Many of my woman friends have been posting "me too" on social media, as part of a push to make people aware of how common sexual harassment and abuse are. This brought to mind an experience I've had of sexual abuse. (Trigger warning: this story is, obviously, about sexual abuse. Skip the bit between the asterisks if you'd rather not read it.)
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A few years ago, on a bus in DC, a woman groped me off and on for about 15 minutes, while repeatedly telling me that she wanted to "fuck the shit out of" me, talking about her sex life with her boyfriend, and speculating about the size of my penis. The friend I was with and the other people on the bus laughed the whole time, and I've told that story for laughs in the years since. She was so over the top, it was hard to believe it was happening. Even I was laughing, although not as hard as my friend or the high school girls nearby. I outweighed her by at least 50 pounds, but, more than that, because I'm a man I haven't had to live my life in fear that an unwelcome advance might lead to something worse. So I was free to let the situation play out without worry. I wouldn't say it was a comfortable experience, but she would have had to have a knife or a gun to make me afraid. Eventually, we got off at the same stop she did, walked to our destination, and went about our evening.
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It goes without saying that if I were a woman, and my harasser a man, that story would be horrifying.
I've told it with that moral appended many times, and always get a sage nod in return about male privilege. But on thinking about it again today, it occurs to me that the only gender role that needs to flip for it to be scary is hers. If a man did that to me I would be terrified. The essence of patriarchy is an imbalance of power at a societal level, in which men as a group enjoy a dominant position over women. But it also plays out every day in personal interactions in which individual men, informed by the social expectation that they should dominate, impose themselves violently on other individual people.
The violence of men like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Clarence Thomas can't be divorced from the violence of men like Dylann Roof, George Zimmerman, and Stephen Paddock. Male violence is the greatest threat to human security everywhere in the world. I'm reminded of the adage that many men's fear of equality reveals their subconscious knowledge of how shittily they treat women: calls for "equality" would mean women get to act more like men and they'd make men act more like women and wouldn't that be awful. The poverty of imagination of people like this is sad.
That, in turn, reminds me of another phrase with the ring of an adage, coined by recent MacArthur awardee Nikole Hannah-Jones: "True equality requires a surrendering of advantage." Words to live by.
A final aside: If the woman had been visibly larger and stronger than I am, I'd have been scared, too, although not as much as if she'd been a man. But I'm a pretty fit 31-year-old; the number of women who fit that description is small enough to ignore, let alone the minuscule share of that group who are disposed toward sexual abuse. Physical strength is part of the power imbalance between women and men. But it's not as important as the psychosocial part.
