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

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. I was responding to "But I feel this nagging worry that I should have felt unsafe in order to warrant this level of anger." While I'm cautious around enormous righteousness, I agree that there's conversation territory that's less fully covered, less fully explored. Something building from an essay about how it's not just about safety, an essay that looks at the other dynamics involved, just as you've started doing here.

It might be the same conversation, it might be another one, but there's a whole "productive anger resolution" aspect to this. Taking this week's example, you dealt with the creeper. You recognized and identified at least one major source your anger. Now what? Like you said, what's the next step?

If I knew any of the useful answers, my stomach probably wouldn't be clenched right now.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

"cautious around enormous righteousness"

I hear you on that. And, you know, one of the things I don't have is any sort of useful metric for how angry is angry enough, and how angry is too much. I am certain that being angry is a reasonable response to being creeped upon. But I'm lacking any sense of scale, here.

I'm sorry about your stomach clenching. I didn't mean to do that.

I suspect that one of the reasons I'm so angry was because it started out with him wearing a D&D shirt, and him claiming close acquaintanceship with Dave Arnason, and me being delighted because I thought maybe he was one of my tribe. So I feel rather especially betrayed. (The offer I refused upwards of five times? It was an offer to play D&D, one-on-one. Um, just for starters, one-on-one role-playing is weirdly specialized, usually boring, and almost always the result of not being able to get enough players together. An act of desperation. The game is not well-designed for that. He was, of course, portraying it as a special benefit to me.)