traumatic, but when
you live with it, or the fear of it, every day of your life, it becomes
stressful and overwhelming. Let’s talk about this stuff openly, only then can
we truly understand it and begin to make a change.