Changing The Creepy Guy Narrative [View all]

[Matariki]

http://www.readability.com/mobile/articles/sm8ypeaz?mobile-shortener-banner=1

How being a writer helped me rewrite a sexist trope...for real.
So a thing happened to me yesterday on the BART as I was coming home from work. (And no, it wasn't a Sharknado...mores the pity.) Maybe I'm just rewriting history or trying to make a story fit in this the context of this blog...maybe, but I really, honestly think that what happened did so (at least in my case) because I am a writer.

You see, as a writer, I am also a reader--a big crazy, prolific-as-shit reader. I've read two or three dozen articles my friends have linked over the years on women's experience with creepers on public transit--usually with some sort of commentary attached to it by said friend along the lines of "ZOMG THIS!!!!" or "SO FUCKING TRUE!!!!" I've read Schrodinger's Rapist, Rape Culture 101, Jezebel articles by the dozens (perhaps hundreds), and even my own friends' tribulations on BARTs and busses. I even read that article (which I can't find now) that lays out a well reasoned case that our culture's entirely fucked up sense of consent and rape culture exist naturally as an extension of the same mindset that cause women to be afraid of being blunt and honest when they get cornered in public by someone they're not interested in.

And in reading all these things I've come to be aware of a narrative. An everyday narrative almost as common for women as "the train pulled into the station, and I got on."

It is the narrative of how men hit on women in public places. A tired old story if ever there were one. A story where consent is not a character we actually ever meet, and where the real antagonist is not a person, but rather the way she has been socialized to be polite, to be civil, to not be "such a bitch"....no matter how much of a Douchasauras Rex HE is being about not picking up the subtle clues. Yes, a human being might fill the role of the immediate obstacle--and in doing so personify the larger issue, but the careful reader of this tropetastic narrative knows the real villain is the culture that discourages her from rebuking him in no uncertain terms lest she be castigated. (And that's the best case scenario; the worst is that she angers someone with much greater upper body strength who may become violent.) The real antagonist is a society where she is actually discouraged from being honest about what she wants...or doesn't want.

(the rest is quite gratifying and worth the read...)