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Sermon Sunday or Rapist Day or The Screwdriver
This post is part of the ongoing Birth of a Feminist series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
I was 16 when I began carrying a weapon with me to go out.
Does that sound young to you? To me, it sounds old. Thinking about it now, I would have done well to arm myself when I was five and boys started beating me up because I was a girl. I’m sure they just liked me, though. That’s what we’re told, anyhow. Love = hate when it comes to boys and men – from birth.
But it turned out that 16 was the age at which I decided that carrying a weapon might be to my advantage. There had been many violent incidents in my life, but for the most part, those were committed by boys and men I knew or at least knew in passing. But at 16, I had a frightening encounter with a strange man, a stranger, and it scared me shitless.
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Religious men and their cockpuppets are dangerous. Every policy, rule and regulation they have ever set up has been designed to hurt women and girls on some level. I’ve lost friends over my belief in this truth, even agnostic friends. It hurts their feelings, you see. To them, freedom of religion is more important than female freedom and the right to be safe. But not to me. Religion is a choice, being female is not. And the data show that opening the door a crack when it comes to men, religious or not, gives them permission to kick it open and rape you on your kitchen floor. So yeah, I take a hard line when it comes to men and the shit they invent – and religion is one helluva big male fantasy that I refuse to accept.
Now, I grew up in a town that didn’t give off the stink of religion, but we still adhered to a strict policy of no Sunday shopping – Sunday being the Christian fuckers’ day of rest and all. As a result, on Sundays, the downtown core was a ghost town. Nothing happening. Very anti-social, anti-community. That’s religion for you. I am in no way a capitalist, but commerce does bring people together and at least gives the illusion of safety in numbers.
But the downtown library was open in the afternoons. And being both an atheist (as far as a child can be a member of this type of ‘group’) and a very good student, I did frequent the library when project research needed to be done.
What I managed to do, however – and I’ll chalk it up to being eager – is fuck up the library hours. I thought it opened earlier than it actually did. I had caught a ride downtown with my father, who was headed off somewhere to avoid being with my mother. And I quickly discovered after he sped off that I was early by an hour. So I wandered around in what on all other late mornings was a bustling commercial area. On Sunday, it was a creepy, post-apocalyptic scene from a movie where you are waiting for the zombies to start crawling out of the cracks. After some unpleasant time killing, I realized the library was opening finally, and made my way back to it.
It didn’t take long to find the perv.
Now, this was a small city, not hicksville. But said perv was sitting there in his dirty pick-up truck beside the train tracks that ran by the parking lot that I needed to cross to return to the library. A middle-aged white guy. What the hell was he doing there? No coffee shops. No stores open. Nothing interesting to look at. Unless, it was a good spot to pick up young girls to abduct and rape. And given that that was exactly the scenario that I found myself in, I guess it was indeed a good spot.
He tried to verbally coerce me into his truck and made a move to open the door to convince me in a different way. I wasn’t having any of it. I ignored him and ran like hell towards the library. It could have gone horribly wrong. If I had encountered him an hour earlier when there were no friendly havens into which I could escape, would my fate have been different?
I was shaken, and after that point, for a spell, I started carrying a screwdriver with me. It did occur to me, even at 16 and even without anyone telling me that as a female, I had no rights, that I could get in trouble for carrying or using on an aggressor a knife or something that was distinctly a weapon. Prey usually know they are prey, even if they don’t come right out and acknowledge it. The worst part about the human prey known as girls and women is that we are NOT allowed to defend ourselves against male-predator aggression. All prey animals on earth, with the exception of human women and girls, are allowed to defend themselves when they are attacked, and are allowed and expected to kill their attackers. It is a given. No one faults a mouse for biting when a cat attacks it. No one faults a bee for killing ants attacking her hive or even for killing all the male bees once they’ve outlived their usefulness. Why do girls and women go to jail when we defend ourselves or do things to safeguard our bodily integrity, such as carrying weapons, or ensuring woman-only spaces are free of penises? With humans, predators ensure they are unopposed. Men ensure they are unopposed.
So, I carried that screwdriver with me knowing full well that I was doing so at my own risk. I was breaking the first rule of human predator-prey relations. In my 20s, I upgraded to a Swiss Army knife. Looking back, I can’t believe how much time I spent mulling over the pros and cons of carrying a screwdriver and how much time I spent trying to figure out what I could carry without it appearing like I was armed. It’s not like I walked around with a tool box. And now, after so much international experience, including living in the US where the range and accessibility of weapons is startling, I now see that in Canada, our government does a lot to make sure that girls and women are not allowed to defend themselves. It blows my mind now that I had to spend time worrying about all the possible scenarios that can only exist when a girl lives in a male-dominated world, and that there is no good situation. Like with all aspects of female lives, there is only the illusion of choice: living in fear, armed or unarmed; unarmed and assaulted and/or dead; armed and assaulted and/or dead; armed and in legal trouble for defending oneself and harming an assaulter. Tell me, where is the good scenario here?
Anyhow, luckily, in my hometown, the religious nuts lost out to the capitalist pigs and Sunday shopping was legalized and brought life and the illusion of safety to the city centre. But really, who are we kidding? We all know that the religious and capitalists are pretty much one and the same. Always have been. And once they started raking in the extra dough from Sunday business, no one made a peep of complaint ever again. The most important thing was that eliminating Sunday shopping bans eliminated an unsafe situation for women and girls – at least during the hours the library was open.
Of course, religion allows pervs numerous other opportunities to abuse women and girls. But at least I could go to the library on Sunday without fear of abduction and rape in empty parking lots.
But we still had all the pervs IN the library. And that is another story for another time…
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Equal Opportunity Religion Hating – Or Not?
Do you love online quizzes? Do you like the idea of contributing to academic research? Are you into social justice and personal bias? Well, head on over to Project Implicit, a collaboration designed to investigate “thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control”. They administer tests on race, religion, gender, age and more.
It’s pretty interesting. I’ve taken a couple of the tests. They seem to rely upon timed keyboard response to word pairings and categorizing, and dependent variables are the time you take to respond and the mistakes you make. The idea is that how we respond is not just a factor of our conscious processing – after all some people are good at consciously self-monitoring their behaviour. We have hidden biases that can come through despite being politically correct.
There were some follow-up questions after the quizzes I took that attempt to examine what I believe influences the way I think, but likely, most people have no idea why they unconsciously behave the way they do. Only when you make a true effort to examine your privileges and biases (through reading, listening, interacting, adopting humility, etc) can you even begin to understand what is going on inside you.
Anyhow, I took a test on views on religion, as well as one on gender stereotypes with regard to science and liberal arts. With the latter, I scored in (the top – my interpretation, haha) 1% of people who overwhelmingly associated science with women and liberal arts with men. I wasn’t surprised at either the misogyny of the rest of the population or with my atypical response. They asked me at the end for possible explanations for my results. In all honesty, having worked in both science and liberal arts, all the best scientists I’ve worked with have been women. Men tend to suffer from arrogance, inflated sense of importance, misogyny, and the need to confirm their own, often strange, beliefs. Women, I’ve observed, are more humble, less biased, and thus truer to the spirit of science. Good role models, in other words. So in my mind, I always associate scientists and properly done science with women. In all honesty, I also tend to associate women with liberal arts and anything intellectual, creative, interpretive, and artistic, as well. Men? I am more and more frequently associating men with porn and violent oppression than noble endeavours, creativity or rational thinking… Hey, once the scales fall from the eyes and you decide you aren’t going to suck the Patriarchal cock anymore, you begin to see things for what they really are. But there was no text input or radio button option to explain my thinking on that, alas. I’m sure the mostly male research team will just pass me off as an anomaly or as we research types tend to say, “an outlier”.
Regarding the test on religion, that one was more interesting and surprising to me. I hate all religions, for obvious reasons (misogyny, ignorance, magical thinking, control, violence, hatred, homophobia, anti-progress, and I’ll say it again, misogyny). The test looked at the four major religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They had two lists of words. One consisted of ‘positive’ words (excellent, good, etc) and the other of ‘negative’ words (bad, terrible, etc). There was a series of groupings. In each, you were told to press one key if you saw a word from one of the religions OR a positive word, and to press a different key for all the other religions or a negative word. The test purported to tap your subconscious attitudes toward each religion.
At the end, I was given a relative placement of my negative attitude towards each of the religions, and as you can see from my outcome above, Christianity fell to the negative bottom of my personal religious shit-pile. Keep in mind that I believe that ALL religions are evil, which is my conscious attitude, but subconsciously, I suppose, I associate the most negative qualities with Christianity. I thought I was an equal-opportunity hater. I’m kind of disappointed.
* note for all dudes discovering their knickers suddenly in a twist at my audacity to associate science and competence with women, I am explaining my personal experience and thinking, not reporting on a scientific study I’ve done or treating my experience as a study. Chill out and stop getting so bloody sensitive and emotional, for fuck’s sake! Note also that women have tolerated this kind of bias from you for millennia. And you’ve been rewarded for it! At least I don’t rape or deny you employment!!!
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