staring and checking out

You hear all the time how men can't help it and they're predestined to try to get with any woman they can who's at all good looking. But in fact, we're complex and live in a complex world and have free will. I can't go out in public, unless it's on a deserted street, without this feeling of visibility, like I'm being sexualized, rated, and every woman. It's, I think, though I haven't done any measurements-- it feels worse than ever. Worse than it was ten or twenty years ago. This did happen back when I was in high school but I think it's increased. I just feel like it has. I feel it in legion amounts where I didn't in high school, that much. Men (and quite a few women also) push women and practically knock them over to get by, get "impatient" with them while standing in line (as happened to me), and....bottom line, this attention, unwanted, drops down on me every time I go into Manhattan. I don't think it's a coincidence. It is probably part of some massive scale backlash, like Simone de Beauvoir talked about. She said that since the publication of The Second Sex in France, French men began harrassing women more in public like when they were in coffee shops or on trains, which hadn't happened as much before. Honestly I don't know the cause. Only that this era is super conservative, dare I say fascist, and all that protesting we did a few years ago.....well, I don't know where those people are anymore. All I see on the street are kind of the "frat boy/sorority girl" types or the "yuppies" and don't get me started on them. But still, having lived in Bed Stuy, I can be thankful to live in a neighborhood where I feel somewhat safe walking around, at night, which I do a lot. I'm a night person. If I'm in an area where I can't go out and feel relatively safe after midnight I get very on edge....I NEED to have those late night walks. I liked living across the street from the convent because I like dark, quiet places to live in. I do my partying outside. But midtown Manhattan is "safe" sort of, supposed to be, but it's not peaceful and there've been more than a few incidents of violence against women. But women are sexist against women, too. That's another story, for another entry.