Altercations With Strangers in Foreign Lands, Redux
A couple of week ago I was going to pay my rent, which - because of my lack of a check book for my British bank account - involves taking a rather ridiculously large sum of cash out of one bank, walking one block down the perimeter of Russell Square to another bank, and depositing said sum of cash into the bank of the letting agents I rent from. This is something of stressful endeavor, because while Russell Square is a pretty safe part of town, I'm always nervous that someone inside the bank is going to hear me ask for that cash and follow me out and hit me over the head and steal my backpack with the envelope full of 50-pound bills. So far this hasn't happened, but being fond of my own paranoid musings, I persist in believing that it might.
In any case, I had just left the second bank where I had relieved myself of yet another month's worth of hard-earned student loan funds, so technically I was in very little danger of actually losing anything valuable. But I was still on edge when, waiting for the pedestrian light to change to green, I felt a hand clamp itself firmly onto my shoulder from behind me. I was close enough to school that it could have been someone I knew, but I swung around anyhow, and got a face-full of smoke blown by a stranger in black hooded sweatshirt. Having had quite enough of this already, I told him in no uncertain terms to get his bloody hands off of me. He did take his hands off of me, but not without sneering and asking me in an Arabic accent what the hell was wrong with me. I didn't think this needed explaining, so I told him in no uncertain terms to leave me alone, and that I'd like to know what was wrong with him that it thought it was ok to grab strangers on the street.
And then I had a major flashback as he started shouting:
"Because you are woman! Because you are woman!"
There was something of a crowd gathering at the stoplight waiting to cross, and he was still up in my face, so I hollered back at him something about having no right to grab women on the street, probably mixed with a fair share of swearing and cursing. At which point he shouted back at me, "You are sick! You need to go to hospital! You are sick!" over and over again. Now, this happened to be right around the time that I had a bad cold and everything else, and I'm sure I was quite a sight to see with a bloodshot left eye from the conjunctivitis (and quite a sound to hear with my voice strained through the cough and that dagger-like feeling of a strep infection in my throat). But he made it pretty clear that's not what he was talking about.
Which bring up the question of what exactly is up when two total strangers of similar ethnic descent who have never met me before and probably never met each other before make the same declaration that they feel the absolute right to accost me in public. Is this some kind of cultural phenomenon I don't know about? With five years working offshore plus a good amount of international travel under my belt, I thought I'd heard the weirdest and the worst that people can come up with to throw at women. This certainly wasn't the worst (not by a long shot, not by a very long shot), but it might qualify as the weirdest. Unless you count the half-witted deckhand whose ship I worked on for some number of months who liked to flash his rear-end around and ask if his sagging pants made his butt look too big. No, wait, this is definitely weirder by far. Though I am quite aware that out of a city of many millions of people of hundreds of ethnic origins only two men have had the gall to pull this kind of trip on me, it does make me somewhat wary of Arabic men. And it makes me wonder if I just happened across the two freaks with anger management issues who happened to be of the same race, or if there really is some underlying feeling across that group of people that women who oppose harassment and groping are "sick" on one hand or "weird" on another hand and - or, as the this latter case declared, that I needed to be hospitalized to cure this oddity. At what point do I chalk up behavior to a couple of annoying individuals, and at what point does it become a cross-the-board phenomenon? And does that mean that I should assume it was just a couple of jerks, or that I have good reason to be careful of certain groups of people because of a commonly-held attitude?
In any case, the light turned green, and I crossed and headed back to school. He didn't follow me and I didn't look back again after ensuring that I was alone. If there's any justice, I hope he got close enough to get a nice breath of my germy strep throat that he could take home as a souvenir of his harassment. And a raging case of pink-eye wouldn't be too much to ask either, I don't think. Heh.
In any case, I had just left the second bank where I had relieved myself of yet another month's worth of hard-earned student loan funds, so technically I was in very little danger of actually losing anything valuable. But I was still on edge when, waiting for the pedestrian light to change to green, I felt a hand clamp itself firmly onto my shoulder from behind me. I was close enough to school that it could have been someone I knew, but I swung around anyhow, and got a face-full of smoke blown by a stranger in black hooded sweatshirt. Having had quite enough of this already, I told him in no uncertain terms to get his bloody hands off of me. He did take his hands off of me, but not without sneering and asking me in an Arabic accent what the hell was wrong with me. I didn't think this needed explaining, so I told him in no uncertain terms to leave me alone, and that I'd like to know what was wrong with him that it thought it was ok to grab strangers on the street.
And then I had a major flashback as he started shouting:
"Because you are woman! Because you are woman!"
There was something of a crowd gathering at the stoplight waiting to cross, and he was still up in my face, so I hollered back at him something about having no right to grab women on the street, probably mixed with a fair share of swearing and cursing. At which point he shouted back at me, "You are sick! You need to go to hospital! You are sick!" over and over again. Now, this happened to be right around the time that I had a bad cold and everything else, and I'm sure I was quite a sight to see with a bloodshot left eye from the conjunctivitis (and quite a sound to hear with my voice strained through the cough and that dagger-like feeling of a strep infection in my throat). But he made it pretty clear that's not what he was talking about.
Which bring up the question of what exactly is up when two total strangers of similar ethnic descent who have never met me before and probably never met each other before make the same declaration that they feel the absolute right to accost me in public. Is this some kind of cultural phenomenon I don't know about? With five years working offshore plus a good amount of international travel under my belt, I thought I'd heard the weirdest and the worst that people can come up with to throw at women. This certainly wasn't the worst (not by a long shot, not by a very long shot), but it might qualify as the weirdest. Unless you count the half-witted deckhand whose ship I worked on for some number of months who liked to flash his rear-end around and ask if his sagging pants made his butt look too big. No, wait, this is definitely weirder by far. Though I am quite aware that out of a city of many millions of people of hundreds of ethnic origins only two men have had the gall to pull this kind of trip on me, it does make me somewhat wary of Arabic men. And it makes me wonder if I just happened across the two freaks with anger management issues who happened to be of the same race, or if there really is some underlying feeling across that group of people that women who oppose harassment and groping are "sick" on one hand or "weird" on another hand and - or, as the this latter case declared, that I needed to be hospitalized to cure this oddity. At what point do I chalk up behavior to a couple of annoying individuals, and at what point does it become a cross-the-board phenomenon? And does that mean that I should assume it was just a couple of jerks, or that I have good reason to be careful of certain groups of people because of a commonly-held attitude?
In any case, the light turned green, and I crossed and headed back to school. He didn't follow me and I didn't look back again after ensuring that I was alone. If there's any justice, I hope he got close enough to get a nice breath of my germy strep throat that he could take home as a souvenir of his harassment. And a raging case of pink-eye wouldn't be too much to ask either, I don't think. Heh.
posted by skylanda at 10:00 PM
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