aggression

I don’t know any woman who hasn’t at one time or another experienced unwanted sexual attention. Whilst this takes many more serious forms, I’m going to focus on the cringe-rich world of chat up lines and come ons.

From the bizarre to the predatory, here’s a selection of heterosexual man’s greatest achievements in making atmospheres uncomfortable the world over.

Hot Hot Hot

It’s a Sunday afternoon. I have just said goodbye to a friend, and on my way to the nearest Tube station, I decide I’m going to get some yin to my hung-over yang in the form of a smoothie. I head into one of those shops full of brown paper bags, chia seeds and jojoba face cream that Isla from Primrose Hill makes in small batches in her ground floor flat.

I’m weighing up the options: Chard + Lemon will up the smug factor, but Mango + Banana will actually taste nice, when I notice a man in an unnecessarily zipped and buckled leather jacket standing next to me. I move a little to the side and gesture, as if to say “soz for hogging the best vantage point for the juice range”. To my surprise, he is staring straight at me, and says:

“I saw you walking outside and thought you looked really pretty. So I followed you in here”

“Oh, right.” I say, turning immediately back to the bottled fruits.

“So what are you doing now? What are your plans this afternoon?”

“Just going home, bye!” I say as I grab something and rush towards the counter.

Not content with having been summarily rejected, he then shouts across to my receding back:

“YOU LOOK REALLY WARM!!!”

Cheeky Nando’s

My friend is getting her bag from a gym locker, as she closes the metal door, she is confronted with the figure of an enormous man, grinning at her.

“You like chicken?”

“Um. Yes?”

“I like chicken. Let’s get some chicken”.

Real smooth bro, real smooth.

It’s a Numbers Game

I recently went away with five female friends. As Brits are wont to do where there is warmth and sea, we set up camp for the day on a beach furnished with sun loungers. I’d decided that my week off was the perfect time for that uplifting holiday read: 1984, and was thus on the edge of emotional and physical discomfort in the burning sun. The man who owned said loungers approached and walked around us a few times, obviously scoping out the talent. After telling us more than once what a good deal he was giving us on the chairs, asking us if we thought he had a pretty face, and then ruminating on how strange it was that we were all reading books (?!), he then asked:

“So, who are you here with? Your boyfriends?”

“Nope, we’re just here together”

“Aren’t you lonely?”

“…Well, no. There are six of us”

“Are you lonely… in general…?” This last he said accompanied with the kind of slow blink that gives you the sensation of swallowing a lump of under-ripe banana.

Points for subtlety, and for a best-not-put-all-my-eggs-in-one-basket approach.

Of course, women can be predatory too. My best friend was famed in our university years for pulling men + women by pointing and staring at them until they returned eye-contact, and consequently turning her pointing finger upwards with a ‘come hither’ motion. She had a surprisingly good hit rate for such an absurd technique.

But it is different for a man to be predatory.

Until recently, I would dismiss comes ons as laughable. They’d make me feel uncomfortable, sure, but not threatened.

And then I was assaulted by a colleague at a staff Christmas party. I won’t go into detail, but for the first time in my life I had the heartbreaking realisation that I was physically powerless to stop what was happening to me. It was not a prolonged or serious assault – another colleague soon saw and intervened. But I have never felt more vulnerable and angry in my life. I know women who have encountered far worse, but on this subject I can only speak to my own experience.

This is why come ons now incite a twinge of fury in me. When you go up to someone proudly proclaiming the sole purpose of wanting to bone them, you remove any space for them to turn that encounter around. You take away from them any say in what they might want that encounter to be, or if they want it to happen at all. And when you are physically stronger, you should think before tipping the power dynamic even further in your favour. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t approach someone who intrigues you, but how about starting a conversation first?

Not least because, fuck it, what if they vote UKIP?

Google image search 'woman running with balloons'. There's an amazing volume of this shit. — Google image search ‘woman running with balloons’. There’s an amazing volume of this shit on the internet.

Yesterday, I went for a run. I like running, not least because a camel toe is an entirely appropriate accessory. Being a resident of London, I have plotted routes that allow me to pretend that I am not in London: back streets and alleys connect laps of parks, woods, and dog-fouled greens. When I am running, I could be in Staines. My current preference is for a disused railway that connects a small cluster of trees to a park. By London standards it is positively rural, and as such, it is congested as fuck. Yummy mummies, cyclists and biffter-honking teenagers jostle for space with dog walkers and optimistic foragers.

Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” keeping my pace steady, and a high SPF on my milky flanks, life could have been a lot worse at that moment. Running towards me at quite a pace was a 6ft man in his 30s, I realised too late that a more athletic specimen was just about to overtake me, so with both of us unable to edge to one side, and moving faster than we were aware, we slammed into each other. Like Telly Tubbies saying ‘eh oh’. It must have looked insane, so I did a laugh smile, put my hands up and said “Oh! Sorry!” expecting him to do the same. He did not; he got angry, and said “for FUCK’S sake, LOOK where you’re fucking going!” He stood there, glaring over me, and suddenly anxious to get away, I started running again, an unexpected lump in my throat.

Am I malcoordinated? Certainly. But in this instance, we were equally at fault, and equally innocent. Had I been an enormous be-muscled man, I feel strongly that Rev. FFS would have reacted differently, with far less, if any aggression. In fact, I think that even if my ripped-man alter ego had ran the length of the path with his eyes shut, arms flailing around, listening + singing along to “Mambo No. 5” on portable speakers, Rev. FFS would not have responded to the collision with such anger.

Physical + Verbal aggression demonstrated at times of sudden confrontation almost always follows the pattern of he who’s bigger, he who has the most power, assuming control and often righteousness. You see it in the playground, and you see it between countries, and how terrifically absurd it is that swagger and muscle can give you such a catastrophic sense of entitlement. If you are a man reading this, you may have on occasion been bullied or threatened by another, and I would bet handsomely that you have been the smaller, softer purveyor of dick + ballsack on the majority of these times. As a woman, you are almost always the vulnerable party, and nearly never have the power that comes with having the physical upper hand.

And it was shit to be reminded of this out running.

Dear Rev. FFS, I hope you slip on a dog turd in front of your crush, lots of love BGP xoxo

Big Girl Pants

dispatches from the bikini line

Is That Male Privilege in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

The Physical Upper Hand