What Made Me Cry Today

This afternoon, I broke into tears about this struggle. I have a lot on my plate now, but this is what made me cry. First, read this article (it's a good one):

Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Mysogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

Please bear with me on this topic. I presume by now that you know I'm a feminist. If you click away from this after reading that, you must also know that it is your attitude that made me cry, not the murders themselves.

The thing that makes me cry about this, and this article specifically is not just that this is horifically sad, true and relatable to me. But let's cover that base first, since we're here. This quote, specifically, hurt me personally:

"No, I'm not saying most frustrated nerdy guys are rapists or potential rapists. I'm certainly not saying they're all potential mass murderers. I'm not saying that most lonely men who put women up on pedestals will turn on them with hostility and rage once they get frustrated enough."

You know what, though? I'd like to say, nerdy or not, many will turn to hostility and rage. They might not shoot you, they might not hit you, and I'd say that most (not all) won't rape you. But there are a lot that will turn to hostility and rage. How is being vilified, slandered, ostracized and ignored not hostile?  I think there's a lot of rage embedded in stalking and harassing.

How about this quote?

"It's the same motivation that makes a guy in college stalk a girl, leave her unsolicited gifts and when she finally tells him to quit it, makes him leave an angry post about her 'shallowness' and 'cruelty' on facebook."

Does that sound free of hostility and rage to you? It doesn't from the receiving end, I can tell you that from experience.

This is a fear I have:

"But the overall problem is one of a culture where instead of seeing women as, you know, people, protagonists of their own stories just like we are of ours, men are taught that women are things to 'earn,' to 'win.' That if we try hard enough and persist long enough, we'll get the girl in the end. Like life is a video game and women, like money and status, are just part of the reward we get for doing well."

This is the part where I tell you a story about how, a few months ago, I was sitting at a church activity. I went on a Monday night to participate a little, but I had a lot of work to get done and so brought my laptop and sat apart a bit from the group, on the stage. As I sat there, making a list for myself and playing some music, a guy approached me and started to try to talk to me. Fair. I was pretty busy (working) and didn't have attention for him in that moment but entertained him shortly to be polite. Also because of the ongoing cultural impetus on women to never offend men so I don't get written off as, at the least offensive and bullying, stuck-up. You know what he did? He harassed me. He criticized and belittled me for working so hard, for having a job that needed me to do that task, for my taste in music and for sitting away from the group. He bullied me for being there and not being available to him.

You know what disturbs me most about the whole thing? I was there, uncomfortable and upset, sending signals to this jerk to leave me alone. Pretty soon, I was blowing him off and telling him to leave me alone. I didn't want to walk out of that building alone, it didn't feel safe. He was not the most disturbing person in the room, though - that particular title, the most disturbing people in the room, belonged to everyone else there. Why, when I had made a clear boundary with a guy who was predatory and disrespectful, did I have to continually go it alone in the face of harassment? At church, no less? Nobody, I mean nobody, did a damn thing about it. You can play dumb if you like, but I'm willing to bet at least one person in that room had an inkling that I was uncomfortable from the way he was treating me. Nobody wanted to stick their neck out and help me when it came to this jerk.

And that brings me to my most important point and the reason I cried today. I cried because this guy who wrote this article, a jeopardy winner who claims some membership in the league of nerdy guys whom he criticizes, by virtue of being male and not by virtue of having had personal experience with this vitcimization, has a voice in an argument when there's an entire community of people who villify women for sharing the same ideas. I purposely titled this blog post to get more readership, because if I have kept you to the end of this post, it's probably in spite of not because of my feminist rhetoric.

It makes me sad that I don't get to say this.

Do you want to know what the most direct and measurable result of all of this in my life? Contrary to popular belief, my ability to love and be loved, specifically in the arena of romantic relationships, has been crippled or stagnant at best. I suffer and fear connection with men because I've always been subject to being on a pedestal, or being knocked down from one. This onus of what I should be, whether or not I follow it (as I have to varying degrees in my lifetime) is the reason I'm not already what I could be, which in many instances is happy.

And that, my friends, is what made me cry today.

Love and Admiration,
Shareeta