We need to talk about harassment.

Yesterday for the first time in my life I cried on the tube. I was harassed by a man on the tube who started calling me “pretty” and saying he can “show me a good time” (even writing this is revolting, ugh), and when I didn’t engage with him he continued saying vile things that made me fear for my safety. When I tried to sit farther away from him he came closer and continued harassing me in front of everyone. I felt scared, ashamed and weak. I felt scared because I immediately thought if he followed me out and followed me home, it would end very badly. I was ashamed because of my looks, and ashamed for thinking that Perhaps if I wasn’t “pretty”, this wouldn’t have happened to me. I felt weak because the terror of sexual harassment and possible assault made me cry in front of a train full of people. I never want to know those feelings again. A woman should not feel like that, she should not feel threatened when she wears her hair down, or wears a skirt. She shouldn’t have to ask a man — a very nice man who defended my honor I must say — to walk her home because she is afraid of getting raped or beaten. And she should never feel ashamed of being a woman. And a man should never feel he has the right to say disgusting things to a woman if she refuses to speak to him after he calls her a pretty thing. We are all humans, yet we act like animals.

I realized that didn’t know what to do in this situation because I never thought something like this might happen to me. I didn’t know how to react because I was never taught that just because you’re “pretty” you’re an automatic target for harassment. had I been told that I might experience something like that, I would have acted differently. Had I been told that it is never the woman’s fault, and that there is something fundamentally wrong with the psyche of a man who allows himself to behave like to an innocent human being incapable of standing up to herself, I would not have felt the shame I did in that moment. It has come to a realization that we as women are inherently taught to believe that we are the causes of the trouble. We — especially the women in the East — are taught to be submissive, kind, calm and quiet, lest to anger the man and provoke a further altercation Hence what i did — ignore him and hope he’d go away — was exactly the demonstration of what I had been taught to believe, and exactly what exacerbated the situation. His aggressiveness, motivated by my apparent refusal to engage with him, to tell him to stop harassing me, and threaten to call the police made him feel as if I thought I was “too good “ to talk to him, when really that was not the case at all. it was fear, fear that made me be quiet, fear that made me hope this would all just go away, and fear that if I said something, I’d make it even worse. Our patriarchal society, while succeeding in educating us in the field of science, math and languages, has failed in educating us to be human. It has failed to address issues which we experience in everyday life. We prefer to swipe the dirt under the carpet and pretend the issue doesn’t exist, but if we dont talk about it — how are we supposed to address it? How are we supposed to fight if, if we are so incredulous that we don’t believe a woman could be threatened on her way home? our first reaction is to think that she brought this upon herself. perhaps her skirt was too short, her top too tight, her hair too long, her lipstick too bright. But is it not inherently wrong, I ask, to assume that just because a woman is confident enough in herself, to wear a short dress, she deserves to be harassed? Clearly our society needs to do more to educate young girls and even young men that this not only can happen, but it does, on a regular basis, and what to do in situations like these. We need to change the mindset of people — of those that think that they are entitled to harass women, in the hopes that they might get some, and those poor women that think that this is somehow their fault. We need to talk. We need to listen. We need to change.

Sidenote: I was coming from an official event, and had an office dress and a blazer on. Nothing short, nothing tight, nothing vulgar. And yet this still happened.