Sexism and Fear

 

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.