#YesAllWomen

In the last 33 years, 70 of the 71 mass murderers in these great United States were men.  To whom is this a surprise?  We rack it up to mental illness or some other freak behavior.  Of course, you would have to be crazy to do something like that.  It’s not just crazy and it’s not just guns.  It’s worse.  Underlying it all, our culture thinks it’s acceptable to satisfy our feelings of powerlessness with violence.  Using force either emotionally or physically to get what we think is already ours is seen as acceptable. Any woman will roll her eyes and yawn at the next guy who uses his fists or a gun or other phallic weapon of choice at assert himself.   When the latest news is particularly horrific, we say it’s unacceptable out of one side of our mouths and then it's unpreventable out of the other.   Not true.  If it were socially unacceptable, it MAY be preventable.  It IS socially acceptable – everyone just has a different definition of where it crosses the line.

“I don’t like *insert irritant here* so I’m going to destroy it” is the basic premise of our culture and constitution.  “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”, to quote Howard Beale.  You can shoot someone who comes into your house with impunity.  But what about the neighbor who knocks at the door to complain about a dog and gets shot dead through the closed door?  A jury of that man’s peers said it’s acceptable.  The line moves.  By inches or by feet.  It’s not the guns, it’s the line, and since people are capricious, they make their own definitions.  You buy a woman a drink; she must pay you back, right?  Girlfriend steps out of line, you have to teach her a lesson.  She wore the wrong clothes or looked the wrong way or didn’t instantly satisfy some deep seeded insecurity. She just didn’t listen.  She threatened your manhood.  These are all acceptable scenarios that go on every day unchecked.  Reverse the gender and you would have a reality TV freak show.

The forced dominance of women has no shocking extreme, it seems.  The man who killed women and talked about it openly in Internet forums to like-minded individuals just acted out an extreme behavior of a commonplace sentiment I have seen on a daily basis in bars and in life.  The examples I am about to give have happened to every woman I know.  From comments, to teeth sucking and other lewd noises, to the boor at the bar who forces his awesomeness on you, to the stalker, to the rapist.  Then it’s murder and somehow it’s different, but boys will be boys and it’s usually brushed off.  “Geez, I’ve felt like killing my wife/girlfriend!” and there are nods of recognition.  A woman can do more time for firing a shot in the air than a man will get for finally killing her.  Yet another man kills the object of his desire and it provokes a yawn, but a woman fights back, and THAT’S a freak of nature. 

I’m not sure when it starts.  It’s always there.  It’s like you are trained in school to understand that the male ego is a precious and fragile thing and if you jostle it in any way, it can blow up like a bomb in your face.  Girls are excluded from “boy” activities not just due to gender differences, but god forbid you were better at said activity than they were.  I learned this in the schoolyard.  When I was excluded, I would wrestle the most vocal boy to the ground.  The only thing he understood was not logic or fair play but violence.  I was trying to speak their language.  I was trying to relate, but what I didn’t realize was a girl that acted like a boy was just excluding herself further.  That strategy didn’t last beyond the fifth grade, when hormones started to kick in and the gender differences became more physically apparent.

Once puberty kicks in, there is no joining the boys’ team.  It’s boys vs. girls, and they boys always win.  My first experience of this cruel joke was the mixed gender “boy/girl” parties.  There is punch and snacks and when you combine sugar and surges of hormones, inevitably the kissing games start.  Boys are supposed to kiss girls in the game.  The rule they don’t tell you is girls aren’t supposed to kiss boys.  The girls who “win” don’t like it, or don’t play at all.  I sadly thought that you try to win the game, or play as well as you can.  I found out the hard way.  Monday morning back at school, it’s like a cruel joke.  The game’s rules changed, and the thing you thought you were supposed to be good at to win brought nothing but shame and ridicule.  I think I was first called a “slut” when I was 12.  Was I too good?  Better than the boys?  Too enthusiastic?  I didn’t fake being demure, or act like I was being forced?  I was not submissive.  I didn’t have to be forced.  I said yes and not no before I was kissed.  I didn’t understand that it was more desirable as a woman to be dominated, to be forced against your will to do something than do it willingly.  I still didn’t understand what I did wrong, and made the same mistake over and over again.  I can see now this was a mild punishment.  It would only escalate into adulthood.  In high school, the girls who went willingly were “sluts” and the girls who acted like they didn’t want to but did were the “good girls”.

A boy older than me asked me to the movies once.  I was afraid of him.  He scared me.  What did I do?  I did what any girl instinctively does - anything to not set this person off.  I said, “Yes”.  I went to the movie and my worst fears were realized.  He put his hands on me.  I was frozen.  I had no training on what you do in this situation.  This was before the “No means no” campaign.  This was before they taught “good touches” and “bad touches” in school.  Your parents invent some obtuse description about where babies come from but they never tell you how to deal with unwelcome advances. His hands kept moving and I could barely breathe I was so terrified.  As bad as I felt, I was worried about hurting his feelings or pissing him off.  Oh god, don’t hurt a boy’s feelings!  He might never recover.  I had to get out of there.  I could not endure one more minute but I couldn’t upset him either.  I excused myself to the bathroom and called my mom to come pick me up.  That’s how much of a child I was and how ill-equipped I was to fend off an aggressive male. I certainly wasn’t going to fight so I chose flight.  A year later when I went to the high school, I would see this boy, and he would mutter nasty things to me in the hallway.  He would stare me down.  Try to intimidate me.  There was that word again.  “Slut”.  What did I do?  I ran away!  Again there were these rules I didn’t understand.  There was such hatred and anger in him.  I literally would not walk down the hall where his locker was.  I was more afraid than ever.  It was like the movie never ended.

To submit or not submit?  This is another survival technique they teach girls.  Submit and nothing will happen.  But it does happen - you just won’t be killed.  Maybe.  When you are in that situation, you forget the debate and you just want to get through it.  You just want to live or survive and not want to feel like dying for the rest of your life.  But it’s still about the male ego – give him what he wants and you don’t die.  Submit to his power and you may have a fighting chance.  Your fight is to do nothing.  The sickest thing that went through my warped teenage mind, I thought I would get in trouble.  Surely I did something to provoke this.  I went through my mistakes, not realizing I was being stalked.  When a familiar face from the neighborhood showed up at my door, what reason would I have not to let them in?  If I screamed, my mother would wake up and I would be in trouble.  Shaking in the shower, I was still worried I would wake her up and she would wonder what I was doing showering so late at night.  I had school.  How could I be so stupid?  The worst part was he somehow found our phone number in the book and called me a week later. Like nothing happened.  He was shocked when I freaked out and wanted nothing to do with him.  In a weird way, I think he thought he didn’t do anything wrong. It was back to the schoolyard for me. I started to take bodybuilding classes.   Acting like a good girl and submitting sucked.  I’m going to be the one wrestling them to the ground next time.  Or again.  Soon, I was bench-pressing my own weight.  I notice a “type” I picked from that point on – I won’t date anyone I don’t think I can “take”.  Otherwise, I seemed to be functioning normally.  I was not going to be a victim.  The violation was not the defining point of my teenage years; it was the vindication I made for myself that was making me whole.  I would not submit ever again.

After college, I became a teacher.  They tell you to be aware of natural gender biases.  Studies show that teachers praise male students more highly and enthusiastically than girls.  It’s the fragile male ego thing.  A boy answers correctly and you construct a cathedral.  A girl answered correctly, and she should.  There is this subtle reinforcement in our educational system that boys need to be constantly built up, whereas girls are “naturally better students” so why do they need praise?  I had to be conscious of this.  I had to be extra aware, and I was.  It was more often the boys who complained about their scores and when it came to their grade, couldn’t I just let it slide.  I was conscious in my professional life, but still, in my personal life, I was submissive.  I let myself be bullied into acts I was not comfortable with.  The male egos of my love life were treated like the Hope Diamond in crystalline cases.  I was careful not to shatter them.  I would take the fall and get the scrapes and scars so the glass would remain intact.  Until I started to crack and fracture and split and shatter.  I wound up in a doctor’s office attached to an EKG.  Perpetuating a male fantasy came at the expense of my physical and emotional well-being.  I was submitting again, but this time submission nearly killed me. 

I broke out of submission again.  Part of that was reclaiming a part of myself I had given up – again subjugating my own desires for that of another.  I went back to my first love – playing music.  A loved one told me that girls should not be in bands.  I knew when I was younger that female rock musicians were not the norm and they were regarded as “different” or not regarded at all.  That was years ago, I thought, and being a 14-year-old guitar player fourteen years later was going to be easy.  Maybe there were more of us but the morays were the same – the Jim Crow of rock and roll that had our fountain labeled and showcases for female musicians that were regarded as the Special Olympics of the rock world.  Aren’t they cute?  They are trying to be real musicians!  I worked hard and ignored the double standard.  I was going to do what I was going to do.  I was going to be me.  This is me and this is who I am, with or without anyone’s approval or encouragement. My hard work and perseverance started to pay off.  The gigs got bigger and better.  The CD sales started to ramp up.  I got to travel.  I started to write about it.  I remember getting my first death threat.  I was very freaked out and called my editor.  I had never experienced that before.  But I had.  This was just another form of someone using anger and the threat of violence to “put me in my place”.  Who did I think I was?   This man thought I needed a smackdown.  One insult I used to read regularly on a male-dominated music forum was, “Go back to sucking cock, you talentless whore.”  First of all, sucking cock is quite a talent.  Second of all, they chose what they perceived to be a submissive sex act that I should be relinquished to.  The one thing they didn’t think about is with one flinch; I could take away that masculinity – permanently.  Think twice about who has the power in that scenario.  So from threats of physical harm to cutting me down to my knees, I should not be playing music.  I should not even be baking cookies or weaving baskets.  My encroaching on male territory is so egregious; I should be reduced to the basest of sex acts.  I should be brought to my knees.

And it goes on.  In my professional life, I was bypassed for less qualified men.  I questioned my superiors.  “Why is a man, who has less experience in this industry and with this company, and is less educated than I am, with academic credentials not as impressive as mine, my supervisor?  Please explain this to me.”  The person informing me of this decision could not.  In an aside, I was walking to this same job one morning, and heard the familiar catcall – “Hey, baby!”, like the suit was a challenge to manual laborers, who again needed to take me down.  The chatter went on behind me, and I kept walking, as if I was wearing headphones.  The man touched my shoulder, and I flinched reactively.  It was my less-qualified supervisor.  He said, “I was trying to get your attention!  What, do you get that every morning when you walk to work?”  “Um, YES!”  And I hate it!”  He looked genuinely surprised.  He had never been catcalled.  Nor would he have heard anyone catcalling a woman he was with.  Only women walking alone endure this humiliating annoyance, usually in front of a group of men who find it entertaining to watch us squirm.  It’s like the singing frog – bring it to light, and it doesn’t exist.  Men do not think that this really happens because they never see it.  Unless they do it.

I was placed in uncomfortable positions personally and professionally where the will of the boss’s male ego was more important than doing what was right for my clients.  I was fired from a job for repeatedly refusing to submit.  “I felt like we never really clicked”, he said.  “I could not agree more.” I replied, as my employment was terminated.  I recalled the times he walked up behind me when I was at my computer, hands placed on my shoulders.  There were so many inappropriate comments and suggestions.  So many warped ideas about women expressed in public meetings.  But it was his company and he signed my paychecks.  I just could not stomach it.  The other partner asked my why I didn’t meet with the boss in his office.  Alone.  Behind closed doors.  I could not even be in the same room.  I would refuse a paycheck rather than submit.  I would rather starve.

This is my personal story, but in casual chats with friends, there is probably not one person I know who has not experienced a sexual assault of some form or another.  There are slights and injuries in degrees.  From the catcalls to the degrading names that are exclusively female body parts to the teeth sucking to death threats and physical violence. 

This is a story we read weekly in some predictable event that the media calls shocking.  Rodger, like most young American men, was taught that he was entitled to sex and female attention.  If he didn’t get it willingly, and who in their right mind would entertain such a sick individual, he was going to take it by force.  Or punish the unwilling for not submitting.  

Gun violence is male violence.  And in the male mind, it is their right to use guns to get what they want.  The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, that is sure.  But whole the “well-trained militia” bit gets ignored, as people interpret that as the right to USE guns and use them against people.  The gun is a strap on and the bullet spray is full metal ejaculate.  A man kills his partner in a domestic dispute and gets a slap on the wrist.  A woman kills her partner in self-defense, or even fires a gun in the air, and she is a freak.  She did not submit.  Dead women are good girls.  They didn’t fight back. 

People rant, “Not one more!” but there will be another and another because you can’t eradicate this from our culture.  It will take generations to wipe it out, but only if people want to change.  Only if we change our definition of male entitlement and feminine submission.  Only if we are reviled by violence as a form of entertainment.  All of this is acceptable.  And then the shooters become famous.  Maybe a step in the right direction is NOT to publish the names of these aggressors, put them on a pedestal and put them in history books.  Do not disclose details of their personal lives – who needs or wants to know that.  Only when it is unacceptable and guarantees impotence, not immortality, will this type of thinking change.  Only if bosses don’t think it’s funny to catcall their subordinates on their way to work.  Some people think racism doesn’t exist because they don’t see it or think about it.  The hatred is there, whether you like it or not.  I feel it and I live it.  But I will not submit.  I get tired of fighting, especially when the world thinks you are imagining things.  I will stay standing and die on my feet, not on my knees, and certainly not on my back.

#YesAllWomen