Today I hate men

Exit strategies and what a small dog and being a woman have in common.

“Can I pet your dog?” the man on the streetcar says, then proceeds to try to pet my chihuahua who, as usual, is freaked out by being on public transit and is trembling like a leaf. I grabbed the streetcar to get home quickly because I worried about both of us getting heatstroke when the temperature suddenly shot up.

“Please don’t pet him,” I say, and the man smiles, moves even closer and says, “I think he’s unhappy” when my dog growls a little at his dumb fat fingers in his face. I can also tell the man doesn’t really want to pet the dog; he wants to talk to me because he is right in my personal space looking at me with creepy eyes. Then he says, “I like your necklace. Hot out there, eh?”

I press the button for the next stop and march toward another door without looking back to see if the man is following me. Last year in Montreal, another man crouched beside me on a metro bench, asked to pet the dog, then asked me out. I said nothing. I stood up, rode the escalator back to street level, and waited for another train. Another time, a man on the streetcar demanded to know my name. When I refused, he accused me of abusing my dog because the dog was trembling. I got off that streetcar too.

Today, after I step onto the sidewalk, something in me finally gives. “Fuck this shit,” I say loudly. “Fuck this fucking shit.”

I say it to seem scary and unapproachable, to show the world how frustrated I am, and I cry a little because I am frustrated. It is so hot, the dog is heavy, I am exhausted, and now I have to walk because of yet another shitty man... yet another walk, another detour that I’ve had to take in life, one I’ve been taking in one form or another since I started leaving the house alone as a seven-year-old girl. Back then, it was the boys on the way to school who would wait for me, tease me, gang up on me, so I learned to take the longer route. It took me ten minutes to get to a school that was so close I could see my classroom window from my bedroom window.

I’m almost 49, so I’ve got the detour-taking thing down pat—42 years of doing it—but today I am especially frustrated because I am responsible for a little creature who depends on me, which makes me even more vulnerable. I keep thinking about one ex who used to tell me, “One day you’re going to miss all that attention,” because he knew I liked the attention, because he knew I was vain. When he said that, I worried he was right. I worried I would become invisible the way women are supposed to become invisible as they age.

Right now, I want nothing more than to be invisible. Right now, I just want to get home safely with my little dog, put his little paws in cold water to bring his temperature down, and make him drink some water and then to finally sit the fuck down. But I have to think of my neighbourhood first, and which streets to avoid – while also rushing to get inside the cooler space – because I have a map that every woman has in her head, where we have our safe and less safe routes based on various men that have commented, followed, yelled… harassed us. At home, too, sometimes it isn’t safe; in my building there’s a guy who used to text me incessantly last year trying to get me to “party” with him and letting me know his girlfriend was not around. I foolishly shared my phone number with my neighbours – who are for the most part awesome – when my son’s shoes got stolen. The neighbour has stopped but, still. He lives on my floor and he’s twice my size.

Right now, as I walk, trying to avoid both a building with the flasher and the corner store area, my puppy feeling way too furry and panting in my arms, I can’t help but remember all the other times when I was vulnerable in a similar way, meaning not while I was out at night or at a party or drunk and stupid – you know, really asking for it, the way we women ask for it when we’re reckless and to look pretty – but just out in the world with my breasts and legs and face, but also out and responsible for someone smaller and even more vulnerable. To me, that’s the worst of harassment, when men bother you knowing you’re trapped – slower, more careful – in that way. Like that time when I was out with my toddler and a man followed us and said, “Tell your mommy I wanna kiss her, tell your mommy I wanna kiss her,” and my son cried. That was in the summer as well and my son was too slow on his chubby legs and I would’ve been too slow myself if I were to pick him up and run… so I just walked faster and the guy walked right beside us and made kissy noises.

Or the time I was nine months pregnant, feeling glorious — glowing and enormous — walking down a closed-off street in Kensington market when a man coming toward me snarled, “Ohhh, I could put another one in you.” In an instant, I stopped feeling radiant. I was just scared, enormous and disgusting, like a walking advertisement for unprotected, unmarried sex with a little bastard growing inside me — a little bastard I would one day have to make sure didn’t grow up to become one of those men. Although how do you make sure of that when his uncle’s response to hearing he’s just seen Romeo and Juliet for the first time was, “Was Juliet at least hot?”

I don’t have any wisdom or a solution but today I just… hate men. And I hate admitting that because I genuinely don’t want to hate them. I don’t even want to blame good men for failing to keep the disgusting ones in check. But I do. I hate how much of our lives women spend molding ourselves, not simply to fit into the world but to survive it. I don’t think most men can fully understand what it feels like to move through the world as a woman because they have never had to imagine that kind of vigilance.

I live in Canada, in a city considered remarkably safe. I’ve only been flashed a few times —far fewer than during summers in Europe— and I’ve been SAed mostly only after putting myself in dangerous situations, usually by getting drunk. That’s the bargain women understand from the beginning. You can’t trust most men when you’re intoxicated, and every time you drink you accept that risk. You know that your fuck-me pumps can become your rape-me pumps, and you know that if you are assaulted—because somehow it will inevitably become your fault—someone will ask what you were wearing or whether you encouraged it. You don’t think about this consciously in your late teens or early twenties. You’re only just beginning to collect the stories.

I also hate that I’m writing this because I’ve read versions of this essay before and caught myself thinking, God, she sounds bitter. Or, She’s being dramatic. I hear that voice in my own head now as I wonder whether men will be offended that I wrote they can’t be trusted around a pair of high heels. Or little dogs.

I still have the same conversation with the men in my life. I ask them to think about the last time they felt unsafe leaving the house, and they’re always surprised they can’t come up with an answer. Then I tell them that most women leave home making a dozen calculations about their safety before they’ve even reached the corner, and they wonder whether I’m exaggerating.

I even remember debating whether getting a chihuahua was a liability. A mastiff would probably be safer, I thought. A chihuahua, like a pregnancy or a child, makes you more vulnerable and I think about how instinctively I protect my little dog. I don’t have to be told that the world looks different from thirty centimetres off the ground, where every stranger is a giant and every boot or skateboard could become an accident waiting to happen. I don’t accuse him of being paranoid because I understand that vulnerability changes the way you move through the world. Pregnancy taught me something similar. Suddenly I wasn’t just responsible for my own body but for another body that couldn’t protect itself, and I became aware of risks I had barely noticed before.

Empathy is the willingness to imagine another person’s universe without insisting it look like yours. Nearly one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence – we are not making these calculations because we’re dramatic or fearful by nature – we’re making them because enough of us have learned, firsthand or secondhand, what can happen if we don’t. I don’t believe we’re ever going to build a world where women no longer have to bend to the reality of men’s violence. Which is why, just for now, I’ll let myself be angry at men who aren’t all dangerous but today I am tired of having to explain why so many women believe they might be. Tomorrow I’ll go back to making distinctions, to reminding myself that people are individuals. Today, I’m too busy wishing I lived in a world where this essay didn’t make sense.