Fear of Sexual Assault

Fear accompanied me throughout my childhood and youth, that’s what you get for being stupid enough to allow yourself to be born to an alcoholic father. The trauma is different to the fear experienced at the time, but still present.

Yesterday for a few minutes I experienced a different type of fear, one which, sadly, most women will encounter at some point in their lives.

I had my appointment with the researchers for the drug trial, it lasted three hours and I returned to my car around 5:30 – I had parked some distance away and had to jump on a tram (two if I’m going to be specific) to get back to my car. I alighted the tram along with a man in his 20s, I thought nothing of him, he was walking ahead of me but then he turned down the side street leading to my carpark and took a piss on a dumpster. I was suspicious of how short his piss was, it seemed like he just wanted to get behind me. So then I’m walking down a long, narrow driveway with a man behind me who I know is not above getting his dick out in public. To ensure I was being paranoid and he wasn’t really following me I moved my path from walking behind the cars to the actual painted walkway a few meters behind the cars. At the same moment so did he. At this stage I thought all I could do was to keep looking behind me so he knew I had seen his face and he wouldn’t get away with doing anything without being identified.

I’ve never imagined myself as a potential victim of sexual assault because of my appearance, but I guess it’s not really about that is it, it’s about the perpetrator expressing his power over his victim. I’ve got some fight in me, but I would have lost hands down to this man. I was ever so grateful when he turned to enter the building and I continued to the back of the car park.

By no means am I scared of men, but this felt like it could have gone very badly.

The Shave

I’m well aware that this post will fall into the category of over share, but you know some of the most intimate details of my mind, so why not my body too! About an hour ago I shaved off a month of armpit hair (I wasn’t aloud razors in hospital). I suffered a bad reaction to the hair removal cream I used on my legs and I prefer to pay other people to wax me than make a mess of it myself, so that meant I just had to let it grow. I think this is the first time I’ve let it grow this long, it actually turned into hair rather than just stubble, I liked it. I’m often annoyed by the unacceptability of the hirsute woman; men chose to shave their faces, but it is rare for them to remove hair from anywhere else on their bodies. Women on the other hand aren’t allowed any hair except that on their heads and pubic region, but thanks to our child like imitation of porn and celebrity culture, even that is increasingly unacceptable. I note that removing hair from the armpits does reduce sweat, and that’s why I’ve done it even though it’s winter and few people are likely to get a glimpse of the area. But I would so like to have hairy legs without feeling like a freak. I’d like to stop stressing about removing any hint of a hair from my face and to have hairy armpits if I want them. I’d like to equate the word Brazilian to a person from Brazil and not an awful trend, which in my eyes infantilises the woman and encourages men to enjoy the child-like, rather than the mature woman before him.

The hirsute woman will remain an aberration unless slowly more and more women remain unshaved and don’t hide it. I’m not sure I have the strength to change the world; I’m not a purple clad, dreadlocked inner suburbanite. I’m just a slightly fat broken down woman currently residing in a dull Western suburb. If I went out with unshaven legs I’d just be taken for a lazy bogan, not a feminist trying to make life a little easier for women all over.

Faith Restored

I just stumbled upon this article in The Age. The writer, Hugh Mackay, was speaking at the same conference Jessica Rowe was quoted from in the article I mentioned in my previous post. Bit of a difference eh?! Mackay is addressing a different topic to Rowe, but at least I now know there wasn’t an entire conference spewing forth the sort of nonsense we read yesterday. A little more acknowledgement from Mackay about the seriousness of significant mental illness and the dangers of avoiding treatment would have been wise, but that's not really what he was talking about so I can overlook it.

A Disappointing Read

I attempted to write a post yesterday, but after close to an hour I gave up. I fear being judged for my ill thought out ideas, poor grammar and the punctuation of a 10 year old; so I spend far too long reading, editing, deleting and re-writing my posts, when I doubt many people care if I don’t know how to use a comma.

So yesterday I was trying to have a little blog rant (which I deleted) about this article in The Age about Jessica Rowe's recovery from post-natal depression. The massive Life & Style logo at the top should have served as a warning of what was to follow. I disobeyed my better judgement and read the whole 208 words (yes, I’m nerdy enough to do a word count on it); by the end I was infuriated and so arose the previously mentioned rant. I first had to find out who the hell Jessica Rowe is -I don’t watch television and so am blissfully unaware of a good chunk of Australian popular culture - Rowe is an educated and experienced contributor to Australian television, she has inhabited the misogynistic world of channel nine and survived (just). Given her education, career development and personal experiences of post-natal depression and misogyny I would expect more insight from her than was offered in this article. I therefore direct my disapproval at the mystery Age columnist, and not just Rowe. I think it is demeaning to sufferers of a significant mental illness to have simplified and saccharine cures thrust in our faces. I acknowledge that this tiny article is in the insubstantial section of the paper/website, but its capacity to harm is present nonetheless, if anything it is amplified because it is more likely to be read by those least likely to analyse what they are being presented with.

Post over, who wants to count the errors?