Artwork by Annie Meitchik
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault and harrassment
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You woke up quite recently after sleeping for the majority of your twenty-something years. You first started to raise your little head from its pillow when you were seventeen and watched the movie Waking Life for the first time and learned about bigger concepts than yourself, like the nature of reality, existentialism, and determinism. Your heavy eyelids lifted a tiny touch more when you rewatched that movie with a boy in his very stereotypical boy-bed in Santa Barbara, where he lived and slept, and had sex in a communal space shared with other very stereotypical boys. While you watched the film, your legs—covered in denim made from pretty plants that had been squashed and dyed into fibers—may have grazed his legs under the blanket. But really, nothing happened that night besides you having to walk home in the half of the day that’s designated for the diurnal creatures to sleep.
You woke up a little bit because, on your way back to the place that you lived, you stayed on the phone with your friend because that’s the safer thing to do when you are a female creature and it’s the time of day for sleeping. In talking with her, you realized that you felt weird because you had watched a movie with this boy who had a girlfriend on the other side of the continent, and that meant that you had overstepped some invisible boundary. And after saying all of that and feeling all of that you went straight back to bed. Because that’s tiring.
When you were eighteen, someone you love very much tripped off your alarm when they were sexually assaulted by someone else who you also love, so you woke up and cried and picked up the pieces. Since you didn’t know what to do with the knowledge you now possessed, you hit the snooze button and carried on sleeping because that was, in a word, exhausting.
So, as you can see, here you are, a young adult who is very sleepy, but never sleep deprived. And at nineteen, you realized that maybe you hadn’t overstepped any boundary by watching the movies you were invited to watch, but that the boy was actually a bit to blame for inviting you over when he was the one with the girlfriend who wasn’t you. A hard cover book with the title, “HE’S THE ONE IN THE RELATIONSHIP, NOT YOU,” came down and clocked you on the head and woke you right up.
And somewhere in this time you gained the right to vote and you exercised it by sleepwalking into the polls and voting for the candidate who shared your anatomy. You didn’t worry, or think, or plan for what would happen if she wasn’t elected Madam President. Later, her opponent, the personification of evil and intolerance, entered Office, opening the floodgates for major social justice issues and inequity to rise to the surface. And it was a flood—and floods are natural disasters. Surrounded by water, you recognized momentarily that feminism was not an issue to be ignored, but in your adolescence, all feminism meant to you was that everyone should be treated equally. And you do believe that. But it takes more than sharing a belief to evoke change. After the election results were declared, people at your school rioted and revolted and protested. And, as you can imagine, the brave people around you were very angry and very tired.
That was all a bit loud, so you did the only reasonable thing that you knew how to do at the time: slipped on your coziest pajamas, ate your sweetest and saltiest snacks, drank the teas made from the sleepy kinds of flowers, swallowed your melatonin tablets, and went into hibernation for a year. At least.
At twenty-one years-old, you go to the Museum of Man. The name of the museum could not be more fitting for the story of how you woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep again. After being in a different museum with a different name, you sprint through Man, hoping to see if the new exhibit has been installed yet (it has not). As you re-emerge from the hallway, you see a 40-something-year-old man and his young, teenage daughter.
“Where does that hallway lead?” the man asks you.
You pause for a second, surprised that anyone is directing a question at you in this quiet space that you came to all alone. Then again, this is a common museum interaction and so you tell him, “It’s a dead end.”
Instead of carrying on through the museum and right through the exit doors as you had planned, you are bombarded with more questions:
Where do you go to school?
What are you studying?
Have you been to this museum before?
What are you interested in doing after you graduate?
You assume these are fairly basic things, and you are used to a lot of grown people asking you these same questions. Yet, somewhere in the depths of your sleepy head, you recognize that, without even realizing it, men can make women feel like they have no agency. You feel like you have no choice but to engage in this conversation. By the looks of his broad shoulders and sturdy frame, you wonder what else you might have no choice in.
You don’t think much of it at the time when you tell him things like the name of your University, but you do, later. You also don’t have the space to think too much during the 30-minute conversation about ethnocentrism, imperialism, racism, dialogue based learning, tolerance, censorship, cultural relativism, and an explanation you need to provide about intersectionality to a stranger. You don’t think, can’t think, because you aren’t prepared to feel like you can’t escape, regardless of the fact that you felt uncomfortable and hyper-aware for half an hour, which is a particularly long time to be awake (and uncomfortable) for someone whose eyes are usually only open to bat an eyelash.
“I’m R,” says the man when the conversation is over. For him.
As you reply, you go to shake his hand which is balled up into a fist, as if fist-bumping would be an appropriate way to end the conversation. You laugh a bit nervously and shake hands like business people do after a fancy meeting in a co-working space with free snacks straight out of a Whole Foods. Except that you aren’t in a fancy meeting. You are in the middle of a museum observing his bored daughter being ignored—and cornered into silence—while the “adults chat” for the better half of an hour.
“Listen, I work for *Insert Company Here,* and my email is R@InsertCompanyHere.com. If you want to continue talking, I’d love for you to reach out,” he tells you.
Listen. As if you were free to do anything else. You nod politely, an unshakeable habit, and part ways. You inhale deeply, noticing the air, and particles, and atoms, and space you can take up by just breathing. You take all of this information, and walk straight away into the safety of another museum, and offer money to a homeless man with Parkinson’s on your way to clear the air, and acknowledge that that was a very weird thing but you are still a good person. After years of subtle (and not so subtle) mistreatment it’s no wonder you feel so gross after a man has overstepped a boundary. Over time, it’s near impossible to avoid defining yourself as bad or wrong when you’re treated badly time and time again.
You begin to wonder how you can find balance. You start to think that maybe, just maybe, even one man keeping one woman in a conversation she doesn’t want to be a part of is perpetuating the patriarchy.
Walking away from it all, your flight or fight response finally fires off. Adrenaline kicks in, and you want to run, so you do the faster thing and get in your car and drive straight home. In that conversation, that seemingly unaggressive conversation, you lost your power to say, Actually, I’d like to check out this exhibit and not be bothered by anyone. Omitting thank you, from the end of that sentence is hard to do. It feels like the natural conclusion. But why thank him? You lost your agency to find an exit and say No to the situation, clean and simple.
You brushed it off like you did when the transient man came into the place where you work sometimes, and sat down in front of the register and asked you, “What time do you get off?”
You were a teenager.
You brushed the Man of the Museum off just like that, and thought it was at least interesting to analyze, and then you went to drink pear cider and eat tater tots with your friends at a restaurant because that’s the thing to do when you’re twenty-one on a Friday.
The weekend passed, and you managed to sleep at night, but not during the day. And then on Monday, you received an email from the Man of the Museum who had found you, as he so generously explained, by Googling your name and the name of your University and then he came upon your blog and a way to contact you. That email woke you the fuck up because you never asked him to contact you, and you didn’t provide him with the information to do so. He gave you the tools that you needed to reach him, and if you had wanted to, you would have. But he chose to ignore the fact that you had the means to reach out and didn’t. He chose to ignore that you weren’t interested in speaking further.
These transgressions are the fibers that weave together the quilt of patriarchy. You hear a lot of stories that speak to the physically harmful things that men do, but these subtle stories that can cause emotional damage go ignored because it is exhausting to stay awake and share every little thing. You feel conditioned to brush all of the grievances off as little, but even when everything is little, it undeniably adds up to a lot.
So, you woke up when you received an email from a man who was excited by you and curious about you. The man had chosen to express that, after all, without considering for a second the effect it might have on you. And, in receiving that email, you realized that you have no obligation to respond, but that you must acknowledge that this isn’t okay, and that even if you are asleep, you live in a world where about 50% of the population has never experienced what it is like to be a woman in a world dominated by men. You start to think that maybe there are people behaving like this because they don’t know any better. But few people are telling them any better. Part of the problem is believing that this is too ingrained in society to change, because you realize you must try your best to educate yourself and everyone around you. Because yes, it’s only half of the population, but these behaviors impact you, these behaviors impact women, every time they happen.
You think all of this at once, and your mind is flooded by the unfairness in one sweeping wave. You think about how badly we need people to speak up about the small issues, because those are the ones that resonate most widely. You recognize the consequences of letting the small stuff slide, excusing men for not knowing better, and for overstepping boundaries. Although, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to feel constantly drained from speaking up about every single thing, you realize that you have to. Because, although it is exhausting, once you’re enlightened, ignoring the problems feels like closing your eyes to the truth.
You woke up under water and realized that believing you are a feminist because you want the world to be an equal place is not enough. You woke up surrounded by people who had been swimming for four years while they held up signs that spoke about impeachment. You realized how brave those people were for swimming and for holding their signs in a world where it’s easier to drown.
You woke up catching your breath and understanding why people have been so angry and so tired for so long. Because the cause of the symptoms—being born male in a world designed for men to thrive and for women to have to fight in order to avoid suffering—is woven into over four billion people.
You woke up angry and tired. But as the hours ticked by from 11:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m., to 1:00, and 2:00, and 3:00, you realized you wouldn’t be going back to bed.