I read a rather aimless book last year about the experience of being a woman pedestrian and despite being pretty dry it was the first time I read a dedicated 300+ pages about the very act that haunts me: Walking. Or, more specifically, walking outside as a woman alone.
I started thinking about this again over the last week as I read Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, an essay collection that’s considered a fundamental text for modern feminists. The essays put words to dangerously amorphous ideas that largely only affect women. As Solnit so expertly (and poetically) details, women are often silently united by the common experience of living amongst men. She sinks her teeth into defining these experiences. How does rape culture extend and restrict women’s lives? What is a woman’s identity if everything must always be a performance? How do we acknowledge the role gender-based violence has in society? And why do we pretend these things aren’t happening?
Like many other works that comment on violence against women, Solnit shares statistics and data that disturb and unsettle. In doing my own brief research, I found the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s statistics page which shares the following: Intimate partner violence accounts for 15% of all violent crime; 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the US have been raped in their lifetime; 19.3 million women and 5.1 million men in the US have been stalked in their lifetime. And who is doing the brunt of this violence and stalking? It’s not women.
Beyond the harassment and assaults and violence that already force women to modify their lives in so many ways, women also must contend with the very real threat of murder. This threat isn’t just bound to violent ex-partners or drunk bar-hoppers or other situations we blame women for being in. This threat of murder is sometimes just for the very simple and fundamental fact that we are women. Men who hate women can become men who kill women, and us women are informed how to speak softly and not upset these men, as if their anger is justified and we’re responsible for their impending crime.
As Solnit details in length in her essays, the 2014 Isla Vista killings revolve around how this idea of what women “owe” men. In this specific event, the killer’s defined hatred of women was the source of his violence and he ultimately killed six people and injured 14 others. His hatred of women even extended to men who “got” to sleep with women. This hatred warped his vision until only he was (according to him) the “supreme gentleman” and everyone else were “animals” to be “slaughtered.” Of the six young adults he murdered, four were men and two were women. He says it very plainly at one point: “If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you. You denied me a happy life, and in turn, I will deny all of you life.” He believed sex is a commodity owed to him by women, and for the act of denying him this right he believes he is justified in ending their lives. Sex is the object and women are simply a method of receiving it. This 2018 BBC article explains the misogynistic Isla Vista fandom that has cropped up since 2014, which is now a group of men rallying together online in praise of their fallen idol who committed these crimes. These sites and forums and blogs are sometimes called “manospheres” and are frequent recruiting ground for violent conspiracy theories and the alt-right.
As evidenced through Gamergate, these men don’t just keep their opinions in these forums. They often feel called upon to silence naysayers, which naturally includes women with opinions about sexism. I know personally of women who have talked about similar misogynistic events online and have been met with dozens (sometimes hundreds, thousands) of messages from deranged men threatening torture, rape, and death for the egregious act of voicing an opinion. This is part of the self-serving cycle. Violence becomes fear of violence becomes threats of violence becomes violence.
All of this impacts women in ways that are obvious and ways that are indiscernible and this is only covering what happens if you’re a white cisgender woman. The way men interact with women of color, transwomen, LGBTQ people, disabled women, women of faith, homeless women, sex workers, and so many other intersections of personhood is unique and varied. And, statistically, horrific.
I finished reading Men Explain Things to Me this week which is also when we learned about Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman who was walking home alone in South London earlier this month who never made it home. Many of the exact details remain murky at this time, but we do know a Metropolitan Police officer has been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and what appear to be human remains have been discovered in Kent. People are outraged, as they should be. Women have taken to social media to share their personal stories of this ever-present violent threat of men. It’s not fair that the only thing that seems to inspire compassion and action from well-meaning men is hearing a woman’s personal challenges with what we can all so clearly see and hear. It’s not fair that women are expected to relive and re-share and defend their traumas to convince men things aren’t right. In fact, things are bad. And it’s not fair that Sarah Everard was murdered simply for being out and about at night, on her way home.
Living as a woman means being magnetically bound to national and international stories of violence of this type. It means being reminded again and again that threat is always around the corner, and even if you do everything “right” you can still experience it and then be blamed for your own attack. As we seem to discuss each time the media picks up a story about a woman being stalked, kidnapped, raped, and then murdered, “there’s always something the woman could have done to prevent it, right?” Solnit helped me navigate exactly why these responses are so sticky and persistent. It has to do with power, with privilege, with men assuming and then demanding access to women.
It’s been said before how men don’t always understand how good they have it, even for rather innocuous things like being able to go for an evening loop around the block or go stomping down the street at dusk. The very simple act of walking alone, especially at night, is not a universal experience. As a woman whose soul is always halfway out the window, going on walks has the unique ability to center my mind. Like meditating, walking can be a mindless repeated action and the perfect excuse to think of nothing at all. If you let it, walking alone can become a ritual. But when you’re a woman, walking alone is a risk.
Moments before I sat down to write this I had gone on a lunchtime walk to drop off a library book and pick up coffee. When I came back I told my fiancé about how an older man honked at me as I crossed the sidewalk in front of his van in his driveway. He was presumably upset that I either didn’t wait for him to pull out (he had been stopped for several minutes as I approached) or upset that I didn’t visibly thank him for waiting. As he honked, I stopped in my tracks and stared at him. His hands were up in the air in “what gives?” motion. As I do with temperamental children, I cocked my head to the side and raised an eyebrow. After a few seconds he lowered his hands and almost sheepishly tucked his head into his chest. I told my fiancé about this and then almost immediately began defending my choices to myself (My hands were full of coffee so I couldn’t wave thank you! He had been stopped the entire time I walked up the block! Did he think I was someone else? Should I not have been so mean? Did I misinterpret the situation?). And then I realized I was doing it, the very thing women are told to do. When a man is angry, cater to his anger. Was he playing this moment over in his head? Was he writing an essay about his experience?
Walking alone as a woman means thinking about your keys or pepper spray or pocket knife or taser and hoping, dear god, that you don’t have to use them. Walking alone as a woman means knowing when to bet or fold on crossing the street, feigning a phone call, or taking the long way home. It means practicing your independence and knowing it’s a gamble.
I could share my own stories here about times I’ve been harassed or judged or discriminated against. I could share the insane things men have yelled at me on the street; I could share the insane things ex-boyfriends have said loudly and proudly to me; I could share insane things bosses and their buddies have said in front of me as if I were invisible. We’re so far past becoming “aware” that there’s an issue with how men treat women. It’s historic, it’s a tradition. Sexism is one of the oldest structures in the world. I don’t know what it will take to uproot it, but I intend to keep talking about it.
Jenny Winstead-Rodriguez 