Too many men

The last time a man physically assaulted me was more than thirty years ago. I was standing at the bar in a Soho pub, chatting to someone when a man whose advances I’d rejected earlier in the evening came over to me and punched me in the face, then spat at me. The pub was full and a pack of men jumped on him, knocking him to the ground. As my blood merged with his saliva, the barman turned to me and said you should probably get out of here. I did, my attacker now obscured by the pulsing punching multitude.

Last Sunday I was attacked again. This time by someone I know. A former tenant who owes me over €8000 in rent, utility bills and legal expenses. He was evicted in October. In the meantime he has shacked up with the neighbour. Apparently they’ve just had a baby. As I could not face renting the flat out again I had sold it. We were supposed to be signing the papers on Tuesday. I was just going there to give it one last once over and pick up a couple of things. A tranquil Sunday morning, when most people are still in bed recovering from Saturday night’s excesses or having a well-deserved lie-in. The neighbour likes to leave her rubbish in the communal hallway and stairway leading up to the roof. The two minute walk to the containers must be too trying for her. But this Sunday she was really taking the piss. Buckets of broken tiles, pieces of wood, toolboxes, empty bottles, all piled up in front of my door. I started to move the stuff over to her side of the hallway. My former tenant — let’s call him Reggie — comes flying out. Dishevelled, reeking, a dirty brown joint dangling from his extremity-spewing lips.

‘Don’t touch my stuff, you whore!’

‘Then move it’, I said.

He grabbed what I had it in my hands and put it back down again in front of my door.

I picked it up again. He grabbed it again all the while treating me to a running commentary of ‘Whore, bitch, whore, bitch’. Then he took out his phone.

‘Calling the police?’ I asked bemused.

‘No, I’m going to take pictures of you to show the world what a fucking whore you are’.

Now as any of my friends know, point a camera at me and you will regret it. I posed for his pictures like an instagramming millennial which probably only served to infuriate him more. He put the phone away and I started to move the stuff again. He punched me in the face, or at least he tried to. He flung several more punches at me, narrowly missing every time, his puny fist lightly brushing my skin. He’s a small man, my height, stocky, but I guess a steady diet of beer and marihuana isn’t conducive to building muscle. Then he grabbed me by the shoulders and started trying to push me inside my flat. It took him a long time. Like I said physical strength is not his forte. He nearly had me inside but one arm was still in the doorway so he slammed the door on it and held it there until I managed to wriggle free. Then he disappeared back into his lover’s apartment, screaming that I was never allowed back in the building again. This was ‘his house, his building’. Whore, bitch, whore, bitch, whore, bitch.

I shut the door and locked it, wondering what the fuck had just happened. I knew I should probably call someone but I had never been in this situation before. Attacked on my own property. By someone who owes me a shitload of money. By someone who has already been ordered by the courts to pay me that money. I left and got in my car and decided I should go to the police. He couldn’t get away with this. I drove to the nearest police station but you cannot just walk into a police station these days. An officer stands guard, questioning everyone as to whether they really have a valid reason to enter.

‘I’ve been attacked’, I said and burst into tears.

She was kind. Yes, I should have called, but it didn’t matter. You poor thing. But before I could report him I had to see a doctor for a medical report. She told me which clinic to go to and I drove there still crying. I knew the clinic well, had been there several times for X-rays and other appointments. I walked into what used to be the entrance, the sign ‘Vaccination hub’ looming, tens of elderly eyes fixed on me. Who is this snivelling young person breaching our safe space? A nurse approached me. ‘Do you have an appointment?’ she asked suspiciously. I told her I needed a report, that I didn’t know where to go, that I’d been attacked. She was sympathetic. ‘I’ll take you’. She led me around the building, two blocks further — it’s a big clinic — to another entrance. ‘You used to be able to just walk through’, she said. ‘I’m so sorry about all this’.

I stood on the pavement, shouting my details at a receptionist behind a screen. Then someone else came and shouted a list of Covid symptoms at me. I had to swear I hadn’t had any of them in the last fourteen days. Then I was allowed in. Then I could sit down. This isn’t anyone’s fault. They were kind. They did the best they could under these circumstances. I could have called a friend for support but she wouldn’t have been allowed in with me so what would have been the point? I saw a nurse who took my blood pressure (165/118 — it’s normally on the low side) and other vitals. Then I saw a doctor who drew up a report for the police.

I returned to the police station. I was calmer by then. Another officer took down my report. She could not find my aggressor in the system. He’s an immigrant from an EU country which he left to avoid paying support for the five children he sired there, but it appears he’s never arranged his papers here. He was in trouble last year for damaging someone’s car. He claimed to be a tourist and got away with it because Spain cannot risk upsetting tourists right now. She said she would check him out and if they couldn’t find anything they would be paying him a visit. Charges are always pressed for violence in Spain. She told me which court we would be appearing in and said I would be hearing from them soon. I will now say something which will make my Catalan friends recoil in horror but I have to say I cannot fault the Spanish police. They were kind, sympathetic and extremely professional, especially considering the circumstances they are working under. I hear a lot of women say that they don’t report things to the police because they are ‘useless’. In my case they were not and I can only implore you to report, wherever you are. The police are supposed to work for us and if they are useless we need to report that too. We have the power of social media at our fingertips. We must report, call out, name and shame if we are ever going to see change.

This was one day before International Women’s Day — you know, that day when women are supposedly celebrated and lots of men get indignant about there being no day for men (there is — it’s 19 November). Two days later the body of Sarah Everard was discovered and the Western world was up in arms again. Her alleged killer was a police officer, one of those people who’s supposed to protect us, one of those people whose praises I’ve just sung. Once again it’s opened up the debate about sexual abuse, harassment, misogyny and of course, that well-worn and totally redundant phrase ‘not all men’.

I could not possibly list every time I have been harassed or abused. I’m 51 years old and can most certainly no longer be classified as hot but it still happens. All you need, to be quite blunt, is a fanny and a pair of tits. That’s enough to warrant being harassed and abused. You had the audacity to be born a woman and that carries a life sentence of harassment and abuse with no right to appeal.

I can’t remember the first time I encountered harassment. I do remember one situation very clearly though. I was thirteen years old and in an RE lesson. The RE teacher — let’s call him Mr D — had a reputation for being a ‘perv’. Everyone knew he was a ‘perv’. Every kid at that school, every teacher. Whether the reputation was justified, whether he actually abused anyone, I do not know, but I doubt he got that reputation for being an upstanding member of the community.

Mr D had asked me to read a passage from the Bible, the Song of Solomon. Not your typical Old Testament book of fire and brimstone raining down, or the deity-sanctioned excision of foreskins, but a love song. As I recited the words of a young woman, longing to be near her lover and enjoy his kisses, I had my head down, and did not realise that Mr D was now standing in front of my desk. When I had finished reading I looked up. The look on his face was rapacious, his lips curled upwards into a decidedly depraved grin.

‘Oh, Justine, I never knew you felt that way about me’.

The boys’ side of the classroom erupted. I must explain that Mr D was very strict. We were seated in alphabetical order, boys on one side, girls on the other. We had to line up in front of the classroom before class, boys on one side, girls on the other. No mixing of the sexes in Mr D’s class.

‘Go on, give her one Mr D!’.

Thirteen year old boys, puerile, immature, hormonal. Boys who Mr D had told that he was a 32 year old virgin, saving himself for marriage. Boys now yelling at him to ‘give me one’. Yelling at a teacher that he should stick his penis inside a thirteen year old girl.

I was mortified, could feel my skin reddening. I wanted to sink into the floor, to be anywhere but there. He still stood in front of me, still looking at me with that predatory gaze and the boys still shouting.

It was shortly before Christmas and the next day one of the boys brought in some mistletoe.

‘For you and Justine, Mr D. You can kiss under it’.

‘How about it, Justine?’, he asked.

I had to avert my eyes from that gaze, that I own you gaze, that I can do anything with you gaze, because I am the adult and you are the child. I am the teacher and you are the pupil. I never told anyone. I didn’t report him. I didn’t even tell my mum, who was a teacher at the school and therefore his colleague. I never told anyone because this wasn’t the first time I’d been harassed. I never told anyone because by the age of thirteen this had obviously become normal.

Sometime later Mr D gave me detention. I had worn my coat during registration, a cardinal sin in his twisted rule book. I was terrified. Being alone with that man in a room after school? I went with a friend. She would wait outside the door. If anything happened I could scream. We were thirteen. Thirteen year old girls hatching a plan in case an adult in a position of trust abused me. I entered the classroom trembling. A voluptuous young woman was sitting on Mr D’s desk. He was engrossed in conversation with her. What Bible group do you go to, something like that. He barely acknowledged me.

‘Sit down and write out “I will not wear my coat in registration 200 times”’.

Mr D’s gaze was firmly on the woman’s breasts. I sat, I wrote, I left. I was safe. Was she?

A couple of years later Mr D left the school under a cloud. No one ever told us what had happened. No one ever explained.

1987. I was on a tube train, crushed between the commuting hordes. I had been separated from my friend, Charlotte. The heat was stifling. The train drew to a stop and we extracted our sticky sweaty bodies from one another, piling out onto the breezy platform. I found Charlotte, tears in her eyes.

‘A businessman, a fucking businessman!’

He had put his hand up her skirt, inside her knickers, inserted his fingers into her vagina. On the tube, in the morning rush hour. Looked her in the eyes, knowing she could not do anything, knowing he could walk away unreproached.

Charlotte and I were living together in a flat in south London and we were seventeen years old. Our neighbours were an older couple, probably in their thirties. The wife went off to work every morning. The man seemed to be a layabout. Every time we went out he would coincidentally be outside and would invite us in for a drink. We always declined, didn’t think anything of it. We were young and having fun, we didn’t want to hang out with our old neighbour.

One day he was particularly insistent. He was our friendly neighbour, why didn’t we want to get to know him, just one cup of tea? Charlotte stupidly said yes. Reluctantly I followed her into his flat. We sat on the sofa. He got her a juice. I said no — what if he put something in it? He came back in with a stack of VHS tapes and put them down on the coffee table. Teenage whores — that was part of one of the titles. I don’t remember the rest. I nudged Charlotte to make her drink faster. We made our excuses and left. He grabbed my behind on the way out. We didn’t report him, we didn’t tell his wife. At seventeen this was normal because we were women.

A few weeks later I was walking home alone in broad daylight. He was loitering on the street and came up to me, walking alongside me. I felt uncomfortable. He was proclaiming to be my friendly neighbour again, where was I going, why didn’t we do something together. ‘I need to buy something’, I lied and darted into a shop. He waited outside for me. I hung about as long as I could, bought a can of drink, came out. I didn’t acknowledge him, walked off as fast as possible. He followed me, grabbed me, twisted my arm behind my back.

‘I’ve got ten quid if you know what I mean’, he hissed into my ear.

‘What?’

‘For a good screw’.

Broad daylight. Passers-by. No one did anything. One of those London buses which is open at the end was waiting at the traffic lights. He ran and jumped on, obviously realising he’d gone too far. But I was terrified. I couldn’t go home. I took a left and went to a friend’s who lived nearby. He was stoned. ‘Ah come in, I’ll make you some cheese on toast’, he said. We ate the cheese on toast, smoked a joint. He came back home with me in case the neighbour was lurking. I didn’t report him. I didn’t tell his wife.

Fast forward. I’m eighteen. Jumped on a boat to Amsterdam on a whim. I was having a great time. I’d barely travelled in my life. Our holidays were always Cornwall, Devon, Scotland and I wanted to see Europe. I met two men. I wasn’t that sure about them. I had always had pretty good instincts. I don’t know what made me throw all caution to the wind but I stupidly did and accepted their invitation to eat at their place. We ate, they were friendly, charming. And after we had eaten they wanted sex. It was a given. Why had I come to their flat otherwise? I said no. They locked me in a room, took away my sandals in case I tried to escape. One of them kept coming in, getting his dick out, waving it at me. ‘You’re not a woman yet?’ he asked. Because if someone waves their dick at you and you don’t immediately fall to the floor and spread your legs in gratitude you’re not a woman? Guess I’m not then. He made me lie down in a corner and lay down next to me. I would wait for his breathing to slow. Was he asleep? I would get up silently, creep to the door. He would wake, drag me down, force me into the corner again. Eventually I dozed off. I awoke to grunting sounds, heavy breathing, wetness on my clothes. I looked up — he was wanking over me. I lay there as his semen seeped through my clothes onto my skin and I knew I was going to die there. He would never let me go.

Several hours later he was asleep. I tried to escape again. He woke up. I bullshitted. I was meeting a friend. If I didn’t turn up she would call the police. People had seen us meet, people had seen me leave with them to go to their place. It worked. He gave me my shoes but relieved me of my money, camera, and anything else I had of value. I ran out of there, no idea where I was. Every street name seemed to have the letter combination of ‘ijk’ in it. I ran and ran and ran until I got to a park and I laid down and cried. Later I managed to find my way to the central station. I thought maybe I could sleep there. Others obviously had the same idea. The police or station staff would walk through regularly and throw us out. A few minutes later we would all go back in again. Eventually a man approached me.

‘Are you ok?’

I started backing away from him.

‘I was attacked’, he said. ‘In Turkey they drugged me and stole all my money. Did something happen to you?’

I stopped and we talked. He was Canadian, studying to be a doctor. Travelling around Europe before he graduated.

‘I don’t have much money’, he said. ‘My parents sent me some, but if you know a cheap place to stay I can pay for you too’.

I did. There were canal barges behind the station renting rooms for the night. We went to all of them. Only one had a room. It had a double bed and a single. Nadr, if I remember his name correctly, insisted I take the double. He left the room while I washed and changed. He was a perfect gentleman. In the morning he gave me a few coins to get the metro to the British embassy and wished me well.

For any Brits who have tried to get help abroad you will know there is no point. The embassy does not give a shit. They will call your family but they won’t help you. No money, no support, no nothing. I waited in the embassy whilst they tried to place a phone call to my dad. A heavily pregnant Scottish woman approached me.

‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes, I’m fine’. That Britishness, that quintessential stiff upper lip, that outdated stoicism which is still so engrained in us. I was down and out, about to be turfed onto the street. I was hungry and thirsty and terribly sunburned, but yes, I was fine.

‘It’s just, I saw your face, and I know that face, that look.’

I looked up at her and then I told her everything. Half an hour later I was balancing precariously on the back of her bike on the way to the school she and several others had squatted in an Amsterdam suburb. We stopped off at a supermarket to buy a chocolate cake. It’s a cheap cake, industrially produced and packaged in plastic foil. I still eat it sometimes when I feel like shit. The squat was a huge brick and glass building where the smell of weed hung heavy in the air, the classroom walls draped with mandala and tie-dye sheets. We cooked huge platters of food each night and shared them, lounging on the playground under the stars. I learned to milk the resident goat. I healed somewhat thanks to the love and kindness they showed me but I awoke each night to the sound of my own sobs.

I returned to England. The little control I had had over my life was rapidly fading. I started smoking 40 cigarettes a day, drinking even more heavily than I had before. I berated myself. I hadn’t even been raped. Come on, what the fuck is wrong with you? Nothing happened, they didn’t even touch you. This wasn’t assault. They didn’t do anything. It’s your fault. You went there with them. It’s your fault. You are the problem.

And so I carried on. I never told anyone bar a couple of friends. I never sought help or counselling. One night when I had gone to a 24-hour petrol station to buy cigarettes I saw my former neighbour, the one who thought sex with me was worth ten pounds. He was the cashier and refused to give me my change. ‘First we’re going to talk about sex’, he said. ‘You and me’. And so I left without my change. I didn’t report him and I didn’t tell his wife.

A few months later I got into a relationship with a man. I don’t think he ever hit me. We were both drinking very heavily and using drugs so I don’t remember a lot of what happened. But he did rape me on several occasions. Only it wasn’t rape, because he was my boyfriend. So was it rape? I mean, I hadn’t been abused in Amsterdam either, I’d gone to their flat willingly. Our relationship was extremely toxic but to be honest until then it was the best I’d ever had. He could be incredibly funny and charming but he was also insanely jealous. We would be walking along the street after a great night out and he would get this irate look in his eyes.

‘You fucked him/her, didn’t you. You fucked him/her. I can see it in the way you looked at him/her’.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That man/woman who just walked past us. I saw how you looked at them. You were fucking them last night weren’t you’.

He would abandon me all over the place, parties, nightclubs, even in a restaurant because I was too nice to the waiter so must have been fucking him too. He would just disappear. I would find him at home, fuming about my imagined infidelities. Why did I stay? I was eighteen. It was normal. At least I thought it was. Things came to a head a few months later. I had had an abnormal smear test and my doctor wanted to do some tests. Several people in my family had died of cancer and I was scared. We were in a pub when I told him and he was in a foul mood because I had been too friendly to the woman behind the bar.

‘I hope you die of cancer’, he snarled.

I threw my drink in his face and walked out. I would like to say I never saw him again, but I wasn’t that strong. I moved to the Netherlands a few months later and he followed me. We hooked up briefly but then he left to go travelling. I turned down his offer to join him. He died a couple of years later. I don’t know the details. I googled him once and found thirty years’ worth of ‘In loving memory’ notices placed by his parents in a daily newspaper. I just hope he didn’t take some poor woman with him.

I would like to think that things have changed, that teenage girls are not subjected to this kind of abuse and harassment now we are living in the 21st century. Unfortunately the world seems more oversexualised than ever. Hotness is the only attribute one should aspire to. Kindness, compassion, intelligence — who cares about any of that when you can have thousands of people liking that photo of you gazing at the camera with your lips suggestively parted.

I was married for a long time which meant I had little contact with men who weren’t friends. I had been unhappy in my marriage for a long time. I didn’t love him and he didn’t love me. It was convenient though and as I was lying in bed one morning after yet another sleepless night, I realised if I didn’t do something soon I would still be lying next to this man when I was eighty. So I went to Lebanon on my own, as you do, where I had a wonderful time. I walked around at two in the morning and never felt unsafe because there are military checkpoints on every corner, a vestige of the war. I wasn’t harassed. The taxi drivers appreciated my pathetic attempts at chatting in Arabic and French with them. I loved being on my own and more than anything I loved waking up alone so when I got back I broke up my marriage.

I wasn’t particularly bothered about being in a relationship but society is. A woman on her own — what is wrong with her? And so I caved to pressure, signed up on several dating sites and started going out with men for the first time in over twenty years. It was a rude awakening to what most men think of women and that their purpose on earth is purely for male gratification. Lewd messages, unsolicited dick pics, married men promising to be discreet and asking if I would find it exciting to be their bit on the side.

I went out with a lot of men. Draw whatever conclusion you want from that. The main reason actually was because I only went out with most men once. They were dull, unable to hold their own in a conversation and the whole reason for the date seemed to be to ensure they would be having sex that night. Most didn’t look anything like their profile picture. It was ten years old or they’d photoshopped it, or it wasn’t even them. Men my own age were the worst. Usually divorced, with grown up or teenage children. They had supported a family, and I was supposed to look up to them. Merely because they were a man. They had nothing to offer me, I earned more than them, I had my own house, I did not have any children that I needed them to play stepdaddy to. And yet, I was still supposed to admire them, to be grateful for their attention, even though there was nothing in it for me. There was also always this assumption that sex was going to be on the cards. We had ‘liked’ each other online so that meant we must ‘like’ each other in real life. I had men berate me because I said I liked them yet didn’t want to sleep with them. It wasn’t just the physical aspect. I err more towards sapiosexual and even if they had looked like Brad Pitt I would still have turned them down. One man who I’d agreed to meet for a drink sent me a message asking me if I would be on my period that Friday because he wanted to fuck me doggy style. I decided to block him but not before sending him a few choice words. ‘Go away’ he replied like a petulant child who has just been told off. Then he blocked me as if I were the problem. He had used a false name and lied about his age but it wasn’t hard to find out who he really was. He sits as a judge in the Catalan courts and is a member of the Spanish nobility. Misogyny knows no limits and has permeated our society at every level.

Younger men were better, they did not have that self-assuredness, that idea that just having a penis makes you a superior human being. So maybe some things have changed. The problem with the younger men was porn. I noticed a direct correlation between how much porn a man watched and how poor his performance in bed was. Unfortunately they have grown up on it and know nothing else. All women are just dying to have sperm sprayed in their face, to be fucked up the arse, to be punched, bitten, kicked, strangled during sex. We live for it. We love it. We can’t get enough of it. And when we don’t scream like those women in porn films, then what is wrong with us? Maybe we need biting some more.

I once took a man home who I probably shouldn’t have. Yes, I was drunk so judge away. He started to bite me in the face and neck. I don’t like being bitten, not anywhere, but this was really painful. I repeatedly told him to stop, I tried to push him off me. He kept biting. When I had finally managed to fight him off I asked him why he didn’t stop when I told him to.

‘I thought you were egging me on’, he replied incredulously.

Yes, because when someone says stop biting me, you’re hurting me, stop that, I don’t like it, they really mean devour me raw.

I told him that he had really hurt me.

‘But it used to drive my ex wild’, he said.

‘I’m not your ex’, I replied.

The next day he sent me a text. Sorry that things had gone kind of wrong at the end of the evening, but he really liked me and when could he see me again. I told him he couldn’t. He wanted to know why. Again I was weak. I just don’t think we have anything in common I wrote. Instead of writing because you’re a violent, evil bastard who abuses women.

Society has raised us to never be nasty to men, to never offend them. And men continue to perpetuate that idea. How many men reading this will have been thinking all along, not all men, not me. Seriously, men, it does not matter. If it had only been one man, one single man who abused and violated women, if you are not willing to hunt him down and bring him to justice then there is something wrong with you. You are that man too. If all you can do is sit behind your screen whining ‘not all men’ then you are the problem. And yes, I know it is not all men. But take a good long hard look at yourself men. Maybe you’ve never raped anyone, maybe you’ve never murdered someone and dumped her in the woods, but have you ever grabbed someone’s arse, tits, made lewd comments, catcalled, plied some woman with drink because you wanted to get your end away with her? Have you ever asked someone out and when she said no harassed her until she lied and pretended she has a boyfriend, at which point you let it go? Have you interrogated someone when they said they didn’t want sex with you, haranguing her, wearing her down until she gave in because that was easier than rejecting you?

I know several men who have been sexually abused by a man I used to know. I have seen first-hand the devastating effect it has had on their lives, I have seen how they have attempted to rebuild their lives with varying degrees of success. I watched how they tried to bring him to justice and how he feigned illness and old age, just a frail old man in a wheelchair, wrongly accused. I saw their pain when the case was dismissed, their mixed emotions when he died, jubilant that he could no longer hurt anyone but devastated that he had got away with it. I have had gay friends who were abused by their partners, heard them explain away their black eyes with the ‘I walked into a cupboard’ excuse. Men aren’t just violent to women. And I also have a friend who was sexually harassed by a woman. It’s not all men and it’s certainly not all women, but it is too many men.

I don’t like those T-shirts that say the future is female. I want the future to be equal. A place where everyone, regardless of their gender, their genitals, their skin colour, their nationality, can live free. Where no one has to fear abuse, harassment, discrimination, physical or sexual violence. Where anyone can say No and that No is respected without question. That is something I am willing to fight for. Are you?