Three things I didn’t learn walking home alone at night, and one thing I did.

[Trigger warning: harassment and sexual assault]

Last night, at one in the morning, I walked home alone.

I’d been at a gig in Central Wellington with a friend. We’d both been drinking pretty steadily for five hours or more, so I walked her home via Burger King before starting the ten-minute walk to my own flat. It was a route I’d taken dozens of times before, alone or in company (and had taken the previous night, in fact), using quiet back streets to avoid the crush of Courtenay Place. It was late, and cold, and dark; I was alone, I was tipsy, and I’d tweeted earlier in the evening that I’d gone to special efforts to look good. The one factor mitigating in my favour (or so I unconsciously assumed) was that I am a 35-year-old man.

At some point I became aware of a guy up ahead engaging people as they passed. I just wanted to get home to my cat, so I buried my nose in my phone and quickened my step as I passed him. I assumed he’d maybe call out at me as I passed; instead, he got up and matched my stride.

Where was I going? Why was I out so late alone? Why was I so rude, not wanting to stop and talk to him? Didn’t I have delicate hands? I stopped; he stopped. I swerved, he swerved with me. I tried to brush him off, tried shame, anger, threats, pleading. Nothing stopped him. He said I was hot. He said I was ugly. As we turned a corner he bumped my shoulder: first accidentally, then deliberately, throwing me off my step. We passed doorways where we were ignored by stone-faced bouncers.

Then he put his hand on my throat. What would I do, he asked, if he followed me all the way home? How would I stop him coming inside? How, he asked, would I stop him from raping me?

Some part of me managed to keep my feet moving. I rounded the corner onto Courtenay Place, and there it all was, the very thing I’d hoped to avoid. A clotting miasma of drunk young men and women, but also, dotted amongst them, the bright yellow vests of police officers. As I slipped into the crowd I let myself look back once, and there he was, standing on the corner, all fists and teeth and white eyes. I squeezed through onto Blair Street and, at the age of thirty-five years, ten months, and twenty-eight days, I burst into tears of relief and shock and anger.

That’s mostly the end of what happened. I called a friend, who encouraged me to talk to one of the police officers there, but even as I explained what had happened to a blonde woman a little taller than me and about my own age, I felt ridiculous and ashamed and hopeless. Her words said, “this guy is one needle in a very large haystack”; her eyes said, I’m sorry. Her eyes said, now you know.

I got in a taxi. The ride home took four minutes. As I locked my front door, it started to rain.

I guess it’s common to want to learn things from an experience like this, but all I can think of are things I haven’t learned, or, at least, things I felt like I already knew that just became clearer and more personal.

I didn’t do anything wrong last night. I followed a familiar route home that would be the fastest way to get where I was going, a route I’d followed alone before while (frankly) much more affected by alcohol than I was last night, and much later. Ultimately the choices that led to my feeling unsafe were entirely someone else’s. I suppose that’s part of what upset me: the hopeless inability to choose something different for myself.

There isn’t an easy way to feel safe in that situation. In the middle of it all, I was just running on adrenaline. I knew where I had to be, and my instincts got me there. It was only after I’d lost him that I began to really comprehend my fear of what I’d just avoided. Talking to the police eased my conscience a little (mostly the idea that if I told someone they could stop him from going back to the same spot and waiting for someone else) but did little to reassure me.

Sexual assault is very much a gendered issue. There’s a really pernicious idea in the dialogue around sexual assault that because men are assaulted too, women shouldn’t be allowed to talk about assault in a way that places any blame on men: that if women really cared about sexual assault they’d do more to uplift male survivors and centre their stories.

I hated this idea before last night, and I hate it even more now. It’s mostly trumpeted by people who have never experienced assault first-hand, and who do nothing themselves to support this cause about which they are apparently so passionate, beyond shouting down feminists and women who have survived abuse with “what about the men?” Why should women, who still overwhelmingly dominate every possible statistic as victims of abuse, have to shoulder that burden too?

All this despite two interesting facts about last night: firstly, that it was a man that assaulted me; and secondly, that as I tweeted about it afterwards, it was overwhelmingly women who sent messages of love, sympathy, and support.

What I have learned is a little bit of what it feels like to so narrowly escape something much worse. What it is to wish any of the fifty people you walk past could see what was happening. What it is to feel someone’s hand around your neck hours later. What it is to remember a single detail (the colour of his jacket, the way the courtyard outside Sweet Mother’s Kitchen has never stretched quite so far, the particular way someone can say the word “ugly”) and choke everything back up again that you thought you’d long since swallowed and digested.

I’m not writing this to women, to say look, this stuff happens to men too. I’m not writing this to say that now I’ve experienced even the very broadest definition of sexual assault first-hand I suddenly care much more about it. I’m writing this to other men, men who can read this and say, oh, that’s what it would feel like for me, I never knew. My hope is that, as a man reading this, you can use it to help you to listen, instead of giving us reasons to make more noise.

Yes, this happens to men too. No, it shouldn’t happen to anyone. But, men! Don’t let’s use that to dump more on women than they are already dealing with from a culture that we let hide amongst us because it’s easier than confronting it and dealing with it. Listen to women. Believe women. Confront the rotting, festering shit in our society that makes it possible for people to get away with this and think it’s okay to treat other human beings like this.

I love this city. I love the people I’ve met here. But I’m sitting in my lounge with the door still bolted, listening to the band I saw live last night, trying to go back to before a stranger made me fear for my life. And I just want to be able to walk home again.