The Tough Guy Vector Biography of Why I Don't Like Having This Conversation
So far, I've had three stalkers, one person (female) who tried (ineffectively) to kill me, one person who tried to strangle me, been raped by a boyfriend, and endured a shitton of sexual and street harassment from men and women (mostly men, tho!). And I had an ex-girlfriend who hit me a lot and was instrumental in chipping one of my teeth. Physically threatened by one of my boyfriends.
I've sat around in classroom environments with men who would sit around loudly chaining rape jokes for literally hours. Get hit on by sleazy classmates. Staring at me while making "here's the cock going in and out" gestures. Get asked on the street if I'm for sale. Backed into corners by graduate students and professors, had my flat tits stared at, ETC.
This sort of thing doesn't surprise me anymore. At this point, when I feel existentially threatened, the first thing I think is: "Okay, get ready. Here we go again."
The professor who stared at me and kept zipping and unzipping his fly over his partial erection as a 65-year-old when I was 19 and the only lady-type in the room was gross and surprising.
So no, I haven't specifically been fondled by a coworker, and I know that my experiences are statistically very unlikely, but that didn't make them happen any less. I would like very much not to be fondled by any coworkers. I've been unwillingly fondled in the tits and had various other bodily parts stroked by friends and strangers (while I said STOP, quit it NOW), and I've had dudes who I didn't know reach out and touch me in other places, but no, no coworkers. I suspect that it helps that I work in education and research. I don't count "having my ass photographed by my teenaged students" as sexual harassment, although obviously stuff like that's happened too.
I am not crippled by paralyzing anxiety and fear, er, as much as I used to be. Sometimes I do have bad days and struggle with going outside. Clearly I'm hypervigilant at this point. I've talked about PTSD a lot here because, well, it's a large part of my life.
And the other thing you should know about me is that when shit goes down, I go put myself in it, because I don't want what's happened to me to happen to anyone else. I've broken up fights in which there was a reasonable possibility of being stabbed before. My friends know that if they have a problem with alcohol or having been violated or with somebody hitting them, they can come to me. Because I'm a mess day-to-day, but I know how to deal with Situations.
So no, I'm not just sitting around paralyzed by fear, weeping because the world is just too scary. Usually.
I'm not even getting into the personal histories and experiences of my friends, who have seen some shit.
I've also lived in rough neighborhoods with gang members fighting in the back yard and gangrapes happening down the street, and I was physically tortured and starved by my mother. I drop to the ground whenever I hear a car backfire. I have a part of my mind that constantly catalogues food sources (OOH LOOK AT THAT, ORANGE PEEL NEAR THE BUS STOP). I had a few years where I couldn't make myself stop eating rotten shit and was kind of a food kleptomaniac to boot. Couldn't wash my face. Could barely take showers. For a long time, I could barely force myself to drink water (I still don't drink it if she's offering). Got big bald patches and a shitty immune system; lots of years when I had various vitamin deficiencies. I grew something like 4-5 inches after I left my parents' house.
My resting heart rate has been 100 for a while. I have to inform people before I have surgery that when I wake up, I'm going to be extremely upset; last time they gave me four shots of morphine before I could calm myself down enough to tell them that no that's not the problem. I almost ended up on heart medication at age 25.
And yeah, they're irrational fears, but dude, I got them the hard way. Not media messages.
I'm doing my diligence and I've been in therapy since I could afford it, as of mid-january 2014. However, I can't just suddenly stop being this person because "it's not okay." "Stop existing, Vector!" Like... no? "Go back to how you used to be!"
yeah, so the last time I didn't have this kind of problem I was 3, and I don't think anyone wants to haul me around while I drool on them.
I never said "women should get special protection because women have problem X." I'm saying that it's my understanding that women experience problem X disproportionately, often in more severity than men do, and what I would like people to do about it is listen to what I'm saying and stop other people if they see 'em being shitty, and stop acting like all this stuff is just a product of the feminine imagination. That's it. I'm not talking statistics because honestly, I don't understand statistics. But I do understand that virtually every person I've heard gloating over a sexual assault was male, and virtually every person I've seen crying over one was female. It happens the other way sometimes. But it's really not just "the media." Shit actually happens.
Obviously, I know that women can be awful. I've been sexually harassed by women, hit by them, and so on and so forth. But right now I'm talking about something else.
(And also, sometimes people lie on the internet. But I'm actually not lying.)
I hope that it's clear that I'm being chill about this. Talking about it is honestly stressing me out a lot just because I can't think about all of this without getting really tense. I'm not mad, but if I sound stressed, it's just because... I'm stressed. But like, maybe not with the "you're irrational" bit. That hurts my feelings.
Folks usually assume that I'm exaggerating. I feel really isolated, and I'm tired of being disbelieved.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1584796 times)