Content warning: harassment; stalking; rape; gender-based violence
About a week or so ago, I was walking home from work with a coworker. We were talking to each other, when, all of a sudden, I turned my head and made eye contact with a young woman who couldn't have been more than maybe seventeen years old. When we made eye contact, I could tell that something wasn't right. As we were passing each other, she turned to me, pointed to a young sixteen-year-old man behind her who was smoking a cigarette, and said, "Can you please tell him to stop following me?" Without skipping a beat, I immediately turned around and yelled at him to get away from her.
She kept walking towards her destination, and he kept following her. As I yelled at him, he turned around, blatantly lied to me, and said that he wasn't following her, but rather, he was just going to get his laundry.
I told him again to stop following her, and he sharply replied, "Or else what?" And I told him I would call the cops on him if he didn't go away. Instead of leaving, he kept following her. I told my coworker to call the cops, and I quickly changed directions, turned around and went in the opposite direction from my apartment, walking behind them as he continued to follow her, to make sure that he wouldn't do anything to her if they got to a block that happened to be empty.
I power-walked about ten paces behind them, shin splints and all, because I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself knowing that I didn't do all that I could, within her wishes, to prevent anything from happening to her as long as he was still following her.
After about ten or fifteen minutes of me trailing behind them, he eventually crossed the street in a different direction than she did, and as she crossed and kept walking, I called out to her, "Miss, are you good? Are you okay?" to which she replied yes, and she nodded her head.
By the time I regrouped with my coworker, we began to walk in the initial direction we were going, when the cops finally arrived. We waved to them as they drove by, gesturing for them to stop because we were the ones who called them. Even though the young woman said she was fine, I still didn't feel right about it, so I told the cops what happened and pointed them in the direction the young woman, man, and I had gone.
Every now and then I think about that situation. I think about whether she actually made it home safe that night. I think about whether she was really okay, or if she was in some sort of abusive relationship and wanted to call me off before he did something terrible to her later. But most of all, I think about how entitled he felt to her that he figured he could continuously follow her and get away with it.
There's something sickening about not only the idea, but the actual act of a man of any age feeling as if he is entitled to a woman, or any other individual at all.
Our society allows rapists to believe that it's "party culture" and not rape culture that facilitates such trauma; that registering as a sex offender because you raped someone is more harmful than the actual transgression that was committed; and that just because an assailant has never been in trouble before, they don't deserve to be held accountable for what they've done.
The bottom line is, men and boys are socialized to uphold patriarchal and sexist norms that perpetuate the violence towards and dehumanization of women and girls. The fact that there are men who believe they have any right to a woman's body is violent, dangerous, and outright unacceptable.
To men and boys everywhere: Don't just step up when you see another man crossing the line into unsafe and threatening territory through his alarming behavior. We are responsible for eradicating this behavior at its core. We must teach ourselves, our brothers, our sons, and our friends that women are not ours; they do not belong to us, and we have no right to assert ourselves or act in a way that says otherwise. The toxic masculinity that is fundamentally embedded in who we are taught to become is not who we have the potential to be. There are lives at stake, and every moment in which we are not ensuring that those lives are saved, we are complicit in the violence perpetrated against them.
