The Night I Wasn't a Woman

I'm not ashamed of walking home alone after dark in Zagreb. I had tested my comfort of the city the night before. What shames me is that I felt more comfortable doing this in Zagreb than anywhere I've been in the country I call my own.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

I have a confession to make. My second night in Zagreb, Croatia's capitol, I did something shameful. Something I never would have done in the United States. Having been raised Catholic, I'm well-versed in the rote of confession: recount all my misdeeds and prepare to carry out whatever atonement is heaped upon me by my confessor. As with any confession before a priest in years past, it's the fear of atonement that delays my divulging my secret.

I anticipate skeptical recriminations and being challenged with, "How could you? What were you thinking? Haven't you learned by now?"

I expect the second-guessing to be followed up with condescending lectures: "You know better. If anything had happened to you, you would have no one to blame but yourself."

It's a desire to avoid these lectures about how my decision-making could have led to risks to my safety and well-being that has stopped me from telling everyone what I did that second night in Zagreb. Until now.

I walked home. Alone. After dark. A little over an hour before midnight. In a foreign city. Where I didn't know one word of Croatian. Not "thief" or "fire" to draw an instinctive response, rather than "help," as self-defense instructors have taught as a tactic to increase the likelihood that someone will be willing to become tangled in a complete stranger's problem.

I had no map in my head estimating the distance to the nearest well-lit gas station or hotel or other building where people would be if a man approached me or followed me and made me uncomfortable.

I didn't walk with keys staggered between my fingers, ready to gouge some man's flesh, should he attempt to grab me.

I'm not ashamed of walking home alone after dark, or my decision to do so in the first place. I had tested my comfort of the city the night before, getting a sense for which were the main streets and how often public transit swept people along the more frequently-used corridors.

What shames me is that I felt more comfortable doing this in Zagreb than anywhere I've been in the country I call my own.

In every city in United States that I've visited or lived in, I've been made painfully aware that if I'm alone when the sun goes down, I don't feel safe walking more than just a few blocks on my own. If I have to walk much farther than 3 or 4 blocks, I subconsciously tick through each of the defensive tactics to protect myself that has been drilled into me since before I graduated high school: Scan my surroundings. Take note of whether there's a lone man in front of me. Is he walking erratically? Is he slowing his pace to let me catch up so he can distract me with conversation? Is there a group of men behind me? Are they drunk? Maybe high on testosterone, trying to impress each other by taunting the woman walking alone at night? What's the most direct path to my destination? Are there lights along the entire route? What about places to duck in where other people will be if I feel threatened and need the cover of a group? Am I ready to feign unconsciousness to become deadweight if a man grabs me from behind? Are my soles hard enough to cause pain by unexpectedly kicking backwards into the man's shin?

Walking alone to my hotel in Zagreb after a late-night meal felt at first like an act of defiance, to test myself and my own willingness to not be cowed in a foreign country. I wasn't oblivious: I had been reading statistics about vast under-reporting of rape in Croatia not 10 hours earlier as I prepared for the remarks I was giving during a conference about strategies to advance gender equality. I knew that victims' advocates said rape survivors tended to report only one out of every 15 rapes -- far less frequently than the 46% of rapes and sexual assaults reported in the U.S. I also knew that according to the 2010 U.S. State Department Human Rights Report on Croatia, "100 to 140 cases of rape or sexual violence were reported annually." In a country with 4.5 million people. And I had read from other women travelers that they had felt an incredible sense not just of safety in Zagreb, but of invisibility as women not experienced elsewhere.

That feeling of defiance from knowing I chose to walk home alone rather than hail a taxi faded so quickly I hardly recognized it -- because I was overwhelmed by my own feeling of invisibility. That's the only way to describe what it felt like once I realized that the men I passed on the street weren't noting my approach. They weren't stopping mid-conversation to watch my progress as they would a ball being passed during a football game. They didn't scan me from head to toe as though estimating my measurements. They weren't staring out of the passing tram's windows at me like I was an animal at a zoo, swiveling their heads to catch as much of my journey as possible before being swept on to the next attraction along the tram's route.

I felt like I wasn't even there for them to notice.

When another woman passed me from behind, there was the same non-response from the man approaching us from the opposite direction.

It's jarring to realize that night in Zagreb that to others out on the street that night, I was just another person. I was not a woman, different from the men I passed.

After getting back to my hotel, I realized I wasn't prepared to not guess how many men would attempt to start a conversation with me, ogle me, catcall or otherwise interfere with my solitary walk, alone, in the dark, as happens when I'm at home. More than that, I was angry: Angry that in my country, a man's aggressive interference in a woman's walk down the street is normal. Angry that when a woman does walk home, alone, in the dark, just an hour shy of midnight, her decision-making is questioned, rather than condemning only the ogling, cat-calling, conversing, grabbing or molesting by men whom she passes.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot