female in public (& in private)
In case you hadn’t heard, last week Memphis police recovered the body of a woman who had been abducted a few days prior, minding her own business on an early-morning jog.
Across social media platforms, on which I follow a number of other –– usually much better –– runners (if you didn’t know this, Running Twitter is the best Twitter) the news story has been greeted with what I have come to think of as the predictable response: a spasm of anxiety mixed with sadness as female runners remind each other of their shared vulnerability and, often, share their best tips for “safety” in running while female.
In characterizing the collective reaction as predictable and reflexive, I don’t mean to suggest that it is disingenuous or “merely” performative –– I’ll make the obligatory acknowledgement here that social performance, to a Cultural Studies scholar, is seldom “merely” anything, but the point is that I don’t think the runners I follow on Twitter or Instagram are just going through the motions, or posting about running risk and running safety solely because they consider that the socially appropriate response. On the contrary, I consider the responses revealing precisely because many of the posts and comments reverberate not just with sorrow for one of our own struck down but with the anxiety that comes from knowing any one of us could be next.
An extraordinary proportion of them also strike me as superstitious. And, perhaps oddly, I don’t so much have in mind the clearly ritualized gestures, like gathering to finish Eliza Fletcher’s last run. Maybe that’s because I understand too well the impulse to “pour one out” for a comrade of the road. Maybe, deep down, I’m hoping that when my time is up somebody will reclaim my battered Xeros, strap them to a fanny pack, and carry my soles for a loop through the hills, one last round.
I am thinking, instead, of the “tips” for staying safe, as a female runner, that I’ve seen off and on this week, the same way I see them every time another news story breaks of another woman dragged off her route, another body found.
They are always the same:
Be careful (I don’t know what the hell “be careful” is supposed to mean, but that’s the advice), especially going out early or late.
Don’t run alone. (This is the one I feel might actually be helpful, but I don’t know that I would want to give up my treasured solo miles in the name of safety … and it also doesn’t really matter: I don’t know anybody else within a thirty-minute drive who runs anything like as often as I do, and I don’t see how running with a complete stranger would be much of a reassurance to either party.)
If you think you are being followed, cross the street and seek a crowd (there are zero crowds in Rivermont at night, which is kind of why I run there).
Carry your keys in your hand (meh, maybe).
Have emergency services enabled on your phone (I do; my ex-husband and my sometime-boyfriend are my contacts, a circumstance I like to describe as “all my best friends are dudes who have dumped me”).
Some of the advice is better, and some of it is worse, but here is the thing: It all assumes that running is somehow especially dangerous and if we just carefully calibrate our running behaviors (if we fulfill the demands of superstition by doing “all the right things”) then somehow we will be okay; the next broken body found days too late by discouraged police won’t be ours.
Superstition emerges out of a desire for control over the unmanageable exigencies of fate, and that desire, usually, emerges out of fear: The Big Scary is out there, and we want to know that we can do something about it.
The main thing we could theoretically do about this one, unfortunately, is to avoid knowing any men, ever.
The vast majority of female homicide victims are killed by men. And according to the WHO:
Sexual assault is of course not the only kind with which women need to be concerned, and is not a necessary accompaniment to murder –– I don’t know what Eliza Fletcher endured in the hours before her death, but I doubt seriously whether she would have been greatly comforted to know her assailant intended only to kill her –– but it is a type of crime to which women are far more likely to be subjected than men, about which women are understandably far more concerned … and I think, probably, the specter of violation adds a visceral frisson to the fear of violence.
Maybe that specter looms so large because so many of us have experienced it, in one form or another. But –– here’s my point –– most of us who have experienced (and most of those of us who are still going to experience) sexual assault are not attacked by random strangers on the street, regardless of our speed of locomotion. Some eight out of ten sexual assault victims know the perpetrator; if those numbers map even distantly onto nonsexual assaults (and given that so much of the anxiety expressed is linked, implicitly or explicitly, not just to the fear of physical injury but to dread of sexual trauma), then really running ought not to worry us all that much compared to, say, having a nice dinner with family or friends.
If that sounds terrifying, it fucking should be.
Being a woman is some scary shit. I’ve been groped, grabbed, and pushed around. I’ve escaped one very clear abduction threat and extricated myself from one assault in which I truly do not know what the guy planned on doing with me (I’m not sure he knew, either; the guy turned out to have a variety of mental health problems and a history of drug abuse, all of which he helpfully if not very coherently explained to me as I talked him down on the side of a filthy deserted street while he was holding me against my will –– I’ve been told I have some powers of persuasion, but please God I hope I never have to talk that fast again). I’ve seen some shit, okay???? And way most of it happened in broad daylight, in full view of plenty of people who could have intervened and didn’t so much as twitch an eyelid.
In all the thousands of hours I have spent running down deserted roads, often in very poor light … somebody has made a move for me maybe a couple of times, yelled some threatening nonsense a handful more.
I haven’t enjoyed any of that, but by my own experience I’m far more likely to suffer something from a complete stranger in public while “bystander paralysis” or failure to give a shit prevents anybody from doing anything that might help me out.
And by the statistics … I’m safer on the road than I am at home. My home, your home, any home really ––
The only “safe” woman, right now, is Eliza Fletcher.
