Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

Rape culture doesn’t begin with men feeling entitled to women’s bodies. It begins with smaller things. It begins when men feel entitled to anything from a woman simply by virtue of that woman being in public, being in their presence. Not every man who admonishes a woman he doesn’t know to smile or expects a woman to hear him out or be politce will rape. That is true, but the belief that they have a right to whatever they happen to want from a woman remains the same no matter the limit of the ends to which they take it.

Yesterday, as I was taking the bus back home after attending a reading at the Seattle Public Library, a large man in a Seahawks fan jersey (though if his smell was any indication he had been too drunk to watch the game) sat between me and the aisle of the bus, making it impossible for me to physically move away from him; there were plenty of open seats on the bus and, in fact, he had been sitting a few rows ahead of me with his slightly less drunk friends.

I could feel his gaze on me, even as I focused on the tome open on my lap. He asked me how I was doing; I told him I was reading and returned to perusing the Ellmann biography of Joyce. I hoped that was a clear enough indication that I had no interest in him–and really, since when is a bus a singles bar?–that it would end there.

If it were not for the aforementioned sense of entitlement, it would have. Several stops later, however, he started telling me to listen. I told him no and began to lecture him about women not being obligated to listen to men simply because we are in public. The man had the nerve to tell me “Shh!”, which was when I began yelling at him that he needed to get up and let me move immediately.

He got up (though I wonder if he would have if the driver had not turned around) and went back to his buddies. I felt sick the rest of the way home and into the late evening. Not only had this man felt entitled to have his say, as if my being an unchaperoned female meant I had to even momentarily entertain whatever proposition he cared to lay before me, but he had had no qualms about using his body in such a way as to limit my ability to avoid doing that, to avoid doing what he wanted me to do. Honestly, if this had been in a slightly less public area or closer to the back of the bus, I might have felt that I needed to humor him in order to maintain my physical safety because no matter how strong you are, someone with about a hundred pounds on you can probably do some serious damage.

It didn’t help that he had a similar build to that of the man who raped me.

Every now and again, I hear that feminism is obsolete. Just the other day some self-entitled male writer told me it was all about the “victim mentality” (ironically, in a cover letter when he submitted to CRIT; guess what kind of response he got?). Feminism is, for me, in part, about just being able to get home without my peace being disturbed simply because I happen to have breasts. It’s about not feeling constantly in danger or obligated to meet the wishes of whatever man happens to wants something from me.

ETA: A small poem I wrote about this incident was published on Slog, enraging a young MRA.

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