The Bad Year Every Female Student Has
You’re in class. You sit in your desk, your teacher starts talking, and you learn! And it’s fun and amazing, and you get along with your classmates and make new friends. You exchange numbers and hang out and study. This happens all the time and it’s unique to the college experience. Maybe you even go on a few different dates! Then there’s someone who messages you on Facebook at one o’clock in the morning and asks you what you are doing, or if you want to drink or smoke some time. Or one of your peers asks you to hook them up with your friend. This could be exactly what you wanted! Or maybe not, and they don’t stop. Or they get angry that you rejected them. Either way, the class is now uncomfortable with that person in it, and as seniors, you take classes with the same people again and again. You don’t know what to say to them, you don’t know what to say in class, or where to sit. Maybe the class before this one is far away so when you get there, the only spots left have you facing them.
In your next class you have a female teacher who was given a steaming chili pepper on Rate My Professor. She is an average teacher. She has great ideas but her follow through and feedback is lacking. She wears high heals and skirts every day. She screams when she sees a spider in the room, and she is a little flirty with her male students. After class everyone comments on how nice she is and how pretty she is. But in your head you think; Is this what I want out of a teacher? Is this who I want a role model of mine to be? Is this who I want to look up to? She’s an alright teacher, but is just alright what I am here for?
Now you have finally reached the last class of the day! Unfortunately, you weren’t much looking forward to it. You have a lot of friends in that class, and your teacher is very smart, but he calls mostly on the one male student in the class and praises his opinions. You have given up raising your hand at all because half of the time his responses to your opinions make you feel small The other half of the time he calls on you after calling on the male student, if at all. When you bring this to his attention in his office hours, he says that if that is really happening, it is fully unintentional. When you email him about your questions he tells you that he is “annoyed that you don’t understand” his instructions. You are feeling the hostility and isolation from your teacher. Is my teacher really singling me out? It feels like it. Am I over thinking this? Is he acting this way towards me because I am a woman? Because I like to contribute to class conversation? Does he feel threatened by me? Will he grade my assignments differently?
After class, you head to your on-campus job. Whether it’s the dining hall, parking services, the mail office, or catering. Or you even work off campus at the mall. It is all, often, the same. Your supervisor is a man who seems not to care much for you. He likes a couple of the other girls that work with you, but they flirt with him. When you ask him for help he ignores you completely, or he says that you have to figure it out on your own. He walks away and starts bullshitting with the guys you work with, and you are left hurt and confused. Do I talk to HR? Will that even make any difference? Why are my questions less important? Should I be extra sweet to him so he will listen to me? Wont that be demeaning? I depend on this job, what id I get fired?
After work, you walk to the library to study with your classmates. A college campus can be an amazing and inspiring place of learning and friendship and fun. And it can also be scary intimidating and threatening. Walking through campus is the same way. During the day, it is beautiful with all of the trees and laughter and hustle and bustle of students. After the sunsets, and the orange pink sky dissolves into darkness, it is not fun, and it is not inspiring. A lot fewer people are walking over the jangling bricks, and the silhouettes of strangers are illuminated by the blue lights of the emergency help stations, located throughout the campus.
You just left a late night study group at the library where you learned that nearly one in every five women have been, and are being sexually assaulted. You reflect on that and wonder if walking down the halls during high school, on an average day, is accounted for in that statistic. Everything is quiet, and then your phone buzzes to tell you that:
“…in the 900 block of North Garden Street, a female reported that she noticed a flashlight beam outside of her home. She then observed a male subject using the flashlight to illuminate his exposed genitals while he fondled them. The female described the suspect as a white male, about 40 years of age, wearing white washed jeans, a dark shirt and a wrist watch.”
“Two women were attacked at Western Washington University in less than a week and police are not sure if there is one attacker or two.”
“…a female student was taking a shower in the Ridgeway Alpha residence hall on Western Washington’s Campus, university officials said. The woman –in the middle of her shower — spotted a male hand holding a cellphone over the top of the shower curtain.”
After reading that, knowing that it all happened between where you are, and your house. The silhouettes look more threatening. Every sound you hear behind you, you have to turn and look. If someone is walking behind you, or walking toward you, you change paths and put as much distance as possible between you and them. And you spend the rest of your walk home afraid.
