Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Women's Experience of Men

“Linked with women's subordinate position vis-a-vis men, women's survival strategies include observing men's behaviour because it affects what women have to do to avoid male violence. (In contrast, states William Goode, men do not often observe women's lives because their behaviour is not affected by them”. Women, for example, monitor footsteps behind them or sexualised comments or glances directed from men because they must devise strategies in case the encounter moves in a direction not of their own choice. Certainly, in many instances, but unpredictably so, the footsteps or the glances could be characterised by women to be men's perfectly 'innocent' behaviour. This characterization, however, only arises after there has been 'no trouble'. As long as women do not feel coerced by men's behaviour, then women feel safe, or feel that at least this time they are not immediately threatened.


Being on guard for women, though, is not paranoia; it is reasonable caution. Many women have encountered men's threatening, intimidating or violent behaviour at first hand. As children, many women have had experiences of sexual abuse, either from male relatives or from male strangers. Quite likely, female children are even taught to be on guard for male strangers who wish to offer them candy or money to do somethin unspeakable (unsepakable, because, of course, few of us were ever told why male strangers might wish to offer us goodies). Female adolescence too is a time of learning what it means to be on guard. As soon as women begin pubescent development, they actually begin to see men's behaviour toward them change. Adolescent women are met with comments, glances, whistles, admiration for the visible development of their sexuality. At the same time within their peer group, sexual experimentation starts. Fending off male sexuality, much of which is initially welcomed, the young woman learns that she cannot always control sexual encounters she engages in. She also learns that if anything 'happens', she is to blame. As adults, then women have acquired, as part of their maturation, an idea of how men respond to them as sexual beings. They are also aware that they are less physically powerful than men, that much of their surrounding world rewards them for their feminine appearance, and that men – young and old – make sexual advances toward them. It is not uncommon that, by the time women are adults, they have experienced some form of coercive, threatening, intimidating or violent behaviour from men. It is no wonder that, as adults, women are on guard.


Elizabeth A. Stanko

Intimate Intrusions Women's Experience of Male Violence

1985, New York, N.Y: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Inc