Girlhood by Melissa Febos

Author:Melissa Febos [Febos, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

Unlike the women I interviewed, I wasn’t conscious of how deeply the experience had affected me until recently. Just before I began writing this essay, I told my girlfriend the story of my peeper.

“I never think about it anymore,” I explained. “It was terrifying when it happened, but I don’t think it stuck with me much after that.”

She gave me a quizzical look. “Really? How about the way you keep your curtains closed with double-sided tape?”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess I do.”

“Or how you won’t walk through any windowed room without first putting clothes on, even in the middle of the night?”

“Especially in the middle of the night,” I added.

I had never considered how that violation disciplines the way that I inhabit my own home, nearly fifteen years later. How much I had since feared being seen as sexually available to any man passing by. I took for granted that it was always so, because for most of my life, it has been.

This may be the longest effect of a lifetime of being looked at, being told that it is a duty, a compliment, even a source of power: it has eroded my sense of entitlement to privacy. I should never not be thinking of the man who might be watching me, even alone in my bedroom. I should not and cannot refuse a gaze through a window, a neighbor with a camera, a closely following stranger, a comment on the street. How different is a gaze from a hand, after all? What a powerful message it is, that your body ought to be available to any man passing by. It will only inconvenience you to protest. Better to tolerate it. Reframe it as nothing memorable, as a joke, as journalism, as privilege, even as a precursor to love.

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