‘I remember walking home through the woods’: later we learned to laugh. Photograph: CHANNEL 4 PICTURE PUBLICITY
Tweet me your first assaults,” wrote Kelly Oxford after the Trump tape leaked. “I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” By Sunday the trickle of responses had become a stream, a river, the sea. Soon there were millions of women telling stories, often stories they’d never told anyone before, often involving walking home from school, or dancing at music festivals, or the kinds of men you were meant to call “Uncle”. Oxford said she was receiving two replies a second. “Anyone denying rape culture,” she wrote, “please look at my timeline now.”
There is the woman who was 10 when a man with a coat over his arm groped her at a museum. The woman who was 14 when an optician dropped a contact lens down her blouse and stroked her breast. The woman who remembers a man cupping her arse when she was in the queue for ice cream at Disneyland. The effect of reading all of these tiny stories one by one is cumulative. You stand up, eventually. You get off the bus with eyes glassy and an ache behind your ribs and you walk through a group of commuters carrying your phone in one hand and in the other despair. And then you order coffee, tell the guy your name, and smile, without teeth.
While Oxford’s feed isn’t shocking to a single woman, it is clearly different for men, some of whom seem to have been oblivious to the Jaws theme each woman hears when travelling alone. Most came open-armed, including the Republicans denouncing Trump because they have daughters, granddaughters. Which, with respect, misses the point slightly. While feminist awakenings (Jeb Bush may not have identified his as such) must be welcomed, doesn’t a sentiment like that expose the lack of empathy they must have had before; their inability to recognise a woman unless in relation to a man? A meme circulated a couple of years ago, shortening “She’s someone’s daughter” to “She’s someone”. It seems crucial that in order for anything to change, these fathers and grandfathers need to realise that earlier.
As so often happens when I read women’s personal stories of abuse, I’m shocked at how unshocked I am. There is nothing new here. We’ve smelled this gas for years, but every so often somebody like Oxford strikes a match, and fires start. You realise something, if you carry on reading, ignoring the feeling of having cycled into a bin lorry and then having rubbish dumped on your scuffed and moaning body. You realise how many stories you have told yourself throughout your life to pretend everything is OK. How much you have been expected to ignore, and how much you have glossed over, or laughed at, or pretended was totally, completely fine. “My fifth assault,” continued Oxford, some time later, “Age 15, at hospital for anxiety & heart palpitations. shirt is off for ekg, 2 Drs, not my Drs, stop & stare. 1 winks at me.”
Things in the cold light of adulthood reveal themselves as, if not technically assault, then certainly a cousin. But they’ve been refiled as sassy anecdotes, or stories about the oddness of men. I had and have a beautiful life, and yet, like all women to different degrees, it’s been lived to a muted soundtrack of powerlessness. Reading Oxford’s feed, I remembered the ice-cream van outside school, the man who would give us broken lollies if we climbed inside and sat on his knee. I remembered walking home through the woods, and my friend shouting “RUN” when she saw a man with his coat open standing beside a tree. When we were called out of our French lesson to talk to the police, we told the other girls about it with pride – the story had been spun in our heads so there was something affirming about the fact that a hooded man had chosen us. Us! It wasn’t fear we learned, it was something worse – we learned to laugh at the men who snuck their fingers up your top on a busy train, or shouted comments about your school uniform from cars. As adults, an accumulation of expectations of what a woman is for led to many anecdotes between friends about “bad dates”, “bad sex”, being playfully strangled, ejaculated on, left behind.
Women walk into relationships now with virtual keys clenched in their fists, as if forever walking home on a dark night.
Tweet me your first assaults,” wrote Kelly Oxford after the Trump tape leaked. “I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” By Sunday the trickle of responses had become a stream, a river, the sea. Soon there were millions of women telling stories, often stories they’d never told anyone before, often involving walking home from school, or dancing at music festivals, or the kinds of men you were meant to call “Uncle”. Oxford said she was receiving two replies a second. “Anyone denying rape culture,” she wrote, “please look at my timeline now.”
There is the woman who was 10 when a man with a coat over his arm groped her at a museum. The woman who was 14 when an optician dropped a contact lens down her blouse and stroked her breast. The woman who remembers a man cupping her arse when she was in the queue for ice cream at Disneyland. The effect of reading all of these tiny stories one by one is cumulative. You stand up, eventually. You get off the bus with eyes glassy and an ache behind your ribs and you walk through a group of commuters carrying your phone in one hand and in the other despair. And then you order coffee, tell the guy your name, and smile, without teeth.
While Oxford’s feed isn’t shocking to a single woman, it is clearly different for men, some of whom seem to have been oblivious to the Jaws theme each woman hears when travelling alone. Most came open-armed, including the Republicans denouncing Trump because they have daughters, granddaughters. Which, with respect, misses the point slightly. While feminist awakenings (Jeb Bush may not have identified his as such) must be welcomed, doesn’t a sentiment like that expose the lack of empathy they must have had before; their inability to recognise a woman unless in relation to a man? A meme circulated a couple of years ago, shortening “She’s someone’s daughter” to “She’s someone”. It seems crucial that in order for anything to change, these fathers and grandfathers need to realise that earlier.
As so often happens when I read women’s personal stories of abuse, I’m shocked at how unshocked I am. There is nothing new here. We’ve smelled this gas for years, but every so often somebody like Oxford strikes a match, and fires start. You realise something, if you carry on reading, ignoring the feeling of having cycled into a bin lorry and then having rubbish dumped on your scuffed and moaning body. You realise how many stories you have told yourself throughout your life to pretend everything is OK. How much you have been expected to ignore, and how much you have glossed over, or laughed at, or pretended was totally, completely fine. “My fifth assault,” continued Oxford, some time later, “Age 15, at hospital for anxiety & heart palpitations. shirt is off for ekg, 2 Drs, not my Drs, stop & stare. 1 winks at me.”
Things in the cold light of adulthood reveal themselves as, if not technically assault, then certainly a cousin. But they’ve been refiled as sassy anecdotes, or stories about the oddness of men. I had and have a beautiful life, and yet, like all women to different degrees, it’s been lived to a muted soundtrack of powerlessness. Reading Oxford’s feed, I remembered the ice-cream van outside school, the man who would give us broken lollies if we climbed inside and sat on his knee. I remembered walking home through the woods, and my friend shouting “RUN” when she saw a man with his coat open standing beside a tree. When we were called out of our French lesson to talk to the police, we told the other girls about it with pride – the story had been spun in our heads so there was something affirming about the fact that a hooded man had chosen us. Us! It wasn’t fear we learned, it was something worse – we learned to laugh at the men who snuck their fingers up your top on a busy train, or shouted comments about your school uniform from cars. As adults, an accumulation of expectations of what a woman is for led to many anecdotes between friends about “bad dates”, “bad sex”, being playfully strangled, ejaculated on, left behind.
Women walk into relationships now with virtual keys clenched in their fists, as if forever walking home on a dark night.
