I was fifteen. My first year at Catholic high school in downtown Colorado Springs. It was the 80s. Homecoming week. Punk Rock Day. I put on a striped mini-skirt, black fish-net stockings, a tank top, and heavy eye makeup. I teased out my 1980s big curly hair and sprayed it with gold and silver wash-out glitter. My mother dropped me off at school.
You understand why I’m telling you what I was wearing, right?
This was my fifth school in five years because my mother used annual school changes as punishments. I’d become kind of used to it. If someone had told me I was suffering from complex trauma because I’d endured years of abuse, I’d have rolled my eyes.
I had seen stories of abuse on TV—Rape. Torture. Death.
Not me. I was fine.
FINE.
In the past, I’d always ridden yellow school buses, but this newest school sat on a busy downtown street across from the Catholic cathedral, six blocks from the city bus terminal. My bus left fifteen minutes after the last bell. Missing it meant waiting forty minutes for the next one in the dank bus station full of scary-looking men. Catching it required a perfectly timed sprint.
Then a friend told me about a bus stop behind the cathedral. A short walk across the street, through the church parking lot, and out onto a triangular median that intersected two streets and a turn lane. I began joining a handful of other students who waited on that median amidst afternoon traffic.
On punk rock day, I stayed after school. Maybe for a group project. Maybe for a boy. When I crossed to the triangular median two hours later than usual, no other students were there. The sun was low in the sky. I had no idea when the bus would come.
I hugged my backpack and pressed my shoulder blades against a hard, beveled lamppost. Cars rushed past on all sides. Pedestrians stopped next to me for the crosswalk, then hurried on. Everyone glanced at my clothing. Their raised eyebrows judged me hard.
Upstream, streetlights turned red. Traffic lulled. I was alone, the traffic lanes and crosswalks, suddenly empty.
He rode up on a rusty, too-small white bicycle. His greasy grey beard matched his shirt and pants. I leaned in harder against the lamppost. He rode past, did a double take, then made a big, circular U-turn in the strangely empty street. I tried to look bored and disinterested.
I was taller than most of my peers by age eleven, and I curled my shoulders inward to feel less visible. But in the mall, at church, and even right outside my middle school, my mother dug the knuckle of her middle finger between my shoulder blades.
“You have the posture of a whooping crane.” She pronounced it hooping crane. Later, she just called me, Hoopy. “Stand up straight, Hoopy!”
Saying it seemed to delight her.
I became hyper-aware of being seen. I wanted to disappear.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” my mother said. “No one is looking at you.”
But she was. She peeked through my not-quite-shut bedroom door, read my diary, and reversed the intercom built into the walls of our house, to listen.
The men were watching, too. I saw their stares, their subtle glances, their narrowed eyes, their winks.
Now, marooned alone on the triangular median, I was five foot ten, 120 pounds, and dressed like a streetwalker. My mother’s term. “You don’t want to look like a streetwalker.”
He stopped next to the curb, so close that I could see the skin on his nose packed with dark pores, and a lip-licking thirst in his glassy eyes. He cackled incoherently as his eyes probed every tender part of my body. Mouth, neck, breasts, crotch, thighs. He pedaled, as if to leave, but made another U-turn and inched closer.
“I’m going to…” He grinned, mumbling something through dark, chipped teeth.
I felt vulnerable and afraid, but I had been groomed to smile, speak when spoken to, respect my elders. Where was everyone? Cars? Pedestrians? Other bus riders?
“I’m going to…” he barked again, babbling, eyes vacant, drool in his beard.
My mother had pointed out men she called vagrants. She said they were dangerous and crazy. I had seen them on the bus. They mumbled to themselves and stared.
“Excuse me?” I blurted. “What did you say?”
A third U-turn.
In my peripheral vision, a light down the block clicked red to green. Traffic was moving. He put a foot on the curb and leaned toward me, his eyebrows going up and down.
“I’m going to stick my shaft so far up inside you.”
I gasped.
It was as though he’d taken me by the shoulders and slammed me into the lamppost I’d been pressing against. It knocked the air out of me. I stared at his wet lips. I wanted to scream, but I could barely breathe.
“Get away,” I whispered, my mouth hot and dry.
He laughed and left then. The cars were coming. The bus chugged up and hissed open its door. The driver raised his eyebrows at my outfit, then shook his head.
I don’t remember the fifty minute bus ride. His words played on repeat. I’m going to stick my… I shook my head, hard, but I couldn’t stop hearing it. My skin was on fire, as though he had actually grabbed me. My body felt violated. I couldn’t understand why. He hadn’t touched me, except with words.
I got off the bus, shoulders hunched like a hooping crane, and climbed in the car with my mother for the remaining miles to our house. In the passenger seat, I finally breathed. I turned toward the window, swallowing hard, forcing tears back to the place I’d always hid them.
That man had split me down the middle. I dropped my backpack to the floor and clenched my hands to my stomach, to keep from breaking apart.
“How was your day?” My mother asked.
I took a long deep breath. “Fine.”
I wanted to pour it all out, but the words caught in my dry throat.
I had heard the tiresome question—But what was she wearing?—on the news, at school, on my parents’ lips. If I told my mother what the man had said, she’d have been angry on my behalf. But then her eyes would have touched every part of my body like his had.
I couldn’t bear it if she said what I looked like. So I didn’t give her the chance. Instead, I used those words on myself in my bedroom mirror.
I had asked for this.
Like every girl and woman, I’ve faced similar incidents, before and after. Not always men like this one. Usually they’ve been clean, nicely dressed, seemingly safe.
Comments. Hands. Eyes. Sneers. Scowls.
I am older now, less a target for the male gaze than when I was young. That moniker sounds so mild— Male Gaze.
Male LEER is more fitting.
I see the leer land on my daughters, daughter-in-law, nieces, friends, and countless women I don’t even know. I still sometimes still feel it on me.
In the 40 years since that afternoon on the triangular median, little has changed. That’s the shocking part. Nothing I’ve written here is unique or new. But the fact that every single woman will nod knowingly when she reads this—THAT is shocking.
Now I am a grandmother, but when I find myself alone and vulnerable and faced with a leer, my blood still runs cold and my skin tightens reflexively.
I stop breathing.
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xoxo
The male leer. Yes. Every single woman has felt it.
Jameela Jamil has recently posted two podcasts about men’s abuse to women and other men. It’s out of control
It doesn't really matter what you're wearing. I was a young married woman, waiting for my husband to pick me up after work for the long trip home. Standing on the sidewalk on a side street at the rear of the building of the insurance company in mid-town where I worked, wearing appropriate business attire, a man in a suit walked up to me and said, "How much?" I heard what he said, but couldn't comprehend it. So I said, "Pardon?" and he asked.again, "What do you charge"? I stared at him, speechless, then retreated into the back entrance of the building until I saw our car pulling up. We had to arrange a different, and far less convenient pick-up point at the front of the building following the incident, and while it was a long time ago and many, many other things have happened since then, I remember it vividly.