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

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I realized several years ago when this conversation came up (it was around the time the woman at the skeptic conference spoke up about having been propositioned late at night in an elevator) that I'm very rarely afraid of violence, but always angered by the space it takes up in my brain when I have to confront someone about it -- like the anger I'd have if someone infected my computer with malware and I had to spend a ton of time dealing with it. Because between the "don't make other people angry/ don't hurt other people's feelings" programming and the "you're a coward if you don't speak up for yourself" programming, it's so hard to feel that ANY response is the right one, and I can just keep second-guessing myself to infinity. That's just my own experience -- it may be different from yours.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

My experience is very similar. Over the years, I've developed enough automatic responses that responding to creeps takes up less space in my brain than it used to, but it still takes up space. And it's always contextual, which requires processing. The proximate cause of this post happened at work, so my responses were limited because it was necessary that I continue to act in a professional fashion. "Fuck off, asshole," was not one of my menu choices. It's like always running an anti-virus program which requires annoying little interactions. It's wearing.

I think that one of the things I'm finding particularly wearing is the self-doubt. The questions about how angry is it appropriate to be. How strongly should I respond to any individual creeping event? I don't want to be a drama queen who creates a terrible scene every time someone trespasses because, honestly, that would make me boring to be around. I don't want to be the girl who, no matter what, responds mildly and politely to outrage, because that enables the bastards. I don't want to pretend that this has no emotional cost, because it does. I don't want to magnify the emotional cost and have it snowball and become more of a burden than it needs to be.

Arghh with arghh sauce.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

"The questions about how angry is it appropriate to be. How strongly should I respond to any individual creeping event?"

Those are two separate issues. In my viewpoint, anger is an emotion, and we feel what we feel, so "appropriate" isn't really the right word for the anger itself; it is what it is. The second question seems to be the one you really are asking yourself. I think there is some territory between "terrible scene" and "mildly and politely"--though each of those is probably appropriate in some cases--and that's the most productive territory for most situations.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I dunno about the anger piece of this. It seems like I do have some control over my level of anger. Partly, this is because I have very early training in how to damp down anger, to the point where it was years before I realized I was capable of becoming angry. Also, anger can feed on itself if you let it. So, at least for me, there's often some level of control over how angry I get. And getting some angry is often a useful tool for motivating behavior. So, possibly only for me, the question of "how much of a scene should I make" and "how angry should I be" are very nearly the same question.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think you know I would be the last one to claim all humans are the same! I think I get what you are saying, and I should have said, "For me those are two separate issues." I always worked on my reactions, my behavior in response, rather than the emotion itself. Works for me, no claim for others! For anger, when I get angry--and it isn't a particularly common emotion for me--I tend to blow up and then get over it quickly, so I worked on what form of "blowing up" to do--including whether anyone else would be aware of it.