I was maybe six or seven years old when my mother first alerted me to the fact that I was not safe. It began innocuously enough. I wanted to walk by myself to school like the other kids.
My mother’s hand flew to her heart, as though she had been shot. She may have even stumbled backwards and looked at her hand to check for blood, such was the shock she experienced. Her face contorted with panic and worry and rage all at once. She shouted ‘NO’ a few times and what was I even thinking, this crazy child of hers.
When she was done, I thought that I had pushed it too far, trying to go on my own. So I tried another tactic and whipped out the older brother card for the first, and probably last time.
‘But maybe Matt could come with me? Would that be okay?’
She wailed once more.
‘Oh great, so they’ll kidnap your brother and then they’ll rape you!’ she shouted.
If I asked her about this today, I doubt she’d recall the moment. And yet there it is, locked away in my memory bank. Her words stung with such voracity that they left an indelible mark on my soul that you can still see two decades later. I didn’t know who ‘they’ were. Ghosts maybe. Faceless men. The back of a panel van.
The only thing I knew is that my brother would be kidnapped but it was me who would be both kidnapped and raped. Because I am a girl and one day I’ll be a woman and maybe one day after that I’ll be a human.
Maybe.
I remember that split second of hesitation before whispering,
‘don’t say that, mama’
and in an even smaller voice,
‘maybe they’ll only kidnap me too’.
But from the outset it became clear. The battle lines had been drawn. I am a girl. I could be raped. I cannot walk alone. I cannot walk with my brother.
I cannot walk.
***
Perhaps this is why I have made it my mission statement to walk alone wherever possible, going so far as to venture to foreign countries on my own.
As I grew older and more rebellious, the phrases brandied about in my house were often followed with the addendum.
‘You can’t sleepover at your friend’s house; you’re a girl.’
‘You have to do all the cleaning yourself; you’re the girl.’
‘You can’t go to that party and stay out late; you’re a girl.’
And in between those phrases came my cries of protest,
‘but the boys can do it, why can’t I?!’
But the logic was not infallible. I raged against the machine but the fight was futile and it seemed like things would never change.
***
I went to an all girls’ school that was entirely feminist at its core; I let them brand me with their radicalism. But I didn’t always see the every day manifestations of sexism in my own life because I started to block it out. It was a matter of survival. It was only recently upon reflection, that I realised how bad things actually were.
I was fifteen going on sixteen when our school did a simulated business week with an all boys’ school. Half of my grade went to the boys’ school and half of the boys went to our school in a kind of swap.
On the first day we were assigned to groups. A CEO had to be elected from the group by way of a democratic voting process. It was a tie between me and one of the boys. I can’t remember the specific details, but the tutor decided that I was the winner and declared it as such. The boys immediately began their protests, crying out that I only got the job because I was ‘a pretty girl’. Not a smart girl, or a confident girl or a girl with social skills.
A pretty girl.
Is that all you got punks!?
I smugly took it in my stride. Okay, so I’m pretty. Fuck you.
I didn’t even care about the ramifications of what they were saying, or that this superficial sentiment would carry along in my life up until the present day, filtering through all my achievements, my hopes and desires, my relationships, only to land smack bang in the middle of my everything.
Just another pretty girl coming through, nothing to see here, folks.
But I quickly learned that being a pretty girl was not a good thing, not by any stretch of the imagination. I was cat called for the entire duration of the week, leered at, groped, was told what they wanted to do to me, was treated like an object, was made fun of as a way of getting my attention and then hit on. One time I was sitting on a bench waiting for my male cousin to finish his class so we could go home together, when a year 12 student started making lewd gestures at me from his classroom. Naturally the teacher’s solution to the harassment was to kick the student out of his class, thereby sending him directly to me, the receptacle of his idiocy. He harassed me for half an hour before my cousin finally turned up, looked at the guy and shook his head at me.
‘I hate having you here this week. I’m getting so much shit from all the guys about you!’
Yes it must be so hard, to experience this for just one week of your life.
A teacher from my school who was on duty — someone I liked and admired — pulled me aside to whisper angrily that my skirt was too short and that I was asking for trouble at an all boys school.
My skirt fell just above my knees.
I looked at my watch to check the time/see what century we were living in.
That week I sat by myself at lunch, read my book and ignored the comments. It’s incredible how little any of this actually affected me at the time. Maybe because I didn’t interact very often with the opposite sex, so I had become immune to it in some weird, twisted way. I chose to interpret this attention as complimentary because essentially, if we really wanted to look at the facts, I guess I was a pretty girl in a knee length skirt. I took the power back. They were nothing to me then. This was self preservation and denial at its best.
It’s only now that I look back and tremble with anger at the injustice of it. That our girls have had to endure this kind of bullshit for so long now and still do and try to mask it as ‘no big deal’ or to ‘just get over it’.
I should add that I wasn’t a very good fake CEO. I probably ran the fake company into the ground. I wasn’t cut out for it. Maybe that other guy would have been better. But that’s not on account of my gender, but rather that I was an aspiring author with my head in the nebulous and probably blew the company budget on catering. But the truth remains that I was democratically elected to be fake CEO because I could command a crowd, convinced the non-misogynistic half of the team that I was worthy. And I walked away from the experience unscathed — I was almost invincible. I didn’t need validation from these monkey morons. I was a goddamn powerhouse, plucked from my gender to fly high above the cretins.
I’m not bossy, I’m the boss.
***
Years later I was reminded of all of this when a good male friend told me that he was moved to tears by the things I had written. My reply was one of shock. I didn’t even know he had read those things.
‘Of course I do. Why do you think I’ve been sending you my scripts to read?’
‘I thought that was because you had a crush on me’.
‘Fuck you for saying that! As if I’m that superficial. As if you’re not good enough to warrant that compliment! Why do you believe that about yourself? It makes me sad.’
And he was genuinely sad for days afterwards.
But around the same time during a break up, a boyfriend wanted me to know that I would only ever have success in life because of my looks and my heart dropped into my ovaries and exploded there, to hear and recognise that voice that already echoes in my own head, reiterated from the mouth of another. The things you don’t want to ask yourself but you live with all of your life.
Did I get this job because of my looks?
Is he just saying that because he likes me?
Who would I be if I wasn’t pretty by society’s standards?
Fuck you’re pretty.
Here’s my brain!
***
‘Women in time to come will do much’
This was our school motto (the motto of the school with the teacher who told me my skirt was too short). Our founder Mary Ward was a revolutionary heretic of her time in the 1600s who believed in the radical notion that men and women were equal before the eyes of God. And that women should be allowed to act in plays, at a time when female roles were almost always played by young men. She told her nuns to stop wearing their habits, educated young women, travelled around Europe setting up schools for girls, and trained them to work with the poor and the persecuted.
So basically she was imprisoned and treated like a heretical witch and ex-communicated from the Church.
Ladies, this is your foundress!
And because it was high school and because most people in high school are dip shits, her radicalism was never truly appreciated. But I worshiped her in secret and spent a lot of time learning about religion and the meaning of life because of her (yeah I was legit the biggest nerd out).
There is one passage that I remember reading in year 12, while preparing for our final graduation ceremony. It was an innocuous enough passage, a quote that barely even registers to the average mind, but it stuck with me for so long afterwards, about the way education was so pivotal to the feminist fight.
Just a small passage about why girls were treated differently in schools.
And something about textbooks.
I’ll never remember it.
But somehow I always will.
I did a three sixty and found myself coming back to feminism after a heightened awareness of how important it still was in the world, even after all this time.
I think the most flagrant reminder of this was a solo travel trip I took to Turkey in 2009. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life but it was pocketed by several moments throughout where I was terrified. Like that time I took an overnight bus to Istanbul; filled with men who stared at me as I walked on, alone. And how the one sitting opposite from me stared at me for the entire six hours. So I stayed awake all night, afraid he might do something. He tried to speak to me at several junctures throughout the trip but I said no and he continued to stare at me. How can anyone stare for that long, I thought.
Please stop staring at me.
I think I prayed for him to get off the bus but he stayed. When I finally got to Istanbul, I ran so fast to the nearest taxi and told him to take me anywhere but this bus stop. It wasn’t until I noticed that I genuinely had no idea where he was taking me, and as he drove for too long and stared back at me with menace, that I soon realised there was no safe refuge except for the one we imagine.
I was told not to walk around alone at night — yep, they already told me that, two decades ago, I thought. A guy who worked at the hostel offered to accompany me at night, pretending to be my boyfriend. I felt cloistered, claustrophobic, sick and stuck. He took me up to a rooftop and said,
‘If you didn’t have a boyfriend I would kiss you,’ as if that was the only barrier to kissing me, and not just that I might not want him to.
At the only hostel in Bodrum, an Australian rogue traveller who worked there told me in a calm, nonplussed voice that it wasn’t a safe place to stay because there wasn’t really any security and they didn’t lock the doors. He added, while eating a kebab, that girls had been followed home by men who sometimes got through the doors but you know, no big deal really, it’s all just a bit of fun, right! We’re all cool and easy going here, right mate! I literally remember staring at him for about five minutes in silence before picking up my bags and walking out of the hostel and I didn’t stop walking until I found a hotel, checked in and stayed in my room for about 10 hours before finally deciding, fuck this shit, left the hotel and sat at a cafe where I met an Australian Turkish couple who took me under their wing for a day. I think they took pity on me when they saw that I was literally trembling with fear.
***
I saw it everywhere in the physical manifestations of every day life. Have I ever been safe? The way I change my behaviour based on that inexplicable pang of fear that shoots up and down your spine against your will. The way I am ogled, objectified, inappropriately touched. The way boyfriends don’t see their own privilege, or realise their conditioning in the way they treat me. The way male friends have hurt me, ostracised me, expected me to love them, treated me differently for not doing so. The way they judge me. That list in my phone of random numbers — the license numbers of every taxi I’ve ever been in as a precautionary method to feel safer because of that one time the taxi driver thought it would be funny to lock the doors. The fact that I can’t walk home late at night without fear, the way I clutch the makeshift hair clip that looks like a knife, texting girlfriends to say you arrived home safely, always always always jumping when a stranger comes up behind you.
The way it was me, out of the whole group of people I was with, who was jumped on a street in Barcelona, and how it was only the girls who came to my aid, and how the one guy with us kept walking, and how we never let him live that down, even though I didn’t need him — I fought my attacker off on my own. But he was symbolically absent from the fight. I was reminded again of my mother’s words. And even though I didn’t leave the house for three days, I eventually did and when I did, I didn’t stop. I walked everywhere with my head held high, on high alert, ready to kick down doors.
Then there’s the harmless stuff; the belligerent and insulting sexist comments still made by people in our migrant community, who appear to still be stuck in the 1950s migrant time capsule. Make your own sandwich, why not?! The way the whole world is still suffering for this inequality. The views of the men in my life. The views of the women. The toxicity that persists.
I learned a lot from my best friend in my early twenties — the way she carved out new paths that no one else had previously explored. She was judged for it but she didn’t care. It was almost like she didn’t even realise how radical her actions were, and she hadn’t quite married them up with her own feminist ideals. It was only later that I’d see how it all built up inside as a kind of anger, watching her tell a guy off for assuming he could touch her without her permission. I saw in her a revelatory way of existing and it was a powerful thing. I am grateful to her for the influence she has had on me. I hold her up as an icon of how life can and should be for women and I always go to her when I’m feeling overwhelmed by it all.
I need to remind you of this from time to time. We can be just like you . You just don’t know it yet.
And there are ways in which men can be part of the revolution and ways for them to better understand what the fuck everyone is talking about when they speak of gendered violence. As uncomfortable as that is to read, it highlights the disparity in equality, that for so many women, we have had to live with these realities for so long, just to exist.
Being a woman is the single greatest thing you can know, I thought as I watched a trans friend try on her new clothes as a woman for the first time, a pang of excitement rushing through me. But I didn’t want to let her in on how hard it was to be a girl. Or maybe I was in denial at the time.
Maybe it’s that I still somehow have hope that by the time she finally experiences being a woman, it will be different.
Women in time to come will do much.
In time to come.
The time is now — and we cannot do it alone.