A conversation about creeping

[lydy]

So, I got creeped on the other night. Predictably, I didn't like it. In fact, it made me several different sorts of furious. But what it didn't make me was afraid. And this caused me to think about all the various conversations I've been hearing lately about harassment, creeping, and so on. Almost all of them talk about safety. We talk a lot about how women are much more likely to be raped than men, that women spend a lot of time worrying about their physical safety, about the incontrovertible fact that women are on average less strong than men. Somewhat related, we talk about how women are socialized to be more passive, but usually in contexts where what we're really talking about is women being less able to protect themselves. We talk a lot about wanting women to feel safe.

You know, I felt perfectly safe the other night. At no point was my physical being in any danger. The guy in question was 20 years older than me, a bit frail, and I had on call a large male co-worker. The guy doesn't know my last name, my home address, and I never had any doubt that my management would support me if I needed to do something drastic. There was, at least in my perception, no actual safety issue.

I was, however, intensely angry at being treated that way. It had nothing to do with being afraid of being raped. It had everything to do with someone acting like I wasn't a real person. Creeping revolves around trying to limit or circumvent someone else's choices. It has to do with attempted coercion, and with assuming that your target's preferences are at best obstacles to be overcome, and basically immaterial to your own wishes. And being subjected to this makes me very angry. And I think it's very reasonable for me to be angry. But I feel this nagging worry that I should have felt unsafe in order to warrant this level of anger.

I don't want to derail useful, necessary discussions. I don't want to undervalue the necessity of people feeling safe in their environments. But it seems to me that there needs to be some sort of acknowledgment that physical safety is not the only thing that is important, and that women have the right to exist in environments that are more than just physically safe. That we have the right to be treated as adults, with the right to make real choices, and that our choices are valid even when it is not directly concerned with physical safety.

It is distinctly possible that I am just not aware of these types of conversations. I hope that's true. But I'm not aware of them. And I think that I am not expressing myself as clearly as I would like to on this issue. Anybody want to help me clarify my thoughts? Point me to some conversations about this? Weigh in? I am definitely looking for input, here.

Comments

[evilrooster.livejournal.com]

I think that safety, as an issue, has a kind of traction in conversation that agency does not. It's easy to point to the consequences of a failure of safety; those consequences are illegal and generally accepted as damaging.

The consequences of a failure of respect and recognition-of-humanity are so much more subtle. They get into that murky, deniable area where people who don't want to discuss the matter say, "But I get disrespected too," not noticing the difference between disrespect and a denial of basic humanity.

I suspect I'm not explaining this very well. But I think I'd say that safety is kind of the poster child of these issues -- an easy proxy for a complex population.

And I'm sorry to hear that you got creeped on, because eeew.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I agree that safety is the easy thing to talk about. It seems concrete, and objective. Of course, it isn't, since safety is partly a perception. But it certainly feels simpler. But I don't like the way it somehow frames everything in terms of she-who-might-be-raped. I don't like that conversations about my life and my rights and my value are framed in terms of whether or not I am sexually and physically at risk. That, in itself, seems to steal something from me, and from conversations I want to have. Does that make sense? It feels a bit like always framing me as the victim.

[evilrooster.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wasn't disagreeing with you; I was just trying to figure out why what you observe has come about.

I think it's a really wise and trenchant observation that framing creeping as being only about safety diminishes the conversation. It feels a lot like the (pseudo?) medieval attitude that a man's honor is in his deeds and a woman's in her chastity. It diminishes us from full citizens of the community to people who exist for a purpose, just with the added dimension that we get to choose when/whether to serve it.

If all we talk about is our sexual safety, then we become sex objects. Which is kind of full circle back to creeping. It feels like Le Guin's quote about the Mishnory road.

This is a very eye-opening observation you've made. Thank you for it.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I think that the concerns about safety are actually closely linked to my concerns about agency. It is my budding suspicion that they need to be worked on in tandem, and that omitting the agency issue actually damages the work on safety. In some sense, violence is the ultimate denial of agency.

As I type, I find that my understanding of this is actually even fuzzier than I had thought. I really feel that there's something here, but I am not able to clearly articulate. I feel like I'm nibbling at the edges of something true and obvious, and failing to make the correct thesis statement.