Why I am afraid of men.
Tags: Men, Women, Sexual Assault, Society, Feminism

I don’t think that I became fully aware of what men thought of me until I was 9 or 10, because thats when I first started being sexualised. To start off with it was looks from guys in the street, then when I was 11 or 12 it was boys in my year making comments on my body. I was scared of men individually from about the age of 13 when I started to realise all the disgusting things that some men do to women, from reading the news and watching true crime documentaries. But it was also when I was walking up a dark alley at the age of 13 with the increased pace of a man behind me, catching me up and terrifying me to the point that I blacked out into a wall for a few seconds, he walked on by but without a care that he had made me feel the most afraid I had ever felt.

I am currently 17, not even an adult yet I have felt violated in every sense by men in my youth, from not feeling safe enough to stop kissing a boy to locking my car doors as soon as I step inside my car for fear of being attacked, and it is not acceptable that some of my childhood was stolen from me because of these things.

It was only till this year that I became afraid of men as a collective, especially men in a particular position of power. I feel upset when I hear a man has made a decision for someone else regardless of the situation, whether it was right or wrong, I always believe it is wrong and it has started affecting my personal relationships with some men. I don’t trust my male friends as much as I used to, I don’t value their opinion even if there is nothing wrong with it and worst of all I feel scared around them.

Nothing in particular has happened to me, like sexual assault or rape, but I think this was triggered when someone sexually assaulted my sister. It was a boy in my year, she was underage and taken advantage of and he got away with it because she didn’t want to go through the stress of a trial at school or a trial with the police, but he knows what he did and he knows that I know. He walks around at school acting as if he is king of the world and it makes me angry beyond belief, it makes me angry because he is such a despicable person who thinks he can get away with it. It makes me angry because it is my sister who he hurt, I mean she didn’t eat for weeks, whilst he told everyone he had sex with her. But what makes me so angry is that he told a lot of the boys who I have been friends with my whole adolescent life, yet they will not come forward and help her, because all it would take is 1 person other than my sister to come forward and say he did this.

And this terrifies me, it terrifies me that men are believed more than women, it terrifies me that men will never come forward against one of their friends who has harmed a woman and it petrifies me that this has been going on for thousands of years yet women have barely made crack in this patriarchal society we happen to live in.

I know for a fact this is not all men, but I can’t seem to shake this fear of them and I can’t see the good from the bad. I know this has affected my love life, I am 17 and I have never even come close to being in a relationship because I am scared to put myself out there, I had tinder downloaded for a week and deleted it because I was never going to actually meet up with a random man because of how scared I am.

Sometimes I feel like I am drowning under the weight of oppression against women, although I am white and face the least oppression a woman can feel I can’t help but feel like giving up sometimes because of it. I see our governements and corporations filled with men making up the majority, I had this argument with some men in my class and they were saying that there shouldn’t be equity in the workplace because “less qualified women will be picked to fill this quota” and it made me angry because they will never have to worry about be undermined or only picked because of their looks or being sexually harrassed in the workplace.

To give some perspective on harassment in the workplace on women, I work in a coffee shop, a FEMALE dominated industry, and this 20 something year old man was doing his first few shifts, I sometimes spend the whole day washing up in the kitchen if it is busy and on this particular day it was very busy so I was in the kitchen with him, the owner left for a few minutes and he towered over my 5'4 self making me feel so small, asking me all these questions about my life and even though he was told I was underage he “didn’t believe” it and still kept harassing me.

I hope my daughters can grow up in a society where they aren’t treated like pieces of meat and are treated like people with thoughts and feelings, because I know in my childhood I haven’t.

I also want to make a promise to myself, to stop apologising to men when I havent been in the wrong, like denying giving people my phone number or my snapchat. I don’t need to apologise to a man for something I have a choice in, I will never be rude, but I also don’t need to apologise for everything I do.

You don’t have to agree with anything I have said, but I mean I really hope you do.

Thank you for listening to my story, I will never be done with my views on feminism because I am only 17 and I am growing up in a world where I feel more strength everyday to fight for my freedom and fight for justice for women everywhere.