While
lounging late in bed late this morning and enjoying a delicious cup of coffee, I
got to thinking. Not common practice for a Saturday morning, but the night before I’d had
a particularly irritating discussion regarding specific public spaces and the
experiences of certain individuals that pass through them, which directly related to gender. The discussion rapidly morphed into something of an unstructured
argument, with neither party (myself included, sadly) accomplishing much more
than a reiteration of the same points and making the others in tow feel just
plain uncomfortable. My emotional reflexes and foggy head left me
unable to clarify my thoughts on the spot, let alone get to the crux of exactly
why I cared so deeply, and needed to dig my heels in right then and there. Thus, here I am, spending my Saturday morning musing over
and possibly reconsidering this debate. And what I’ve decided is that this supposedly
insignificant spat actually encompasses the far more significant fact that external
perceptions and forces – resting on superficial external clues related to
gender, or to race, or to age, or to whatever - almost always influence the
ways in which individuals navigate public social spaces amongst one another.
Ignoring this fact, in my opinion, is both ignorant and detrimental.
Ok, let’s rewind
and zoom out and add a little current context…. Whether you watch the news,
peruse the blogoshpere or religiously read The New Yorker (gosh, you so
smahhhht), you’re well aware that some horrible shit’s been going down lately
(always?) across the board. Shootings at movie theatres and bars, rape jokes
heedlessly slung by douchey comedians in late night clubs paired with actual
rape scandals on Air Force bases, Modern Family hogging four out of the six
Emmy nominations for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy… And, yet, here we all
are, still hanging and going about our business like “oh hey, that shit was sad
or tragic or whatever, but I’ve still got only 30 minutes for lunch and I still
can’t decide what to eat, and where are we going for happy hour tonight? I’m
totally jazzed for the Block Party this weekend, TGIF guys!” and so on and so
forth. Life’s life, you hear shitty shit in the news all the time, it’s
screaming at you from the television, it’s assaulting you on the internet, and
you just take it in, and you digest it, and you excrete it in whatever form
allows you to successfully leave it behind as “that horrific thing that
happened” (but not to you!), the “moral of the story”, the “lesson learned”, or
as the impetus for future necessary precautions. As Walter White has said
“we’re human. We move on”. And, we do. Humans do horrific things to other
humans over and over again and, somehow both as a society and as individuals,
we continue to move on.
Sometimes, however,
as with the shooting that occurred in Colorado last week as one example, those incidents are
so massively horrific they catch the eye of the entire nation – at the same
time - and everyone takes pause in shock (in this case) of the sheer disregard
for human life, for other human beings. At the risk of diminishing the
severity, terror and sadness of this event, I’m not even going to try to
further articulate it. I don’t need to, as it’s being replayed, elaborated
upon, embellished and dissected on every news channel, across the Internet, in
daily conversations and interactions. No matter your source or daily routine,
odds are that since last Friday, you’ve had ample opportunity to be repeatedly reminded
of this tragedy whether sought out or not. And common conversation, no
matter what the venue, relates to “our” safety. A Google search of a sampling
of news headlines read: “Do we need metal detectors at the movies?”; “Colorado
Shooting Shatters our Sense of Safety”; “Dark Knight massacre could prompt massive,
expensive security changes at movie theaters”. With this continued media onslaught
alongside the events of last Friday, the experience of “going to the movies” -
the “movies” as a public, social space - will inevitably be, and already has,
changed. Whether or not you, as an individual, choose to continue going to the
movies is somewhat less relevant than the thought process that runs as an
undercurrent to your eventual actions of entering that public space or not, the
decisions you make and considerations you take into account, the thoughts that run through
your head, the sense of (dis)comfort and overall safety that you experience the
next time you walk into a dimming theater and settle in to your seat.
Whether you
live in California, Kansas or Connecticut, the extreme violence that occurred
in Colorado provides a loud and unique breach in “daily goings ons” that forces
the very valid reevaluation of public space in general and the movies in
specific, in relation to both personal safety and sentiment. The apparent
randomness allows for individuals regardless of social indicators to feel
somewhat similarly - threatened or saddened or just plain aware - when moving
through this specific public space. But, what if this indiscriminate air was
absent?
Now, stay
with me here; it’s an interesting, and for many a not all too foreign, thought.
Let’s consider this same general heightened sense of awareness and potential for harm in public spaces in the context of that initial argument I participated in the
other night: in relation to gender (“gender”, for the purposes of this informal
chat, being either man or woman). Think about this. Picture being assaulted on
the daily with news articles and stories that highlight rape and sexual
violence perpetrated against individuals solely because they’re perceived
(easily physically identified, based on dress or build or just general
assumption) as women. Envision taking public transportation every day to or
from work and, say, being confronted with the “See It, Say Something” campaigns
in regard to groping on crowded buses and T’s, something that’s happened to you
personally, more than once. Consider hearing a plethora of tales (let alone
personal anecdotes) from and about your mom, your friend, your coworker, your
cousin’s roommate’s sister, and how these women were “taken advantage of” or molested
or even raped. Spread out over a day, a week or a year, these personalized micro-aggressions
by no means make national noise comparable to that of a mass shooting. Their
repetition and frequency over the course of a lifetime, in numerous facets of
your life, however, creates a landscape in which awareness is not only beneficial
but also necessary for survival. As a physically identifiable “woman”, I’m
subtly inundated with reminders daily and come to critically comprehend that
ensuring my own personal safety requires a keen awareness of my surroundings in
no way unrelated to this classification.
Right. So
for many (rather unfortunately, if seen as reflective of the current state of
social kyriarchy), this is hardly news. Heck, maybe this is little more than a
personal discursive exercise in better understanding my visceral reaction. But
what it comes down to is that moving through public spaces smartly requires an
understanding of how you’re perceived. This understanding is fluid, and it doesn’t
need to change your actions, it doesn’t necessarily dictate what you do. Let me
emphatically state that by no means do all women do all of the same things,
frequent the same places, or interpret external information, habitual clues or
micro-aggressions in the same ways. There is nary an individual – man or woman -
that doesn’t have a host of additional factors (in addition to and way beyond gender)
playing into their public perceptions and the way in which they’re publicly
perceived. Across the board, however, these internal and external factors do
remain present as we all live social and interactive public lives and they (whether
implicitly or tangibly) need to be accounted for, whether going for a jog, walking down a darkened street, getting a drink at a bar solo, riding public transportation or getting the mail.
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