I have just listened to a fascinating seminar about Dee Graham’s Loving to Survive, published in 1994 by New York University Press which in that era was happy to publish books by radical feminists.
The seminar was presented by two women, one of whom is currently working with a publisher to produce a book. The publisher is extremely reluctant to allow her to use the phrase “the reign of terror” to refer to the societal relationship between men and women. Loving to Survive is unambiguous about how men are exerting a reign of terror over women, and the strategies that women adopt in this hostile environment. Graham says “Femininity describes a set of behaviours that please men because they communicate a woman's acceptance of her subordinate status. Thus, feminine behaviours are survival strategies.”
Let me share a tiny vignette from my own life. A few weeks ago, on a day when I was working at home, there was a lot of noise in the street outside - 120 pounding disco beats per minute. Two men were repainting the windowframes of a house on the other side of the road. After a couple of hours the noise was still going on, and I was finding it irritating.
I went out and crossed the road to speak to them. Now for most of my life, I would have approached them with my 1000 watt smile, with all my (very considerable) powers of personal charm switched on, and would have made the request in the most conciliatory manner imaginable. Because that’s how women make requests of men they don’t know, right? Particularly tall and big men - Greggs Frequent Flyer big - with their arses hanging out of their jeans.
But on the day in question, my “reign of terror” cup overfloweth. I had been reading about how a serving policeman had used his police ID and his police issue handcuffs to kidnap a young woman off a busy London street, and then subject her to hours of unimaginable terror and torture. HMP Isle of Wight, a high security men’s prison housing 1000 inmates, including rapists, sex offenders and paedophiles (including, before their deaths, Gary Glitter and the Kray twins) had just tweeted about issuing “pronoun badges”. And of course there was the usual background sound of Stonewall pretending that it’s perfectly safe for men to play contact sports with women. I wasn’t in the mood to conciliate the dominant sex class. So I crossed the road with a neutral face on.
Both these tall, big men were on ladders. I am a small, slight grey-haired old woman. They looked down at me with surprise, closely followed by disdain and contempt. They could scarcely believe they’d been approached by a woman without her performing the sex-based kow-towing.
Me (no sweet intonation, no chirpy chirrups): Excuse me.
Man 1 and Man 2 (facial expressions consistent with disdain and contempt)
Me: Can you turn that noise off? It’s been going for a couple of hours and it’s irritating.
Man 1 and Man 2 (facial expressions consistent with disbelief)
Man 1: There have been kids playing in the street.
Me: That’s not irritating. Your incessant doof doof is irritating.
Man 2 (comes down ladder, starts to turn music down)
Me: Down is good. Off would be better.
Man 1 (still on ladder, looking down at me with more disbelief)
Man 2: We’ll just turn it off, then.
Me: Thanks.
Then I turned round and walked back to my front door without looking back. My inner Health and Safety Monitor was screaming “smile, say THANK YOU SO MUCH, say something about how they’ve got good weather for their task, smile, smile, SMILE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Two big, ugly, nasty-looking men know where you live!” My heart rate was elevated, my system was flooded with cortisol.
This may sound completely inconsequential. Two men were making an irritating noise, a woman asked them to stop, they stopped. But my internal decision-making about how to handle the situation was, to me, anything but inconsequential. Make no mistake, men are exerting a reign of terror over women, whether or not individual men and women are aware of this.
Thanks for this. I absolutely understand the stress of that situation. Even when you DO smile, it's stressful, but if you go in without smiling, the nerves are shrieking, the adrenalin is pumping!
I had this myself last week in a queue in a small shop, where a maskless middle-aged man was being served before me, by a maskless young man, and I was waiting to collect something (a 1-min job, it turned out). The customer wanted to pay for something on credit, which involved lengthy form-filling. I didn't realise what the delay was for some time. By the time I worked it out, I'd already been waiting long enough to make it pointless to leave and come back later. Then another maskless man started queuing behind me.
So I was stuck in a small, unventilated space for TEN MINUTES, trapped between all these maskless men, waiting to collect this thing that I desperately needed that day, and thinking all the time, should I just leave and come back another time? Should I stay? Why on earth is this taking so long? Why hasn't the man serving so much as given me an apologetic look? Am I going to catch Covid? (The case rates are soaring where I am.) And WHY ARE THESE MEN NOT WEARING MASKS?
Finally, the guy left and it was my turn, and I was so fraught and angry by then, I instantly demanded to know why he hadn't TOLD ME as soon as I started queuing, that the customer ahead of me was going to take ten minutes? Since I could then have come back another time and not had to stand for so long in an unventilated space.
The young man stared at me coldly, and said, with no attempt at civility, 'My priority is the customer in front of me. I wasn't even aware of you waiting.'
What he meant, of course, as I could tell from the look he exchanged with the man behind me, was, BECAUSE HE WAS A MAN, AND YOU ARE A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN, AND THEREFORE UNIMPORTANT. I then said, furious as hell, 'Right, well, I am the customer in front of you now, this is my order number, get me what I want.'
He looked like he wanted to hit me. He practically threw the item at me without a word and then turned straight to the man behind me, with a pointed smile. 'Can I help you, sir?'
I left the shop shaking. And not just with fury, but with abject fear for having DARED speak to a man like that instead of smiling and being appeasing and conciliatory. I was also worried that I had been too rude, that I'd over-reacted and was in the wrong. I then spent several days worrying that this young man would know my name, and possibly my address too, through the order I'd collected, and might come round to exact revenge, even though logically I know that would be highly unlikely. But not IMPOSSIBLE.
Reign of terror is about right.