Concluding Thoughts on Essay Series 5

People, regardless of sex, can experience emotional and logistical labor related to the fear of violence. Emotional labor results from girls and women experiencing or fearing violence from boys or men, including those they love. Girls and women do the logistical labor of limiting their dress and activities, and always having to balance their freedom with safety. Girls begin bearing this emotional labor by puberty.⁴⁰⁸ Boys and men may also fear violence from their peers or others and have to change their lives to adapt to it.

The fear of violence is second nature in that I had to adjust my activities and behaviors beginning at age 13. By the time I went to college, I decided that if a man raped me, I wouldn’t report it unless he was a stranger who had hurt me in an obviously physical way. Clearly, I had absorbed all the messages and had done the emotional labor that fear of men’s violence requires.

Many girls and women, like me, are wary about the potential for danger and we live our lives making choices about how much freedom we can exercise each day. I am a hiker and I love being around the many streams and rivers near where I live. Each time I go out I have to make sure that I’m not going somewhere too isolated.

Before age 55, I would sometimes go to isolated places when I knew they were beautiful and I needed to be out in nature. That freedom ended after I visited a park in New Hampshire at 6:30 a.m. I hiked into it and started to return to my car on a road bordering the park when a man stopped his truck, jumped out, and started walking with me. I got away from him because I remained calm, carried on a conversation, and then ran away when we came within sight of a restaurant. He ran after me but couldn’t catch up because he was shorter and much heavier than I. If he caught me, I believe he would have sexually assaulted me.

I’ve been single and dating off and on for about 20 years. Generally, the men I dated were safe to be with. The exception was a months-long relationship that ended after he raped me. The details don’t matter, but the emotional labor of fear still does. Over the past five years, I’ve experienced little harassment, probably because I haven’t dated much and don’t go to isolated places anymore. I’ve traded some of my freedom for more safety. I miss my long, solo hikes in the woods.

What can we, as a society, do to stop boys and men from assaulting girls and women? Dr. Jackson Katz, in his book Every Man, Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue, has some ideas.⁴⁰⁹ He believes that men need to recognize that, as a group, they are responsible for the vast majority of violence against women and violence against each other through bullying, sexual assault, wars, and genocide. He also advocates that men challenge misogyny whenever they can.

Katz created the Mentors in Violence Prevention program, which is an international movement that educates men and boys about misogyny. One of the first things he does is to ask men what they do on a daily basis to avoid sexual assault. Their answer is usually nothing. In contrast, women and girls are on alert and take action much of the time. Katz describes ways in which bystanders can intervene in violence, whether it’s verbal or physical. Intervention can involve providing support to survivors, interrupting or challenging abusers, and creating and sustaining a group climate that doesn’t accept violence.⁴¹⁰

One of Katz’s most important points is that leaders need to make violence prevention a priority. Most leaders aren’t doing this in the United States. One of the biggest problems is that boys and men can terrorize girls and women in-person and online and get away with it time after time. Many of these actions are already crimes but aren’t prosecuted, and others should be treated as crimes. Leaders across government and the private sector need to make sure they are treated as such. I don’t understand how online companies are able to get away with hosting abusive content and allowing children to get access to it. I don’t understand why individuals often get away with the abuse they upload. I don’t understand why anyone would want to watch such horror.