When I’m at my father’s house, I lock the bathroom door when
I take a shower. This isn’t because I’m afraid of our male roommates coming in
on me—I trust them fully. But I have been raised all my life to fear and hate
men.
That is not to say that I hate men. I don’t. But I’ve been
raised to. When I was little I was told to never go out at night, because I would
be kidnapped by dangerous men prowling the streets. Of course, I was never told
explicitly that it would be a man taking me, but it was heavily implied. I was
shown videos as a kid, and all of the examples of rapists and kidnappers were
men, always men. When I was young and asked my parents why we didn’t take the
bus, they mentioned these ‘suspicious people’, which were of course characterized
as men. The adults in the unmarked white vans were men. The homeless people
with the cardboard signs on the street were men. The occasional passerby in the
big, scary city I was hidden from were men, which meant I should fear them,
even if they meant no harm. All the others, they were women, which meant they
were like me: merely hapless would-be victims of men. We were all waiting to be
attacked in an alley, snatched and harassed, kissed and abused. I was taught to
fear the world from a young age, so that even boys in my class could be watched
from my peripheral for signs of evil.
Now, I like to call
myself a humanitarian: I believe that people should be viewed as if they were
moral human beings until judged otherwise. I’d like to believe the claims of
the homeless with the cardboard signs, and trust the kindness of the occasional
passerby in the city. I would want to talk to these people and learn their
stories. I love the night air and want to go out at night any time I can. But I
don’t.
The ethics and warnings I was brought up with stick to me
even when I try to resist them. They were meant to keep me safe as a child, but
I fear they have made me judgmental and cruel as an adult. What have men done
to me to make me fear and despise them? Absolutely nothing. I have been treated
with care and honest kindness all my life. That is not to say that there aren’t
horrible, terrible men out there prowling the streets, but there are also
horrible, terrible women, and the vast majority of both parties are regular
people with regular morals leading regular lives. But while I know and believe
these things, it doesn’t stop those deeply rooted stigmas to disappear. I still
can’t trust as openly as I’d like to. I still live fearfully of a large half of
the population. Not in a way that I openly dislike them, but in a way that it
is hard for me to coexist with them at an unconscious level. I hate that. I
hate fearing people without reason. It is unfair, unfair to men and unfair to
myself.
I lock my bathroom door when I’m at my father’s house, but at
my mother’s house I do not, even though I live with an older man. But I don’t
fear my step father walking in on me in the shower; I have no doubt that my
body doesn’t interest him. Instead, I lock my bedroom door—I fear him talking
to me and harassing me. I hide in my shower because I know he won’t bother
me, because in the shower I can definitely avoid him, and because in the shower
I can’t hear him argue with my mother about how terrible and narcissistic her
children are.
I have realized there is a difference between a taught fear and
true fear of a person.
Life is good.
