Blog About It: Safe Spaces
In January I posted this a few hours after a particularly bad street harassment experience. I posted it in a secret women-only comedy facebook group because it was the only place I could be sure that I would be listened to, believed, supported, and not judged and that is fucking bullshit.
It’s bullshit that women need secret/exclusive spaces to feel like their voice matters. It’s bullshit that men make public existence terrifying and unbearable. It’s bullshit that I couldn’t be sure I could trust my male friends to believe me. It’s bullshit that 20 comments on this post were “this has happened to me too but it passes.” It’s bullshit that male comics think that our secret all-women facebook groups are just for “gossiping”.
I am so happy that all women spaces exist. Not just because I love doing an all-women show and performing for women who have been discouraged from going to comedy shows because they once had to listen to 8 white guys in a row talk about their dicks and how women are crazy. Not just because I love watching a male comic’s face drop when I tell him that my all-women show is incredible and that yes, we only book women. Not just because I feel filled with a warm glow of love and sisterhood by performing with women. I love women-only spaces the way I love abortion clinics and mental health crisis centers. We NEED this. Being a woman is so nightmarish that sometimes we just need a place where we can just feel like people. Exclusive safe spaces for marginalized groups (I won’t say “minorities” because women and people of color are the global majority) let one shed their other-ness for a little while and be the sum of your parts that don’t have anything to do with your skin or your parts or who you love.
I almost called this section “The Myth of Public Space as Men Only” but it’s a fucking fact of life. Read the mentions of any women who identifies as a feminist on Twitter. The superliminal message is that “you should be ashamed of your thoughts and experience and the internet isn’t a place for you.” Some men say that outright. Most say it by calling adult women “sweetheart”.
The “IRL” world is no better. The post screenshotted above is after an instance of getting catcalled in the middle of the day in the liberal paradise of San Francisco, California. It wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last. I stopped running a show in the Tenderloin because I was tired of asking the male comics on the show to walk with me for a block and a half to the train station after the show. It’s infuriating that I have to think about what I’m going to wear based on the neighborhood I’m going to be in. It’s sickening to dress conservatively or sloppily and still get yelled at. Women do not dress for other women. We dress for men because they have made us afraid and feel like we don’t exist in a world where we’re allowed to dress for ourselves.
It’s expensive to be a woman who has been assaulted. I was lucky. I was able to see a psychiatrist. I was able to buy and develop a dependency on prescription anxiety medication to treat my PTSD so I could take the train to my tech job without breaking down crying. I was able to work with a therapist to work through my PTSD and benzodiazepine dependency. I was able to afford to take a Lyft when I needed to be at work but knew I couldn’t handle spending rush hour on a train squished between a bunch of men. I was able to afford to cancel a Lyft and then cancel another Lyft and keep cancelling until I got a female driver. I’m so fucking lucky that I could afford the resources to not go completely insane over this stuff.
My “Good Guy” Male Friends
I didn’t put it in quotes because my male friends aren’t good guys. They are. But they have all said things that made me feel like maybe I couldn’t talk to them about this. Guys: when you talk about women as a group in a disparaging manner or argue that some women get ahead simply by being women, you’re broadcasting to your female friends that they can’t trust you. When you ask why didn’t I hit the guy who assaulted me, I now know that I can’t trust you anymore. When you question women’s lived experiences or derail the conversation so we can assure you that you’re one of the good ones, we stop trusting you.
Yes. All women. Not all of us have been raped, or abused, or assaulted, or killed. But all of us have been made to feel like less of a person because of our gender. And TOO MANY of us have been raped, abused, assaulted, and/or killed.
I'm just afraid that when I do get raped-- and let's face it, it's an inevitability that men will ruin sex for me. They've already ruined walking down the street, drinking, shopping, meeting up with friends, waiting to meet up with friends, working in an office, working in not an office-- basically public life in general. I just hope when it happens it's one of those fairy tale rapes.... ya know one where people will believe me and give a shit. Where I'm sober and wearing a burqa and where he's a stranger and I'm in a dark alley but not so dark an alley that I can't ID him as a black guy so cops will actually care. One of those rapes where the cops don't try to talk to you out of reporting it. Where a rape kit is performed. Where the staff doing the rape kit treats me with dignity. Where the rape kit is actually tested instead of languishing in a box on the lowest shelf in the basement evidence locker of a precinct for a decade. Where my case goes to court. Where people respect my decision to not go to court. Where I’m not dragged by the press for “ruining a young man’s promising career in XYZ.” You know, a fairy tale.
How dare anyone say what we do in all-women spaces is just gossiping. Gossiping is called “sharing intelligence” when men do it. Men minimize women talking to each other by making it seem frivolous and unvirtuous because they are afraid that we are talking about them. Women share information with each other to pool resources and identify threats. The CIA does the same thing. What a bunch of mean girl gossips they are.
So yeah. This isn’t an “I Got Assaulted and Then Went Crazy AMA”. Don’t Ask me anything. Don’t ask women anything. Just listen to us and believe us.
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