Hast Thou Considered Being A Bitch?

it's less dangerous than they say it is

This started as a post titled “High Unicorn Tolerance” about the virtues of talking to strangers, especially unusual ones. However, I found it impossible to make a case for talking to strangers without acknowledging the sex-politics of talking to strangers.

I think the inability of a woman to build rapport with strange men is grounded in her inability to be openly mean to any particular man. Women are usually only mean to strange men in ways that they will never see; behind their backs to other women, or else on the internet. To the face of a strange man, especially an awkward or unattractive strange man, most young women will be coldly polite. Privately, they will be deeply uncharitable.

To be fair to us women, it’s often the case that our first experiences of having men try to talk to us in public are violating experiences, after all, 100% of grown men who hit on teenage girls quietly going about their lives will be creeps (maybe a hypothetical young woman who looks much older than their age has a more wholesome experience). These early experiences come at a time when a young woman is already being bombarded with charged messaging from all angles about what she ought to do about sex.

Often (although less often than the height of the #metoo era), there will be news stories circulated where a woman being “not nice enough” to a man results in a violent response. The takeaway is “therefore women should be nice to potentially dangerous men”, or at least “therefore women are justified in being nice to potentially dangerous men”.

I think this takeaway functions in two ways: first, as a heuristic by which women make decisions about how they respond to their dehumanization; secondly, as a post-hoc rationalization for why a woman made a certain decision. Let’s talk about the first, the heuristic function:

I can’t speak for anyone else’s life, but I think either version has insidious effects on a woman’s life. Yes, there are edge cases where it is best to politely bow your head and stammer a response which preserves male ego: if you are one woman in a group of many threatening men, if the situation is immediate and you are alone, if you are dealing with a crazy person who can’t see that violence would be an irrational choice. But these cases make up the minority of harassment situations.

The obvious way to be mean is the big, angry way we might associate with a woman whose honour has been tarnished (you can tell them to fuck off, you can scream at them, you can throw things at them). But you can also just be not-nice, or at the very least make the situation awkward enough for everyone involved that it’s clear that you won’t stand idly by while someone tries to make you feel like less than a person.

It is an aside that feels relevant here, in that it’s about a situation where I had to determine whether or not ideal it was to stand my ground, that when I was travelling in Stuttgart, Germany, I stayed at a hostel where the only other occupants were a large group (or groups) of Romani and a bachelor party from rural southern Germany. On my final night in the city, I was sitting on the porch with the bachelor party drinking some beer. There was a girl, maybe 12, who was sitting outside with us while an older female relative was talking with the hostel staff inside. At one point, the drunkest of the bachelor party started making increasingly gross remarks about having sex with me. In Canada, I navigate these kinds of situations understanding that I have a fair amount of power on my side; I am almost certainly never going to be shoved into a bag Wiley-Coyote-style in front of witnesses, so it is fine to just tell someone to go fuck himself.

Abroad, I respond with nothing in mind except my physical safety in the worst scenario, treating such a man as an obvious danger. But with the girl there, I felt as if any response where I was clearly acting from fear would reaffirm to the girl that there is nothing to do but act on the defense, running to lick your wounds. So instead I performed my best female-machismo act wherein I was a big tough guy who was unaffected by anything a drunk guy would ever have to say to me, insulting him to his friends, asking them why they’d let their friend make such a fool of himself. I just asked myself how a man might respond if a drunk man was saying the same things to him and tried not to let being a woman figure into the equation. His friends, after I had asked them a direct question of why they were standing by, (what kind of men does that make any of you?) apologized and brought him inside.

Solo travelling as a woman is one of the most interesting times to think about the politics of sex, strangers, and weirdness. People seem to be of two minds: either all solo female tourism is sex tourism, or the fact that you can be raped must underscore your every logistical decision. Reconciling risk and reward means constantly confronting how much you value your ability to experience adventure against the potential you will have to be on guard for your safety.

I think the average woman¹ would benefit from being significantly more open about their disdain towards men. Imagine being free from any feeling of guilt or complicity in your own dehumanization! Imagine what it feels like to make an asshole feel like a visible idiot! Imagine parties if bad men knew to stay away from you! Do these things come with a more severe (albeit more unlikely) worst-case scenario? Maybe, but all life is a risk, and your own dignity as a person should be something you’re willing to take some risk on for.

The second, more insidious way in which the takeaway “women are justified in being nice to potentially dangerous men” functions is as a post-hoc rationalization. I think in the majority of scenarios for women, kowtowing to bad men isn’t a rational safety decision, but simply the path of least resistance. When someone is asking something (anything!) from you directly, it can be hard to reject them. When this thing is also something sexual, assembling an intelligent response requires sifting through parts of yourself which you might prefer to ignore, or at the very least the acknowledgement of an uncomfortable reality. It is in your best interest as a woman to acknowledge that many forces (both deliberate and unplanned) work together to pressure you into passivity. Having the unquestioned belief that showing any aggression towards men is unsafe allows you to fold under the pressure of these forces without having to question whether or not you might’ve been better off standing up for yourself.

It really sucks to have to stand up for yourself, and if you choose to swear it off entirely, I don’t think you’re a lesser person for that. You can choose to be scared and passive in your encounters with men. But you should know you have the choice.

And anyway, to bring it back to the impetus of suggesting that women should be more aggressive in their feelings so they can feel more comfortable talking to strangers: it’s only when you feel comfortable telling someone you don’t want to continue a conversation with them that you have the option to freely engage with the world. Until you can act freely, the prospect of talking to any male stranger is fraught with dead ends and dreadful scenarios.

There’s that one Plath quote that’s been making the rounds on the internet ever since someone pasted it onto Tumblr, I think that summarizes what a woman stands to gain from committing, as much as possible, to the defence of her personhood and autonomy in difficult situations.

“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”

In a world where many of the legal and structural barriers that Plath faced have been removed, the hunger to know the world around you and everyone in it as deeply as possible is still felt. Freedom can only be realized if women allow themselves to interface with the world honestly, which requires leaving the door open to being mean.

1. “average” is important here. I haven’t met a lot of women for whom being meaner isn’t a good idea; however, I’m sure they exist, especially poor or racialized women who are less likely to be treated fairly by the justice system. Also, implicitly in this article, I am talking about women living in cultural/political situations similar to mine, which I assume is “Canada and the United States”.