Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
When I was growing up, my parents never really talked about the idea of violence. There was this general sense that violence was oafish or loutish, something well-educated and reasonable people, especially Christians, should shun. They were the parents worried about their teenage sons playing Halo because it meant shooting at people, even if only in pixels.
But, for women, knowledge of violence is not a choice. It is baked into much of the way that we are molded by our families and our society. From chastisements of a mother to wear a longer skirt or a higher neckline to the horrified whispers of what might’ve happened to someone you might know. It’s ugly and brutal and no amount of Christian or moral sheltering can outrun its long reach.
The thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever been afraid enough. When I was little, I roughhoused with my brothers and other friends, but it never occurred to me how ultimately powerless I was. I knew I was supposed to bite and scratch and kick and scream if someone tried to kidnap me, but no one ever talked about why I needed to do that, or what could happen to me if I didn’t. Much like one of my very first the post calvin pieces talking about my growing realisation as a woman in STEM of how unfair and uncaring circumstances can be, simply because of one’s gender, I’ve also learned the importance of the inescapable fear—and rage, yes—of existing in an embodied way.
In Melissa Febos’ book Girlhood, she writes about her first realisation as an adolescent girl that there was nothing her body could do to oppose the boy she was playing soccer with: “It was the last day that I believed my body’s power lay in its strength.” I think about this quote often, because I’ve always known my power as a person lay in my brain with its dynamic and perplexing personality, but I’d never thought about my power (or lack thereof) as a body.
Now, living as a single woman in DC and becoming friends with other women in similar stages of life, I’ve learned more about how violence has shaped them and also me. It’s not unusual for altercations to happen on the Metro, whether it’s getting threatened at the bus station by a mentally deranged woman or watching two drunk men attempt to brawl on the last train car. This is ordinary urban violence, the kind that teaches you to never make eye contact with the person who sleeps on the street and to not hesitate when you’ve got to make your way off a crowded bus.
My friend Sophia recently said something that’s stuck with me. “If you find you can’t trust a man, and you don’t know what he’s going to do next, you have to be prepared to kill or be killed.” This is the ugly tacit reality that no one wants to look at. And this is only one of the innumerable facets of violence against women, one we all recognise.
So, maybe it’s not so bad I didn’t have too much fear of violence as a child. But maybe it would’ve also been good to know it as something more real and specific than just the Big Bad Thing.
