Give every girl a clicker
We have no official data on leers, gropes, crotch stares, touches, suggestive winks or sexual insults. Let’s get some.
When I was a teenager I had a job counting cars. Say someone wanted to build a shop or a factory or whatever along a stretch of road, the local council would want them to find out how busy the road was. So someone used to pay me and my boyfriend to sit in a car and count the number of vehicles that drove past us. They gave us these little clicky mechanical things called tally counters and we would sit there, all day, smoking joints and click click clicking for a fiver an hour.
It was a good way to figure out how dangerous it would be to build an entryway to an establishment along a given public roadway. It’s much better than just saying: that road is busy, or not busy, or sometimes kind of busy. They presumably fed the raw data into a machine and use the results to predict the chances of traffic pileups or crashes.
But all this is standard stuff. You wouldn’t just make up a policy with wide reaching consequences without robust data, would you?
Opportunistic sleaze
Being crazy charitable, let’s assume that the people advocating for mixed-sex spaces, not to mention the self-ID merchants, are unaware of the sheer volume of opportunistic sleazy bullshit women and girls have to put up with from men on a daily basis. Let’s imagine they think the number of prosecutions for sex crimes is an accurate measure of men’s unwanted behaviours towards us.
But those are the worst case scenarios. The real meat of this is the thousands of private, unspoken, unrecorded, un-remarked-upon anecdotes of men’s seedy overtures that go on throughout our lifetimes. Some of the experiences are humiliating. Some of them are infuriating. Most are just absorbed soundlessly, like cosmic background radiation.
It is so pervasive, we don’t even bother to talk to each other about it. It’s like that metaphor of the fish who says to the other fish: what do you think of the water? And the other fish says, What’s water? Water is men’s suffocating need to make females uncomfortable because they are inordinately horny at random times during the day. That’s the water. We been swimming in it.
If it’s not recorded, it’s not happening
Every time a man rubs his crotch area at the sight of a woman, or holds a door open theatrically while staring at a teenage girl’s chest, or grunts like a boar at the sight of a woman bending to get something off a low supermarket shelf, or calls her a slut for not smiling back at his wink….
Click. Click. Click. Click.
Every time a strange man you’re interacting with randomly segues to a sexual topic, and takes pleasure in watching you squirm.
Click.
Every time a man lingers. Blocks the door. Makes himself bigger to take up more space. Tries to make you stay and talk even though you clearly want to leave.
Click.
In mixed-sex toilets, they are listening to us piss. They are watching how we wash our hands. And they often have something to say about it.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
What a story the numbers would tell
This doesn’t happen to me nearly as much any more because I’m no longer hot (my babies did an absolute number on my hips and gravity saw to the rest). But young girls, who start to notice this stuff around 9 or 10, are facing a lifetime of this uncomfortable did-he didn’t-he, will-he, won’t-he bullshit in narrow confined spaces.
We smile like maniacs of all of these situations and get the fuck out of there. Because despite what the major sports bodies tell you, men have a size and strength advantage over us. We don’t call the police. We don’t log it in an app. And we certainly don’t send a little ping to dickheads like Victor Madrigal Borloz, though we probably should.
Without real data on the prevalence of these benign-seeming but constant assaults on our dignity, we are doing the equivalent of standing outside the window of the local council’s office screaming at them that the road is too busy and too dangerous for a new factory.
I think that if officials were to see the raw numbers, they’d not only stop letting men into women’s spaces, they’d do a repeat of that Russian experiment where they bred foxes to make them tamer and less pathologically horny and aggressive. Only with men.
Screaming into the void
When the self ID debate was going on in Hollyrood in Scotland in December, there was a big fuss made about how few autogynephiles or other assorted incel types had been criminally prosecuted for sexually assaulting women in countries where self-ID is already in force. But that’s not the data we need.
We need numbers on how many men enjoyed making women feel deeply uncomfortable. How many own spy-cams, how many like flirting sexually with children, how many regularly lie or otherwise use subterfuge to get close to us, how many of them are out there rubbing their grimy little hands at all this sex-positive blank-slate retardedness we have suddenly instituted at the highest levels?
Why do you think Reem Alsalem (queen) told the Scottish committee members about a deeply personal and probably humiliating incident in which she found a hospital worker groping her as she was waking up from anaesthesia? It had nothing to do with self-ID, as such, and it had nothing to do with any particular male fetish (though there is one for that, too, of course) but everyone knew why it was relevant. Immediately. And if you don’t know why her anecdote was relevant to a discussion about self-ID, just make sure you never get a job making policy where the safety of women and kids is involved.
Anecdotes are not working
Eventually, some nerd invented a machine that was able to do my car-counting job on the cheap. He figured out that you could just lay a hollow rubber tube across the road; the puff of air exiting the tube represented the passing of a car, and a little machine picked up on the little puffs. And just like that, I was out of a job and out of weed money, outdone by a strip of rubber.
But until we can come up with a similar clever automated system that can measure creepiness in males (the Pervasi-Perv™?), maybe we should give a clicker to every newborn baby girl. Alternatively, of course, policymakers and legislators could simply decide to believe us. Because until something is done, I’m closing off the fucking road.