I want to expand on my answer, a little bit. I have swum in the misogynist stew of our culture all my life. I'm pretty sure I laughed at the cleverly misogynistic comment at the 90s era postmortem. It can be hard to focus on the water we swim in. What made my co-workers comment so shocking was that it recontextualized shit I had been seeing all my life. I had bought in, a little bit, to the idea that being a girl in public was to also to be a public utility. The idea that the clothes I wore were not for me, but for strange men, was a concept I had completely internalized. The thing that my co-worker's comment brought home was that there was literally no time or place in which I was not possible prey. There was literally no point of my existence that this man thought belonged to me. It was shocking to me because I had not realized how incredibly offended this man was by a woman who was not fuckable, even in situations where fucking was never a possibility. The existence of a non-fuckable human female was an affront to him. While I had certainly seen this kind of behavior in the past, this was the moment at which I saw it clearly, the moment where I understood how deeply embedded it was in every interaction some men have with women.
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