True story

So last night I stayed over at a coworker’s house and in their yard they’re hosting a recovering meth addict and he's having a hard time and one of the side effects of his recovery is he's sometimes incoherent and at the end of my stay, my coworker pulled me aside to apologize if Steve (the recovering addict) was making me uncomfortable. Without getting too much into the addiction side of this story, because addiction is a serious illness and the way it's dealt with is in a way to specifically repress lower class POC, I assured my coworker that this the recovering addict’s behavior didn't bother me. “In fact,” I breezily told him, “It's not even close to the most uncomfortable a straight man has made me this week.”

And as soon as I said it I realized how horrifyingly true it is. I live with amazing, very left leaning people who would just about castrate any cis-man who tried to impose the patriarchy on them. I am a confident, self possessed woman in control of her own body. I have a high socioeconomic status and most of the things I do are filled with feminists of a similar caliber. And still, just this week, three men have made me profoundly uncomfortable. One by hitting on me without taking hints to stop, one by emotionally abusing his girlfriend in front of me and one by sexting me without first establishing boundaries or asking me what I wanted. Three more men (all complete strangers) have either catcalled or offered me unsolicited compliments on my appearance. And two other men have simply made me uncomfortable by existing at a gas station in the middle of the night when no one else was around.

I'm writing this to explain that I was not asking for it. I'm writing this in frustration that when I say I'm a feminist I still have to explain that I don't hate men. I'm writing this to explain why #yesallwomen is still a relevant hashtag. I'm writing this to call out my male friend, a self proclaimed feminist whose first reaction when I told him these stories, was to say ‘well, maybe all men aren't that bad’. I snapped at him for using #notallmen and then, after he got offensive, apologize if I was too confrontational. So, check your privilege is the what I’m saying.