Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence
I am six. My babysitterâs son, who is five but a whole head taller than me, likes to show me his penis. He does it when his mother isnât looking. One time when I tell him not to, he holds me down and puts penis on my arm. I bite his shoulder, hard. He starts crying, pulls up his pants and runs upstairs to tell his mother that I bit him. Iâm too embarrassed to tell anyone about the penis part, so they all just think I bit him for no reason.
I get in trouble first at the babysitterâs house, then later at home.
The next time the babysitterâs son tries to show me his penis, I donât fight back because I donât want to get in trouble.
One day I tell the babysitter what her son does, she tells me that heâs just a little boy, he doesnât know any better. I can tell that sheâs angry at me, and I donât know why. Later that day, when my mother comes to pick me up, the babysitter hugs me too hard and says how jealous she is because she only has sons and she wishes she had a daughter as sweet as me.
One day when weâre playing in the backyard he tells me very seriously that he might kill me one day and I believe him.
I am in the second grade and our classroom has a weird open-concept thing going on, and the fourth wall is actually the hallway to the gym. All day long, we surreptitiously watch the other grades file past on the way to and from the gym. We are supposed to ignore most of them. The only class we are not supposed to ignore is Monsieur Pierreâs grade six class.
Every time Monsieur Pierre walks by, we are supposed to chorus âBonjour, Monsieur Sexiste.â We are instructed to do this by our impossibly beautiful teacher, Madame Lemieux. She tells us that Monsieur Pierre, a dapper man with grey hair and a moustache, is sexist because he wonât let the girls in his class play hockey. She is the first person I have ever heard use the word sexist.
The word sounds very serious when she says it. She looks around the class to make sure everyone is paying attention and her voice gets intense and sort of tight.
âGirls can play hockey. Girls can do anything that boys do,â she tells us.
We donât really believe her. For one thing, girls donât play hockey. Everyone in the NHL â including our hero Mario Lemieux, who we sometimes whisper might be our teacherâs brother or cousin or even husband â is a boy. But we accept that maybe sixth grade girls can play hockey in gym class, so we do what she asks.
Mostly what I remember is the smile that spreads across Monsieur Pierreâs face whenever we call him a sexist. It is not the smile of someone who is ashamed; it is the smile of someone who finds us adorable in our outrage.
Later that same year a man walks into Montrealâs Ăcole Polytechnique and kills fourteen women. He kills them because he hates feminists. He kills them because they are going to be engineers, because they go to school, because they take up space. He kills them because he thinks they have stolen something that is rightfully his. He kills them because they are women.
Everything about the day is grey: the sky, the rain, the street, the concrete side of the Ăcole Polytechnique, the pictures of the fourteen girls that they print in the newspaper. My motherâs face is grey. Itâs winter, and the air tastes like water drunk from a tin cup.
Madame Lemieux doesnât tell us to call Monsieur Pierre a sexist anymore. Maybe he lets the girls play hockey now. Or maybe she is afraid.
Girls can do anything that boys do but it turns out that sometimes they get killed for it.
I am fourteen and my classmateâs mother is killed by her boyfriend. He stabs her to death. In the newspaper they call it a crime of passion. When she comes back to school, she doesnât talk about it. When she does mention her mother itâs always in the present tense â âmy mom saysâ or âmy mom thinksâ â as if she is still alive. She transfers schools the next year because her father lives across town in a different school district.
Passion. As if murder is the same thing as spreading rose petals on your bed or eating dinner by candlelight or kissing through the credits of a movie.
Men start to say things to me on the street, sometimes loudly enough that everyone around us can hear, but not always. Sometimes they mutter quietly, so that Iâm the only one who knows. So that if I react, Iâll seem like Iâm blowing things out of proportion or flat-out making them up. These whispers make me feel complicit in something, although I donât quite know what.
I feel like I deserve it. I feel like I am asking for it. I feel dirty and ashamed.
I want to stand up for myself and tell these men off, but I am afraid. I am angry that Iâm such a baby about it. I feel like if I were braver, they wouldnât be able to get away with it. Eventually I screw up enough courage and tell a man to leave me alone; I deliberately keep my voice steady and unemotional, trying to make it sound more like a command than a request. He grabs my wrist and calls me a fucking bitch.
After that I donât talk back anymore. Instead I just smile weakly; sometimes I duck my head and whisper thank you. I quicken my steps and hurry away until one time a man yells donât you fucking run away and starts to follow me.
After that I always try to keep my pace even, my breath slow. Like how they tell you that if you ever see a bear you shouldnât run, you should just slowly back away until he canât see you.
I think that these men, like dogs, can smell my fear.
On my eighteenth birthday my cousin takes me out clubbing. While weâre dancing, a man comes up behind me and starts fiddling with the straps on my flouncy black dress. But heâs sort of dancing with me and this is my first time ever at a club and I want to play it cool, so I donât say anything. Then he pulls the straps all the way down and everyone laughs as I scramble to cover my chest.
At a concert a man comes up behind me and slides his hand around me and starts playing with my nipple while he kisses my neck. By the time Iâve got enough wiggle room to turn around, heâs gone.
At my friendâs birthday party a gay man grabs my breasts and tells everyone that heâs allowed to do it because heâs not into girls. I laugh because everyone else laughs because what else are you supposed to do?
Men press up against me on the subway, on the bus, once even in a crowd at a protest. Their hands dangle casually, sometimes brushing up against my crotch or my ass. One time itâs so bad that I complain to the bus driver and he makes the man get off the bus but then he tells me that if I donât like the attention maybe I shouldnât wear such short skirts.
I get a job as a patient-sitter, someone who sits with hospital patients who are in danger of pulling out their IVs or hurting themselves or even running away. The shifts are twelve hours and there is no real training, but the pay is good.
Lots of male patients masturbate in front of me. Some of them are obvious, which is actually kind of better because then I can call a nurse. Some of them are less obvious, and then the nurses donât really care. When that happens, I just bury my head in a book and pretend I donât know what theyâre doing.
One time an elderly man asks me to fix his pillow and when I bend over him to do that he grabs my hand and puts it on his dick.
When I call my supervisor to complain she says that I shouldnât be upset because he didnât know what he was doing.
A man walks into an Amish school, tells all the little girls to line up against the chalkboard, and starts shooting.
A man walks into a sorority house and starts shooting.
A man walks into a theatre because the movie was written by a feminist and starts shooting.
A man walks into Planned Parenthood and starts shooting.
I start writing about feminism on the internet, and within a few months I start getting angry comments from men. Not death threats, exactly, but still scary. Scary because of how huge and real their rage is. Scary because they swear they donât hate women, they just think women like me need to be put in their place.
I get to a point where the comments â and even the occasional violent threat â become routine. I joke about them. I think of them as a strange badge of honour, like Iâm in some kind of club. The club for women who get threats from men.
Someone makes a death threat against my son.
I donât tell anyone right away because I feel like it is my fault â my fault for being too loud, too outspoken, too obviously a parent.
When I do finally start telling people, most of them are sympathetic. But a few women say stuff like âthis is why I donât share anything about my children online,â or âthis is why I donât post any pictures of my child.â
Even when a man makes a choice to threaten a small child it is still, somehow, a womanâs fault.
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