This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

This post will serve as a sort of preamble to the next topic in the Alphabet Series – O is for Ownership., but I’ll name it Part I, with a secondary title of ‘Pelmeni on a Twig’. Please note that I am not writing is as a sort of ‘poor me’ lament, but as an example of what single women who refuse to play the cock-sucking game often have to deal with. It’s not about me as an individual, but a sub-class of women, and there are many – mostly ignored. I occasionally recognize them in the news, although these women are held up, not as what can happen to women under Patriarchy if they don’t follow the rules, but to blame a government or a foreign country or a racial or religious oppressor for one transgression or another. But whether in the news or in your own world, lone women without money, especially those without children, families or community support always pay the consequences of opting not to orbit men, yet are still forced to live among them in a pro-male world without protection.

And what do I mean by protection? First and foremost, money and property – these two things alone can make the difference between life and death, safety and danger, thriving and surviving. Protection can also come in the form of the services that males are supposed to provide under the millennia-old heterosexual contract that many women take advantage of, but these days, refuse to acknowledge exists. You sell your body to a man for his use, and in return, he protects you from all the other males in the world and from poverty and having to do even more degrading things in order to survive. Protection also comes in the form of women’s shelters. If you are a battered woman in a straight relationship, you are acknowledged and supported if you choose to do something about it. But a lone woman suffering from abuse from a male roommate she hasn’t chosen or a male neighbour doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on as this form of vulnerability is not acknowledged anywhere in the world.

I’ve been a woman of slender means since I left home at 20, and I’ve been supporting myself since then. It has often been hard. Thanks to some weird emotional abuse centring on poverty in my childhood, I’m very neurotic and paranoid about money. I started earning my own money and keeping a weird and meticulous ledger when I was 12 years old, and doing financial calculations has had and still has a calming effect on me since those early years. You’d think that I’d be predisposed to amassing great wealth as a result, but the opposite is actually true – although that is a different story for another time. I often cruise around or below the poverty line. I am great at saving and being thrifty. I’m a minimalist, and there are very few things I can rationalize spending money on. And that includes housing. I’ve lived in a lot of shitty housing, sometimes because I have to, and sometimes because I have a ‘be prepared for hard times’ mentality. And hard times, in my experience, ALWAYS come. If I think about it, I’m kind of amazed at how used to deplorable conditions I’ve become. At this point in my life, I can’t even imagine living in a nice place or even owning my own place where I have control over things.

While I can handle a shitty environment, and even learn to find something charming in decrepitude, the one thing I can’t tolerate is the effects of males on my living space. Males can make a situation dangerous, terrifying, and unbearable, and if you are a lone woman without much money, there is often very little that you can do about it. Sometimes, you don’t even have the option to leave, nevermind the fact that it is ridiculous that a woman should be forced to leave her home because a man or men that she has not chosen to have around are making her home life difficult or dangerous. I can’t count how many apartments or other living arrangements I’ve had where my quality of life has been seriously negatively affected by males, and I’ve even had my physical safety directly threatened by a male room mate I did not choose. And the only options have been to stay and accept it or leave (if that’s even an option – sometimes it isn’t).

So I’m going on year three in a former Soviet country that I won’t name, but I will write about it in depth after I eventually leave. It is a challenging and miserable country, and I find myself yet again in terrible housing. I can’t really move for a few reasons, the most important of which is financial. Since the most recent Ukrainian-Russian war started, housing prices have skyrocketed thanks to a massive influx of Russians looking for long-term stays in this country. I’m still paying pre-war rent, but I still think I’m overpaying given the slum quality of the place. Even considering some of the shitholes I’ve lived in, this one is pretty bad. It’s a two-floor building with eight apartments. I’m on the ground floor. There is severe water damage in the building. Due to the sheer amount of mold eating away at the interior, every day, I have to sweep up what has crumbled off the walls. My kitchen ceiling leaks in 9 different places, including the light fixture – some places leak when it rains, but others leak when the upstairs neighbours don’t turn off the water correctly. And the latter is worse because the entire floor floods, sometimes for days. The landlords knows, but makes excuses. I have no heat that works and it snows here in the winter, but I’ve lived in the Yukon of Canada and could only afford to heat my place to 5 degrees Celsius when it was 50 below outside, so this country is no big deal. My water heater stopped working recently, so there are no more showers in my future. Like in the old days, I heat water and bathing is creative and water-efficient. A few months ago, my cat and I noticed some animals had moved into the space above my bathroom and kitchen ceilings. They sounded quite big, to be honest. But I think someone may have died up there a few days ago, as I haven’t heard any running or thuds lately, and today, there were many flies in my apartment. But there are no open windows that would account for them… I have no way of getting up there to investigate. Further, in the critter department, this country is plagued by packs of dogs. Some are street dogs, and some are pets that are universally kept outside and often free to roam all day and night, as this is how people treat dogs in this culture. There are frequently dog fights in the middle of the night, which can wake you up at any hour. You have to be careful in this country. Rabies is a problem here, and dog attacks are common.

But the worst part about living here is the men, and in particular, my upstairs neighbour. It is a man of about 50 and his young son. I’d like to be able to explain him away as been partially mentally retarded or brain damaged, but a lot of men here are a lot like him. And his buddies that come round seem cut from the same cloth. He is extremely loud, speaking and moving about. And his son is learning fast. Because of the poor construction of the building, everything these people do causes the light fixtures and furniture to rattle, as if a minor earthquake is occurring. Their sleep schedule is hard to pin down, and I’ve been frequently awoken by shouting and thudding at 3:30 in the morning. The man has a group of loud male friends who stand outside my window, which sits directly on the small road running behind the building, with no yard as a buffer. Instead of texting or calling the neighbour or going up to his door, the visitors just shout up at his window. The neighbour and his son also throw large firecrackers down to the street beside my window late at night sometimes. It’s terrifying to both me and my cat.

But the worst part of the worst part of my apartment problem is that the patch of yard beside my building has gradually, over just the past year, become a garbage dump. You see, despite there being many, many large public waste bins along the streets for all to use, my neighbour throws all his garbage, as well as all his liquids, out his kitchen window. And my kitchen window being directly below his and at ground floor level, I get to hear the dumping activity, I get a view of the garbage dump itself, and all the liquid and some of the trash lands on my window instead of the ground.

I frequently have a WTF?-moment when I look out my kitchen window. The scenery changes every day based on what my upstairs neighbour tosses. Sometimes, there are chunks plastered to my kitchen window if the refuse is liquidy-chunky in nature. Sometimes, there are cigarette butts, bits of plastic or food remains on the window ledge. And of course, the breadth, depth and content of what’s directly on the ground varies. But perhaps the most interesting variations are what occasionally becomes impaled on the twigs and branches of the tall plant life in the yard. One day, I might see used tea bags dangling like single-use Christmas tree decorations. Other times, it’s a plastic bag waving in the wind to celebrate post-Soviet freedom and the backward slide into medieval chaos and poverty. But one day recently, I glanced out my window, and I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. It was cream-coloured and round; it wasn’t packaging, but some form of food remnant. I photographed it and went online to figure out whether it was some local food that I hadn’t yet encountered.

And I think I figured it out. I’m pretty sure it’s a pelmeni [пельмень – singular; пельмени – plural] – meat dumplings, considered by some to be the ‘heart of Russian cuisine’. And apparently, they make great tree decorations. Much like the slim odds of flipping a coin and having it land on its edge, I can imagine it equally rare that one can toss a pelmeni out the window and have it end up speared by a twig. I’d be impressed if it weren’t the mark of a much larger problem – that of being a woman negatively affected by males in your living environment whom you have no control over. And in case you’re wondering, I can’t do anything about this. The police are a corrupt joke in this country. And I am a foreigner, so I have no power. And of course, I am a lone woman. And it doesn’t matter whether you are in a really patriarchal religious country like this one, or a liberal democracy like my own, going up against a crazy male or even an average male when you aren’t under the ownership of another male can be very risky.

So like with so many periods in my life, I see this as something I just have to ‘get through’. I just realized the other day, that even when I can find moments of enjoyment in a shitty period, I still understand most of the chapters in my book of life as something I have to endure. I’m trying to make something happen so that I can leave this country. If you’ve been following my writing for a while, I said something similar about my time in China. It took a while, but I made it happen then, as I’ve made things happen many times before, so I know I can do it again. But I feel tired, and the goals I’ve set feel really big right now. I used to be more ambitious when I was younger, and I’m trying to dig deep to find it again. I want to be able to tell younger women that it gets better with age and experience. That you can achieve something and feel a bit of freedom with some options and comfort. I’d like to be able to say that you can find a place of your own without resorting to sociopathic behaviour or selling out and earning your money through anti-woman behaviour. But I can’t help but wonder to myself when looking at that goddamn lone dumpling suspended above the rotting food and plastic bottles outside my window whether this is just a metaphor for my life, and for the life of any woman who rejects men: throughout and in the end, it’s all just a stick up the ass of a dumpling. I hope I’m wrong. Stay tuned.

I’m going to file this in my Conversations with Men series because many of the things men tell us are non-verbal. Sometimes, you get more honesty when you look at male behaviour and body language than when you listen to their bullshit.