When I read about this sentencing scandal in Italy, I asked myself how many times I’ve been groped in my life. I turn 40 next year and the truth is, at this point, I don’t even remember — particularly because I went to many concerts as a teenager. Some incidents stand out because they were particularly terrifying, but overall, it becomes a blur.
And that, I suppose, was the point of the judge in Rome who said that groping is not a big deal if it lasts “five to ten seconds.” If you’re a woman, you should put up with the fact that your body is not really your body, and can be interfered with at will. In this case, eleven seconds would be a problem as far as interference is concerned, but ten seconds is still OK. Let it be a blur.
None of this is shocking if you’ve spent a considerable amount of time simply existing while female.
Men tend to not fully understand this phenomenon, unless they’ve been interfered with as well. One of the biggest wakeup calls in the life of a male friend of mine occurred when he was groped by a drunk gay guy at a party where he thought he knew everyone.
Two things occurred to my friend then, 1) “Wow, you don’t have to be a straight dude to be a drunk asshole!” and 2) “Jesus Christ, what is it like for women then??”
It can be very hard to balance the need to speak out against assault with the need to move on with your damn life and smell the flowers every once in a while. The real reason my groping experiences have become such a blur is not due to the fact that they were easy to cope with. It’s because dwelling on them can poison the mind.
Many people have told me what I should and shouldn’t have done to avoid being groped. As luck and irony would have it, I’ve almost always worn conservative outfits when it happened. The good old “what were you wearing” shaming technique never managed to stick, even when I was more vulnerable to it.
Let’s face it, some of these men get a real thrill from grabbing the body of a perceived “good girl,” the woman in a bulky coat on a train, the woman in sweats who’s waiting for a driver to take her to her hotel, etc. They see it as a game of conquest that makes up for whatever is going on in their own shitty lives, and they are therefore “winning” when they manage to put their hands on that which, to their screwed up minds, seems “harder” to attain.
This brings me to my main point: the shitty lives of these men. At some point, we’re going to have to shut up about the actions of the victim and be bold enough to focus on the perpetrator.
And yes, perpetrators come from all backgrounds, but shittiness unites them. Shittiness is not about the state of your bank account or whether you were raised in a loving family or not — it’s about your state of mind.
There are so many overlapping factors that influence the actions of the predator, from his upbringing — and yes, they’re almost always male — to needing to impress their friends, because their friends think it’s manly and cool to be a raging asshole.
One of the saddest things I’ve seen was an older guy teaching his younger brother to harass women. The kid seemed no more than 12 years old. They were sitting in a car and I watched as the kid’s so-called elder showed him how to mimic touching a woman’s boobs and whistle and yell a few gross things, and then had him do it. The boobs in question were mine. I was outside my old apartment in Amman, Jordan, waiting for a ride. I was wearing an outfit that barely allowed for a suggestion of boobs. But again, the outfit is never what matters.
How is a boy supposed to act if this is what he’s taught when he is still in grade school? It’s not just a question of “this is cool,” it’s a question of “this makes you a man.” Until we face the fact that victimizing women is still seen as a path to attaining and maintaining manhood for some people, we’re not going to solve the problem.
And just for the record, I used to do high-intensity interval training. I know exactly how long ten seconds can last. It’s a long fucking time.
Images: Rémi Noyon and CarlB104