Last weekend, a close friend and I spent a night in downtown Chicago looking for apartments. The trip was exciting and made real-life adulting feel realer than ever. After dinner, we decided to stop and get ice cream at a small stand outside of the restaurant. We paid and found a place to sit on the edge of a cute little fountain amidst a crowd of people beginning to enjoy a reopening city.
Deep in conversation, I barely noticed a man approaching us out of the corner of my eye. Naturally, I assumed he was headed toward anyone else in the surrounding area. I tried my best to keep my eyes on my friend and my focus on the conversation, but he quickly became impossible to ignore once he stopped directly in front of us. Startled, we turned his way.
In the middle of the crowd, without warning, the man pointed his finger at me and declared, “I’m going to marry her.” Excuse me? Desperate to look anywhere besides at the strange man, my panicked eyes met my friend’s in mutual confusion and discomfort. I, obviously, had no experience with strangers demanding marriage and had no idea how to respond.
A circle of older men nearby overheard the very public exchange and turned to face us, one of them gesturing to the pointing stranger. “No you are not! - ” He exclaimed. Thank God, I thought, exhaling with relief and gratitude for the kind person who was surely about to save me from this creepy nightmare. But mid-thankfulness, he finished with, “- Because she’s already MY wife!”
It took everything in me to not fall backwards right into the fountain. My jaw fell as I watched two adult men, both easily old enough to be my father, jokingly argue about which one of them I belonged to. Rather than fight or flight, my body chose a third option: freeze. It felt like a century before my friend finally grabbed my wrist and appallingly pulled me away.
After relocating to a safe enough distance, I could barely even process what had just happened in between my shoulders tensing with every man that walked by. As I painstakingly avoided eye contact with each passerby, a question came to mind that a friend asked me once after I shared a different story about being cat called: is it not at all flattering?
I had paused before answering his question, just as I paused before deciding to write this post. Naturally, I second guessed my initial discomfort. Yet again, I assumed I was guilty of simply overreacting to situations that were probably harmless.
But as I thought harder, I remembered the time a trusted male friend grabbed me at a party in a way that I was not okay with. I thought about when my roommates and I had to leave the pool during our Nashville trip after suspecting that a man on his balcony was taking pictures of us in our swim suits. And I recalled just this month when my friend and I walked through a hotel parking lot while getting yelled at by a group of boys, not even safe beneath our hoodies and sweat pants.
The noun “flattering,” as defined by the Oxford dictionary, is synonymous with “pleasing or gratifying.” As I took myself back to each of those moments, I became confident that I had been neither pleased nor gratified. Rather, in each instance, I felt like what I imaged it would feel like to be unwillingly naked: violated, exposed, and really scared.
Even as my anecdotes of uncomfortable encounters multiply, my reactions stay miraculously consistent. Every time, I am paralyzed with fear to an extent that makes it impossible to speak or move. Every time, my only priority is sneaking away without provoking an angry response to rejection that can get women raped or even killed. Every time, I wonder if it’s my fault, if I’ve overreacted, if it actually could be, as my friend proposed, flattering.
“No,” I finally answered his question. “It’s not.”
By age 21, I have just about mastered the universal, unwritten rulebook for girls: watch what you wear, never walk home alone, lie about having a boyfriend, and definitely don’t drink too much. But still, my identity as a woman alone has continuously been enough of an invitation for harassment. I’m tired, and I’m mad. I’m mad for myself, for my sister, for my friends, and for the daughter I might have one day who can do everything right and still somehow be objectified while eating ice cream at a fountain.
Maybe my experience at the fountain was not driven by malicious intent. Maybe the old men were actually trying to be nice. But it's exhausting and reductive to continuously justify actions that undeniably make me feel uncomfortable and even unsafe. My clothes, company, relationship status, sobriety, and gender are never invitations to violate me.
Unfortunately, the innocent excitement of moving to a new city is plagued with an underlying fear that will follow me wherever I go. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to adequately prepare myself to respond to the upcoming episodes I know are ahead. But I do know that I will do everything I can to help other girls escape the freeze, just as my friend did for me the other night.
Because, personally, I can’t think of anything more pleasing, gratifying or flattering itself than basic respect.