When I realized how frequently women make decisions based on the risk of violence or sexual assault happening to them.I was in college when I had this revelation. I was already very liberal. I understood rape culture and its relationship with toxic masculinity, but I didn't get it.These were issues that were abstracted from myself and were nothing I could really understand, until this moment.It was the first day of class in one of my gender studies classes. The classroom was in an auditorium which held over 350 kids in it—it was huge. Our professor asked us to separate ourselves into two groups on far sides of the auditorium based on one question.
“Have you, in the last 24 hours, thought about the risk of being sexually assaulted or attacked and done something different to lower that risk? Anything from not walking to your car alone to trying to evaluate why someone was being nice to you.”There was a yes side and a no side.But there was also a women side and a men side.Out of a class of almost 400 students, not a single woman was in the no side and vice versa.Every single woman in that class, in the last 24 hours, had feared for her safety in some way and then acted differently to lower the risk of something happening.That revelation hit me like a ton of bricks. I could feel my skin flush and the hair on my arms start to rise.What the fuck, I thought to myself.
I always knew that it was a real problem but I never got it until that moment.I loved that class.