To the man that spat in my face.

I highly doubt that you would be able to identity me in a police line up, in fact, dare I say, you probably have absolutely no memory of me at all. I first noticed you at the bar adopting a typical predatory stance; drink in hand, wet on your shirt, a slight wobble to your step and eyes darting continually around the room looking for a weak member of the herd. You were loud, abrasive, American and conducted yourself with such a subconscious and narcissistic god-complex that it made me embarrassed to share a language with you. I knew exactly what you were doing because I’d seen you a thousand times before; a wasted, sexually corroded animal searching for the first opportunity to swoop a girl drunker than you into a taxi and into your bed. And then you could brag about it to you friends the next day; reducing a girl who was too out of it to make decisions to nothing more than a hole that needed to be filled and discarded. Its people like you that utterly disgust me; it makes me fear for the safety of my friends and my fellow female species; that we still need to stay in tight packs to protect against tomb raiders after the insides of our vaginas. And then they can disseminate and carve up the spoils on whatsapp groups and forums, posting photos and videos to prove they are nothing but the embodiment of what it is to be a man.

In a particularly angry phase of my life I couldn’t help but go out and pick fights with men that I thought were behaving just like you; to me it felt like the nightclub was full of hunters that would grope, smack and fondle their way through the dance floor and into girl’s hearts. This backward hat, vest wearing, facial hair growing mentality used to infuriate me to the point of threatening violence to all parties involved; usually found congregating on the peripherals wagging their sweaty fingers to some shit house music remix. But as Gandhi and Mandela rightly suggested, violence does not solve violence, and on more than one occasion I’d been told that ‘I needed to wind my neck in’- which in Peterborough, where I’m from, is not a very nice thing to say. I remember one night sitting on the wall of a car park, in a pug t-shirt and mild fancy dress lamenting to a relatively new male friend about the perils of a being a girl surrounded by a walled city that seemed to be a sanctuary and safe haven for perverts. As if on cue a group of men walked past and cheered: “well done mate- you gonna fuck that tonight?” Also, 90 metres down the road a solitary girl, tottering around in heels too high and clearly inebriated, was ushered into a flagged down cab with a man who’d spotted her and made a beeline for her intoxicated state.

Because almost every woman has a story; I actually have several. From when I was thirteen and pinned against a wall by a greasy long haired friend of my aunts and he rubbed his dick all over my leg. But it’s ok because he wrote me a note saying how sorry he was. Or when I was even younger and got drunk for the first time on vodka, I was left alone with a very ugly boy who was two years older and very much a virgin. He took me upstairs and pulled out my tampon, fingered me and went down on me whilst I lay on the bed almost unconscious. He then told everyone what had happened and I was, of course, labelled a slut. Because that’s just what sluts do. I spent most of the weekend thinking about how I was going to kill myself so I didn’t have to go back to school and face the whispers. I never considered that I wasn’t actually to blame for about 10 years. He did the same thing to one of my friends too on a playground hill after she’d mixed too much of her parent’s whiskey cupboard. And then there was the time a taxi driver tried to charge me 50 pound for a 15-minute journey and I woke up with no bra and bruised internally. Apparently we were arguing over the price and disappeared for twenty minutes, I can’t really bear to think about what happened as I was so drunk but I think you could probably connect the dots. Oh yeah, and then once I was spiked and ended up in a house with a guy whose face I never saw; I have only flashes in my mind of the carpet, it was a pale beige colour, and the feeling of my back being rubbed raw by the thrusting- perhaps I didn’t deserve the decency of a bed. As soon as I sobered up enough I ran out the house, leaving my favourite knickers behind, having no concept of where I was and what time it was- I stumbled back to my mum’s and threw up for five days; my stomach irritated and swollen by whatever had been slipped into my drink. I could go on but I won’t, I’m not trying to portray myself as a victim and I don’t feel like one. And then by law where’s the trade off anyway? At what point do I have to accept responsibility for my drunken behaviour and my inability to make sensible decisions? Can I prove that I got preyed on numerous times or that a taxi driver raped me because I didn’t have 50 pounds? Probably not. Did I deserve what happened to me? Depends who you ask. Even that can become a contested liquidity of opinion.

What exasperates me the most is that some people are of the train of thought that if a girl accepts a few drinks off a man it becomes a legitimate currency exchange for sex; as if three Pineapple Bacardi Breezers equates to a teethy blowjob; and, well, with four they will probably let you spunk in their mouth and attempt to swallow it through alchopop acid reflux. But it depends how much you’ve got to spend really, I would say you’ve got to be capitalizing on a plethora of gin and tonics if you want full sex, and, most definitely having to ‘speculate to accumulate’ if your looking for anal. One good tip is getting your competitors to do most of the legwork and then pouncing in at the end with two double Sambucas and the suggestion of a cigarette outside. Because then you’ve hardly done any of the initial outlay but you end up with all the bonuses and rewards. It wouldn’t surprise me if hedge fund managers started investing in this market: it’s so much more stable than money. There’s always a surplus of young girls; clutching fake IDs like shields, makeup streaked across their faces to hide the creases of their childhood dimples; their breasts aligned high and prominent on their chests, displayed as two war medals validating the supposed age they clearly are not. And naturally, there’s the masters, age ranging from sixteen to deathbed, flapping their wallets like ceremonial fans in a procession that can only end in a parade float of insertion. As we are so often told, us women only get a few good years before we fall into irreversible disrepair and are no longer of any aesthetic value, which is usually when we have given birth for the third time and you just can’t bear to see another darn stretchmark. Men on the other hand, can distinguish and mature like pungent camemberts, disguising their age and irrelevance in cloaks of business and pinstripe and padding their rotund bellies, grown fat with feasting on the flesh of the naïve, with layers of multi-coloured paper. So us, haggard, weatherworn specimens have very limited time to ensnare a bloke that isn’t going to cheat on us too much or have a mid-life crisis with Tammy from accounts, before we are chased out of the running by the new crop of perfect seventeen year olds, shooing us like homeless cats with the same fake IDs we once held. It’s a bit depressing to think that one day, probably not that far off in the distance future, I’m going to be too old and ugly even for a sympathy spike.

When I saw that you had found a suitable candidate, she was beautiful and young and sat in a chair completely wasted out of her brain. You’d just bought her a new alcoholic drink but she was having trouble locating the glass rim with her mouth, and this was in between you, picking her up like a ragdoll and forcing her into a perspiration-filled and rather aggressive embrace. I decided at that point the young girl looked like she was rather in need of some water instead the alcohol you were trying to force down her neck. I went to the bar, purchased a bottle and placed it near the girl, opened the top for her and asked if she was alright. She was very sweet and appreciative and tried to say thanks in a very jumbled, incoherent sort of way. You on the other hand were not so appreciative.

“Thanks honey.” The spit already beginning to transfer from your face to mine and the diminishing pronouns flying like bullets. “Are you trying to suggest that we aren’t looking after her?” There was a level of malice which was surprising but not entirely unexpected; I’d already assumed you were a cunt.

“Not at all.” I smiled warmly. “I just thought she looked like she needed a bit of water.” The spit had now begun to swell in waves and crash against the surface of my cheeks and you had risen in height to try and assert some dominance on a girl who’d had the audacity to interrupt your methodical zero to fuck plans.

“Yeah well, we’ve actually just ordered her some water so we don’t need any help. Are you sure you aren’t trying to imply anything with this water buying?” Now, this was the sliding doors moment; was I about to flare your simmering rage to breaking point so it spilled over or do I extract myself from the situation? Let’s find out, shall we?

“Oh no, I’m just happy she’s getting all the hydration she needs.” And with that I returned to my table, aware that you were watching me to see if you could unearth any justification to take our mild confrontation to the next level.

Not even five minutes after I looked over and you had just launched a metal chair across the bar and grabbed a server by the throat. I couldn’t quite make out exactly what was the problem but there seemed to be a mix up with the ordering of a glass of water. You were swiftly removed from the premises, staggered off, waving your arms, making more threats whilst trying to grab your prize for the evening and bundle her into a waiting carriage. She disappeared for a few minutes and I thought you had won, the police arrived and started to take statements and it was then she came swaying back through, free from your clutches, a vison in a billowing white dress like a fallen angel in a near-miss with hell. I imagine you would probably have found a fight regardless that evening, be it with an interfering cow like me or a defenceless bartender, but I like to think I had something to do with antagonising you enough that you ended up alone and being investigated by the police. And not wishing you ill but the chances are, if you were on a work visa you’ll most likely be deported, the Korean police are notoriously harsh on Westerners that get drunk and throw things. So perhaps you’ll get to go back to America and join your counterparts fingering comatose girls behind bins; although if you do get caught and you play a sport and are white, you’ll probably only get six months. So you can carry on facilitating this molestation and predatory culture we’ve normalised and deemed not worthy of proper prison time because it’s ‘too steep of a price to pay for 20 minutes of action’ from a full life of complete and devoted Christian compliance. I on the other hand, will continue to intrude on and annoy men, just like you, who think that getting their dick wet is only a few sips away. Because life is nothing but a series of seismic ripples that co-ordinate and align into different futures; vigilance and just a bit of compassion for vulnerable individuals of any gender can prevent them being led down an unwanted path where their safety is in jeopardy and they are unable to tell people they don’t want to do something. It can be hard to remember sometimes we are all humans sharing the same planet; we should be united as a cohesive eco-system instead of separated into hierarchies of hunters and the hunted when we’ve had a drink. We don’t need to turn every Weatherspoons or O’Neils into a microcosm of The Hunger Games, because there can be no victory in tricking and deceiving someone to get a shag; there is no glory in an unresponsive glory hole or pleasure in fucking a pussy that is so dry because it’s trying to say that it hates you.

(Actual footage of said face mere hours before coming into contact with man’s spit)