Breathless, I lengthened my stride and called yet another number, praying for someone to pick up. At last, my sister’s voice emerged: “Hey, what’s up?”
“Someone’s following me. He came up in the grocery and started talking to me, asking all these questions, being super persistent and ?intimidating.
“I got scared and tried to end the conversation, but he wouldn’t have it. He asked for my number, stood next to me while I checked out and now he’s following me. I don’t know what to do, but I’m freaking out.”
“Keep talking to me,” she said. “And don’t walk straight home until he stops.”
When I finally crossed my threshold, I flipped the deadbolt and dragged a chair in front of the door.
So many aspects of the encounter had raised red flags; absolutely nothing about it was ordinary, and I knew without a doubt that my tears and pounding pulse were ?justified.
My sister urged me to call the police. My reaction to her command — the internal dialogue that ensued while I turned the prospect over in my mind — gives me chills to recollect.
It was in this moment I realized a fundamental truth about modern womanhood that had been waiting for the precise moment to rear its ugly head.
“Are you sure? I mean, I’m scared, but I don’t think I need to get the police involved. It’s probably ok, right? He’s probably gone? I hate to bug them with this.”
In the hours which followed, I heard story after story from my sister, mother and several female friends who had similar experiences: strange men frightened them on sidewalks, followed them through parking lots, trailed them while running, stared at them in parks and robbed them while brandishing weapons on busy city streets.
All of the encounters had a crucial commonality: none of the victims of these incidents called the police.
All of them, once the immediate menace passed, had talked themselves out of contacting authorities because, really, everything turned out fine, right? No physical injury had occurred, the alarming figures had disappeared and brushes with danger and fear were just an unfortunate part of the female experience. Their terror, they all said, didn’t seem important enough to bother the police.
This is a pattern of thought we must reverse immediately. Women today still internalize the disdain of a society which has belittled our experiences and anxieties since time ?memoriam.
It convinces us the people who threaten to do us harm are only worth addressing if they’ve already done so.
We aren’t worth defending, only retroactively avenging. We don’t warrant the benefit of the doubt.
When I realized I had manipulated myself into denouncing the legitimacy of my experience while the tears were still damp on my cheeks, I was livid. I picked up the phone, filed a report with the Bloomington police and asked to speak to an officer. He promptly arrived at my door, and I was filled with security of body and judgment.
But my confidence waned when I noticed his dismissive nonchalance. I finished my description, and he quipped: “I’d probably say the same thing to a woman I was trying to pick up in a grocery store. Some guys are just awkward and don’t know how to talk ?to women.”
The word ‘hysteria,’ meaning “unhealthy emotion, perversion of the intellect, enfeeblement” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is rooted in the Greek word for womb.
As I listened to the officer validate the behavior of this man who had so ?terrified me, I knew he saw before him a girl in hysterics, succumbing to the inevitable lapse of judgment and high-strung derangement to which her femininity regrettably ?condemned her.
The world has never learned to heed the perspectives of women with trust and investment. Regardless of the identities one embodies which society has chosen to doubt, regardless of the ways in which one has been invalidated, everyone deserves to be heard and everyone deserves to be safe.
sbkissel@indiana.edu
