Elevators, Men and Safety

The law firm I work for occupies several floors and I have to take the elevator up and down at least ten times a day. Today, while in the elevator with a man, I noticed the fact of being in an elevator with a man. And not feeling nervous in the slightest. Or even noticing it, even vaguely registering it in the back of my mind. This is significant because I used to be terrified of getting into elevators in case men got on, and I wouldn’t enter elevators if there was a man already in there. And if ever, perchance, I happened to be alone with a man, trapped for another 30 seconds, I would near-panic.

The fear was sexual assault. And it wasn’t ungrounded. I wasn’t the only woman I knew who felt or acted this way about men and secluded spaces.

I’m amazed how comfortable and SAFE I feel now. I almost never feel threatened, I almost never look at men and try to judge if they can be trusted or if a sexual predator is lurking beneath the surface. I’m not constantly watching and listening for footsteps behind me, for a face that keeps cropping up in a crowd, quietly stalking me. In public spaces, I never feel alone – there are always women around. I never instinctively protect my ass while walking close to people or riding the train, expecting to be groped unless I’m watchful.

This sense of safety is really new, and none of the old watchfulness is entirely beaten out of my system. I’m not naive about American society, nor did I settle into this sense of safety as soon as I arrived here. It took at least a year for me to be somewhat comfortable in public by myself. It took at least that long for me to acquire the confident look of a woman who knows where she’s going and where she is and not look like a hopeless scared teenager just run away from home.

And it’s not a false sense of security. My defenses and reflexes are very honed. I’m about as cautious as you can be when I’m in unsavory neighborhoods. I still automatically note people’s clothes and the expressions in their eyes.

Of course, whenever I’m in a solitary place – I end up in such quiet and deserted places sometimes when I’m out running – my nerves are on edge. I would feel naked if cell phones didn’t exist. But nothing bad has ever happened to me here. I haven’t even been groped. The worst that has happened has been whistles and cat calls from very young men when they drive past me running. That’s alarming enough, but it’s not severely traumatic. It’s not like that time in a grocery store when I was ten.

My brother and I had discovered this apparently foolproof way to shoplist from this grocery store that had a basement full of dry goods manned by a solitary sales clerk. Our method required taking whatever we were stealing out down through the basement. The trick was dodging the sales clerk. He seemed like a sleepy genial giant – very tall and skinny – and we had no trouble with him the first couple of times. The last time, I was by myself and saw the man bearing down on me, with *molest* written all over his face and in his eyes. Even I, a child, could tell. Instead of answering his question and walking closer to him as he beckoned, I RAN. That was terror.

Or that time in the flea market, where a short skinny South Indian man would follow me around, trying to catch my eye so he could wink at me (winking in South Asian circles is not as innocent as it is here – it’s shorthand for “I want to rape you”), and finally managed to get his hand deep in my ass (a very common, grab-and-push-up groping method) while passing behind me. That was overwhelming anger and humiliation.

Nothing like that – nothing even close – has happened here. And I’ve acquired a sense of security. Most men don’t seem threatening. A few do, and then I’m more ready for them than any white woman.

This safety thrills me to the core when I think about it. I know it’s not the whole picture – I know there’s lots we women have to be afraid of even in relatively safe western societies. I know lots of bad things happen. But the threat of it is not ubiquitous as it is in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I can’t tell you how many child molesters I’ve looked in the eye. I forget how many times I’ve felt close to death, just walking down the street.

That’s partly why it surprises me when I come up against the venom of many mainstream Muslims for western sexual mores which they often mention in the same breath as high rates of rape and child abuse. A free sexuality that has more to do with adult consent than rigid religious and social mores upsets them, and they somehow always equate it with women’s sexual exploitation, rape, prostitution, and other stuff they vaguely disapprove of (I say “vaguely” because none of these self-righteous pricks seem to me to be overly concerned about women’s welfare).

What makes their position even less tenable – especially if they’re women living in these horrible, repressive, misogynistic societies – is that they’ve got to know how threatening their social structures are for women, any way you look at it. And a lot of it has to do with illiberal sexual norms that don’t accept that consenting adults frolicking in private is just dandy, a GOOD thing. Ultimately, all public sexual morality (except for anti-gay bigotry) comes back to women’s bodies. And the more legislation there is over a woman’s body, the less woman-friendly the society is going to be.

Covering women up because they’re pieces of meat that might get eaten is not the way to ‘respect’ them. It’s treating them just as much like a sex object as any girly magazine. Until Muslims, especially Muslim women, realize that they deserve to be respected even if they’re dressed like trollops, there will be no real respect for women in the Islamic world. “Modesty” will never lead to “respect;” only full human autonomy will.