This week Jamie Dornan, the Northern Irish model-turned-actor who
went from messing with Gillian Anderson’s head in “The Fall” to
‘starring’ in “Fifty Shades of Shi…er, I mean Grey” told
the LA Times in an interview that, to help him prepare for his role
in “The Fall”, he once spent a few moments stalking a woman who
got off the Tube, “just to see what it was like”. He says he’s
not proud of himself for doing it, which is a point in his favour,
but does go on to add he also found it “kind of exciting, in a
really sort of dirty way”.
Well guess what, Jamie Dornan, you utter muppet. It is NOT an
exciting experience; for the person being followed, it can be
absolutely bloody terrifying. And I know of what I speak, for some
years ago I was followed by some completely random bloke and it
remains one of the singularly most frightening experiences of my
life. And when one of the bloggers on the Indy’s website made this
exact point, out came all the anti-feminists to tell her – and,
presumably, myself and every other woman who’s been followed – to
“get over it”.
A selection of the comments which I personally found the most
charming (complete with their original typos/misogynistic rants):
“I'm a big bloke - 6'5" and broadly built, and when I'm out
at night I often see women cross the road, speed up, slow down or in
one case, actually run, to get away from me. How do you think this
makes me feel?!? I would never hurt a fly and yet I am constantly
assumed to be a threat! I'd like to know what goes through the minds
of those women - what exactly to they think I am? A mugger? A serial
killer? A rapist? Even though this has been happening my entire adult
life, it still hurts. And now you suggest that I should modify my
behavior?”
“Some guy who finds you interesting and tries to start a
conversation with you is not "following" you or "stalking"
you, whether or not you welcome the attention.”
“Why are you demonising men for the simple act of walking behind
someone?”
“I don't get nervous when a man just happens to be a decent
close proximity to me because I don't hate all men, and I am not a
delusional paranoid schizophrenic. You're article is inciting fear in
women. It's not healthy. This entire article is far more worrisome
and insulting than Jamie Dornan ever was following that girl for five
freaking seconds.”
“'Why should ordinary law abiding men feel the need to divert
themselves to assuage the largely unfounded fears of women?”
“The fact is that men make up 80% of the victims of street
violence. We are far more likely to be assaulted, robbed, murdered
etc. etc.”
“As a woman, I don't relate to this article because I don't
assume every man that is standing next to me or walking next to or
behind me, is a threat. You can't live in fear. The only time when my
alert is up full throttle is when I am out in the middle of the night
and alone. Because THATS when all the scary ones come out, ,ore often
then in daylight. And at least in daylight, there will most likely be
witnesses...”
“To me this article sounded almost like she was dictating women
to assume every man that you pass on the street is going to attack
you. It's opression against men.”
And my own personal “favourite”:
“Mind you, you're not that attractive so you should have
appreciated the attention.”
Ah, well now I’ve had all that explained to me I clearly see I
should have realised I was oppressing the poor lad who followed me
and instead of being scared I should have been flattered by the
attention. Thanks for that, I feel so much better.
Except, of course, I don’t.
Now obviously I’m not suggesting for one single second that every
man who walks down the street is out to drag me into the nearest bush
and rape me, nor do I spend my entire life darting across roads and
scurrying back again to avoid any man who happens to come my way. I
can even be relatively nice if someone does try and start a
conversation with me. However, there is a vast and frankly
terrifying gulf between a man walking along the street behind you
when you’re both on your way home from work and a man who is quite
clearly following – nay, stalking – you.
I was 19 when it happened to me. I have never forgotten it,
especially not the sense of utter helplessness I felt while it was
going on, or the fear it might escalate from simply following me to
something far more heinous. To put it simply, I have never been so
scared.
So, the facts:
I was staying for a few days with my parents, brother and brother’s
best friend down at my step-nan’s house on the Kent coast. Been
there lots of times, always loved it. Close to where she lived
there’s an old ruined church called Reculver which I have always
loved; it’s four miles along the sea wall from the beach and the
walk is beautiful – four miles there, four miles back, all with the
sea on one side of you and fields on the other. On a glorious
summer’s day you literally can’t ask for anything better and so I
took myself off, as I often did, to mosey along down there for a bit.
I had my headphones on, the sun was shining and I practically danced
along the path to Reculver. When I got there, I spent a bit of time
chilling out in the sunshine and rediscovering the ruins (it was a
Roman fort before it was a church) and then decided to head back
again in time for tea. And that’s when it happened.
Now please bear in mind that this was the middle of the afternoon and
the path to and from Reculver was pretty busy. Plenty of people were
walking one way or the other – it’s a route popular with cyclists
and dog walkers – so there were, to paraphrase from one of the
comments above, plenty of ‘witnesses’ about. My mp3 player ran
out of battery as I headed home but I kept my headphones in and just
meandered along the path watching the sea, minding my own business.
I remember there being a German family on the beach to my left; there
were a lot of them and they seemed to be having a really good time,
which made me smile. Oh, and I should also add for the record that
this was in the days before I had a mobile phone (because I am *that*
old), so wasn’t able to either pretend to be on the phone to
someone else or ring for back up…
So.
He came up behind me on his bike. I wasn’t aware of him at first,
mainly because I was too busy watching the kids from the German
family attempt to throw one of their siblings into the sea, but I
soon realised he wasn’t trying to get past me, he was following me.
What really surprises me, looking back, is how quickly I started to
feel uncomfortable by this; he was quite close to me and kept trying
to talk to me – although my mp3 player wasn’t working and I could
hear every word he said, it was pretty obvious I had my headphones in
and so one would assume I was listening to music and therefore not
paying attention. But as I say, I could hear everything he said and
it quickly turned nasty. One of the things he kept saying to me,
over and over again, was “what’s the matter, you don’t like
black boys?”
I was really, really freaked out by this. It was intimidating, it
was uncomfortable – frankly, it was harassment. This went on for
about an hour; I was getting more and more distressed by it and
literally had no idea what to do with myself. Part of me wanted to
turn round and tell him to sod off and leave me alone, but I was
scared that if I did he might retaliate. At best he might hit me.
At worst…well, let’s not go there since it didn’t actually come
to that. But I was genuinely terrified; I didn’t know this guy
from Adam and had no idea what he was capable of doing, so I just
carried on walking and hoped he’d get bored and leave me alone.
When he finally did cycle off – after a few false starts when he’d
go off ahead of me, slow down and wait for me to catch up and then
start the whole thing over again – I had to sit on the sea wall
because my legs were shaking so much. There was an overwhelming
sense of helplessness, of fear and also relief because he hadn’t
actually done anything to me; I had, in my mind, got away quite
lightly, and I was so overwhelmed that I burst into tears.
Not one person stopped to ask me if I was all right.
Now I can appreciate people not stepping in while the harassment was
actually happening. After all I had my headphones in, albeit with no
sound coming from them, and was walking as briskly as I could to get
rid of this guy; people may not have realised there was anything
wrong, and that’s ok.
What’s not ok is that nobody, not one single person, stopped to ask
a sobbing girl if she was all right. In a way that only added to my
sense of apprehension; I didn’t know if the guy was going to come
back, but if somebody had at least stopped and asked if I was all
right it would have helped me realise I wasn’t alone, and at that
particular moment in time I had never felt more alone.
As it was, I eventually managed to pull myself together enough to
walk the rest of the way back to the promenade where the walk
starts/finishes, although not without looking over my shoulder or
ahead of me just in case he came back. When I reached the prom I
went straight to the phone box, thanked my lucky stars for
remembering my Brownie mantra of “always keep 10p in your purse for
emergencies” and called my step-nan’s house. When my brother –
my poor brother – answered, I burst into tears and was so
hysterical I could barely speak; he put my mum on the phone and she
came to pick me up.
I’ve never been more pleased to see her.
There was nothing to actually be done about what had happened; I
wasn’t physically hurt and anyway, I hadn’t got a good enough
look at him to be able to tell the police anything if we had
reported it, but I’ve never forgotten how utterly helpless and
scared I felt in that time. And this was in broad daylight, on a
busy path; I can’t even begin to think how much worse it would have
been if it had happened late at night when there are by default less
people around. And it’s actually had a lasting effect: I was
always relatively blasé about coming back from places late at night
before then, not worrying whether I cut through the alleyway to reach
our street or who was behind me, but after this incident I started
following the ‘rules’ we girls have always been given. If I come
back from a gig in London by myself now, I always make a point of
pretending to be on my phone. I am hyper-aware of who is around me.
Sometimes I walk in the road if it’s quiet, just in case someone
jumps out of a darkened hedge or side street and grabs me. And I
never cut through the alley, taking the long way round instead. In
fact until I started writing this blog entry I genuinely didn’t
realise how much I’ve modified and accommodated my usual behaviour
since that moment, and that in itself is quite scary.
So for all that Jamie Dornan maintains it was “exciting”, and for
all those commentators who hyperbolised the subsequent article into a
“feminazi man-hating ‘all men are rapists’ puff piece of
propaganda” I would like to say this.
I know – all women know – not every man is about to jump them and
do unspeakable things to them. Most of you are lovely, decent human
beings. But sometimes you do things, no matter how innocently, which
make us nervous, even if you don’t intend to and there’s
absolutely nothing untoward about your actions or intentions
whatsoever. So please don’t be offended if we cross the street if
you walk behind us, or look over our shoulders and speed up a bit.
It’s not you personally. It’s just we live in a world where the
sort of incident I described as happening to me happens to an awful
lot of women, on a daily basis, and it sometimes ends horrifically;
that has a psychological impact on us whether we’re aware of it or
not. By asking you to please consider how your approach might feel
to a woman as you walk behind her I’m not implying you’re going
to attack her, or that she needs to be afraid of you; I’m not even
asking you to ‘modify’ your behaviour or assume every single
woman you meet is going to run screaming from you. I’m just asking
you to please be aware that this happens to us and it impacts how we
react to things.
As to the guy who followed me, I’m not going to lie. There is a
part of me which still wonders what might have happened if I had
reacted to him. Maybe if I’d screamed at him to leave me alone
he might have realised he was intimidating me and backed off. He may
even have apologised; perhaps he meant nothing by it. Or perhaps it
would have antagonised him and what was already a scary situation
could have become far, far worse.