I don't know what it is, but it is your fault...

Even gray haired and slightly jaded I can be persuaded to suspend what I know to be true. Sitting in the car after a long day of work and an after work event, a friend and I talked about my essence. In the light of day and a few hours’ sleep, my more cynical side cringes a little, but last night it made some semblance of sense. The vague idea that something more than (although not exclusive of) my body elicited the sometimes inappropriate actions of a few of my guy acquaintances.

I held the thread of logic for a while. Our conversation starting off as friendly yet vacuous banter. But as the night wore it, it grew more serious. I grew defensive as I tried to explain my vacillating behavior. How my demeanor, friendly and inviting, changes when I feel that friendliness is taken advantage of.

I should have anticipated the response. After all, I’m a woman and they are men and men are primal.

Sigh.

Never one to assume that I am beyond reproach, generally interested in someone else’s perspective, I as

“There are things you do. You know what they are.”

And when I was genuinely perplexed he changed tack. 

“Maybe you don’t even realize it, there is just something about you.”

When I countered with how my behavior mirrors that of other women we know and regularly interact with, I was informed that I was somehow different. Good old convenient exceptionalism. Who doesn’t want to be special?

In this case, me. In this case, being special doesn’t just make it my fault that sometimes I am approached by friend-like people in ways that make me feel unsafe. It means that my vocalizing my dislike of that is somehow unfair because it is uneven – just as the behavior is uneven. It means that I am responsible for emitting some thing that no one can name or properly identify. It means I should feel a little special because someone is finally seeing me for all of my beauty.

And it almost sounds reasonable. 

Ok it doesn’t. But it almost sounds nice. It almost sounds complimentary. At least until I’m no longer as sleepy, eyelids fighting to stay open and years of (not so )subtle conditioning that somehow it is what women wear or say or do that leads to unwanted attention and action. It is everything to do with women and nothing to do with men. Men are the real victims, victims of our feminine wiles. Victims of some behaviors or actions that they cannot name but that women are somehow responsible for. 

Our conversation ended with my head on the steering wheel, sleep scratching at my eyes in a bid to escape. 

“You’re too much brain, not enough cock and balls,” That was the closing point of our conversation. A lighthearted attempt to assure me that all of the confusion and discomfort I sometimes feel is because I spend too much time in my head. And it isn’t untrue. I spend a lot of time thinking. But the wrong in that assessment is the failed logic, the thought that if I think too much than that mandates that I shouldn’t feel uncomfortable. And that is flawed logic. It just is. I can think too much and other people can still ignore my no and be inappropriate.

I am exhausted this morning. Exhausted that the light of day illuminates my greatest fears, that the nicest of guys do not understand the power of their maleness in “polite” society, exhausted that I did such a poor job of explaining.