Embed from Getty Images
—
Beauty has its share of advantages, but one inarguable downside is how it greatly enhances the likelihood of a boor to holler out their car window while rushing past. At 18, I was well aware of this. Fortunately for me, I was not attractive. In my hometown, I rarely solicited even the faintest of male attention while on the street.
So when I got lost in Worcester, MA, I was more surprised than scared when a handful of guys drove past shouting and honking.
I had flown in that day for orientation because I was arriving from overseas. I was jetlagged and hungry. I had originally left the hotel on the lookout for a meal, and my belly was empty.
I jumped at their voices, then stopped. I peeked out of both corners of my eyes, looking for the pretty girl, or a group of guys they knew. There was no one else on the street. I continued on, assuming they had caught sight of someone I couldn’t see, or else had made a mistake.
In retrospect, I think it was that jump did me in. I had marked myself as easy prey.
They came back, two, three, four times. They drove slowly past, hooting through their windows a mixture of elongated greetings, Hey Baby’s, and undecipherable sounds.
I assumed they were just going to annoy me, but trusting your safety to a group uninhibited enough to trail you for several blocks feels pretty risky in the moment. I knew the odds; that in most brawls, boy beats girl, and several boys beat one girl probably before she could raise much of an alarm. I didn’t have a cell phone, and even if I did, I didn’t have anyone to call. The first time I had set foot in New England was my college tour. I had no relatives or friends within 500 miles.
I began to scold myself. If I managed to get myself killed here, it wasn’t just going to be a bummer for me. My parents were going to have to fly in, and my mother was very stressed about work right now. Why hadn’t I thought about that? Why was I so selfish?
I reflected on them flying, with my brothers, trapped for hours in an airplane with little to distract them from my grisly end. If they held the funeral on campus, who would even come? None of these kids even knew me yet. It struck me as deeply unfortunate that I had chosen now, in the liminal state between high-school and college, to get murdered.
By this time, I was on the point of such self-pity, that I could feel my eyes fill up with tears. But I refused to cry. My startle was bad enough.
I was stupid, then, of course, to suffer through blocks of harassment. I should have stopped at a shop or gas station, and asked the owner to call a cab for me. I could have explained the situation, and I suspect that he or she would have been sympathetic.
I thought about this, many times, as I trooped on. But part of me felt I was being ridiculous. They were just saying words, after all. That wasn’t even illegal, right? I was alarmed enough to be plotting in my mind what I should do if they tried to grab me and didn’t have a gun, but I felt I didn’t have sufficient cause to actually act on my fear.
Once I had decided that I would ignore the risk, I did the only respectable thing that I felt I could do. I threw my nose up in the air, jutted out my chin, and walked like I had a clue. I refused to even look when they came back and forced myself to slow down, reminding myself that I could not outrun them.
Somehow, I managed to make my way back to the hotel. It was only once I got inside and felt the air conditioning blow on my skin that I realized I was covered in goose bumps. Even my scalp felt prickly.
I took an extra cookie for dinner, and pressed the button for the elevator. I pumped up and down on the balls of my feet while I waited. It was slow in coming, and when it finally arrived, it was crowded. I wanted to take a shower and wrap myself in blankets and call someone I knew. I was too tired to wait for another one, so I squeezed in.
Suddenly, a guy on the elevator said, “Hey!”
I looked up at him, so he could get full view of my face. I was so sure he was mistaken, I didn’t even really look at him.
“Sorry about that back there. We were just having some fun, right?”
It took me a moment to even understand that his words were addressed to me. I am bad with faces, but I finally looked at his anyway. I didn’t recognize him. He looked sheepish, like a kid hoping his mom won’t notice the broken flowerpot.
His voice sounded so different close up, but I could tell from his words, and the number of people with him, that he was one of the men that had been tracking me.
“Yeah,” I said.
Then he offered me his business card, and told me something about what he and the others did. And they got off the elevator, and I never saw them again.
I consented to that, I would think, later that evening, while trying to loosen and de-prickle in the glow of the hotel’s TV. I consented to being treated that way. I told them I was having fun.
I could have forgiven myself if I was scared for my life. If I thought they might be hiding pistols in their pockets and daggers down their pants, I could be forgiven for saying anything that I thought might prolong my life beyond the elevator ride. But of course, I wasn’t. People on the verge of murder don’t hand over a business card.
Instead, I let myself be surprised by their audacity. I thought that what they had done was wrong, really clearly wrong. They obviously didn’t. So I questioned myself – surely I was being dramatic? I couldn’t even really tell what they were saying – maybe they were asking for directions? And before I could sort out the confusion, I was cosigning their behavior. Far from giving them pause next time, my actions in that elevator had nicely laundered their boorishness. One can imagine them saying to a gutsier woman than me, who actually pushed back, “well, some women don’t mind it.”
Like a lot of women, I got tougher as I got older. I have little doubt about how I would react to this behavior today. Perhaps this is one of the inevitable lessons of growing up as a woman.
But it wasn’t inevitable for the guys who did it. They chose to be jerks. And while there will always be jerks in the world, the more that we do to disrupt this kind of behavior, the better.
—
Photo: Getty Images
You did not over react. It happens way too often that when a woman does not respond positively to cat calls (and there is no reason that she should) they are attacked! Yes you were in real danger!