https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/16/the-trump-revelations-show-how-much-women-are-expected-to-ignore
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Tweet me your first assaults,” wrote Kelly Oxford after the Trump tape leaked. “I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” By Sunday the trickle of responses had become a stream, a river, the sea. Soon there were millions of women telling stories, often stories they’d never told anyone before, often involving walking home from school, or dancing at music festivals, or the kinds of men you were meant to call “Uncle”. Oxford said she was receiving two replies a second. “Anyone denying rape culture,” she wrote, “please look at my timeline now.”
Men are oblivious to the Jaws theme each woman hears when travelling alone
There is the woman who was 10 when a man with a coat over his arm groped her at a museum. The woman who was 14 when an optician dropped a contact lens down her blouse and stroked her breast. The woman who remembers a man cupping her arse when she was in the queue for ice cream at Disneyland. The effect of reading all of these tiny stories one by one is cumulative. You stand up, eventually. You get off the bus with eyes glassy and an ache behind your ribs and you walk through a group of commuters carrying your phone in one hand and in the other despair. And then you order coffee, tell the guy your name, and smile, without teeth.
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While Oxford’s feed isn’t shocking to a single woman, it is clearly different for men, some of whom seem to have been oblivious to the Jaws theme each woman hears when travelling alone. Most came open-armed, including the Republicans denouncing Trump because they have daughters, granddaughters. Which, with respect, misses the point slightly. While feminist awakenings (Jeb Bush may not have identified his as such) must be welcomed, doesn’t a sentiment like that expose the lack of empathy they must have had before; their inability to recognise a woman unless in relation to a man? A meme circulated a couple of years ago, shortening “She’s someone’s daughter” to “She’s someone”. It seems crucial that in order for anything to change, these fathers and grandfathers need to realise that earlier.
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