I did not arrive at female boundaries because I assumed every male was dangerous. I arrived there because I knew what society does to women and girls when the dangerous one eventually shows up.
I had already spent too many years in the work of violence and abuse to pretend I did not know. I knew what happened when a woman said something was wrong and the room suddenly became interested in her tone. I knew how quickly people could become detectives of a woman’s behavior when the person who harmed her was standing right there. I had listened to enough women explain themselves backward, from the moment of harm through every decision they made before it, trying to answer questions that somehow never seemed to follow the person who chose to hurt them.
So when conversations about female spaces began changing, I was listening with an advocate’s ears. Those ears had heard too much. They had heard women blamed for staying and blamed for leaving, blamed for trusting and blamed for being suspicious, blamed for drinking, blamed for going home with somebody, blamed for walking alone, blamed for being afraid. They had heard grown people describe little girls as “fast,” “knowing,” “seductive,” “grown,” as though childhood itself could be revoked whenever an adult male behaved sexually toward a child.
I could not unknow any of that just because kindness had entered the conversation.
There is a particular kind of freedom in no longer spending years trying to persuade someone to care about a safety they have repeatedly shown they are willing to gamble with.
There was eventually a mutual parting of ways with some people who chose to think the worst of me because I would not be kind in the particular way they required. I could live with that. It wasn’t my first time finding myself outside so-called ‘respectable’ company because I refused to say what everybody had agreed a good woman was supposed to say.
Over forty years around violence and abuse will do something to your relationship with approval. You learn that applause can be terribly cheap. You learn that a room full of agreement can still be wrong. You learn that people can call a woman cruel because she refuses to participate in something that frightens her, exposes her, violates her privacy or asks her to abandon what experience has taught her. Sometimes being thought difficult is simply part of staying awake.
Women who refuse to toe the line of supporting males regardless of circumstance learn this early. There is an old current running beneath much of human life, one so familiar that people can mistake it for nature: accommodate him, explain him, forgive him, consider what he has been through, consider what he might lose, consider his future, his loneliness, his humiliation, his intentions, his pain. Women become fluent in considering.
I had spent much of my life sitting closer to the other side of that equation. I had seen what women lose.
That knowledge followed me into every conversation about female privacy. I never needed to believe that every male walking into a female space intended harm. Human beings build safeguards precisely because intentions cannot be seen. Somewhere, eventually, somebody crosses a line. Then we discover what our principles are worth when the situation is no longer theoretical and somebody is crying, somebody is frightened, somebody is humiliated, or somebody has been hurt.
That was the part I could never get past. I knew us.
Sometimes the safest thing a woman can do is believe what people have already shown her about how little they value her safety.
I knew how we behave after harm.
Women college athletes had been describing the experience of encountering male genitalia in spaces where they undressed. I listened to them talk about privacy and discomfort, and watched conversations wander toward their athletic records, their politics, their motives and whether they had really suffered enough to justify objecting. A woman could begin with her body and somehow end up on trial for her character.
During the California Wi Spa controversy, where a male was walking around fully nude, the presence of a young girl should have made room for serious conversation about children, nudity and what parents reasonably expect in a sex-segregated spa. Instead, some of the public discussion turned toward the mother. Why had she brought her daughter there? What kind of mother takes a child to a spa? The old reflex had found its footing again. Something happened that a woman considered inappropriate for her daughter, and soon enough people were examining the woman….and her little girl. (Some prominent people: “Teach your children to look the other way”)
I recognized that move.
Singer and songwriter Tish Hyman later described encountering a male in a women’s locker room at her Los Angeles gym and objecting. Video from the confrontation circulated widely, and once again there was plenty of attention available for how the woman reacted. Immediately on the spot, she was accused of making a scene. The irritation from the gym goers with her reaction is on the video. Her response became part of the spectacle, as though a woman who encounters something she believes violates the boundary of an intimate space must first achieve perfect calm before she earns the right to be heard.
That expectation has always troubled me in violence work. Human beings do not necessarily become their most polished selves when startled, frightened, angry or exposed. Women know this peculiar requirement well: something can happen to you, but your reaction had better be lovely. You must locate the proper volume, the proper vocabulary, the proper facial expression, the proper amount of fear. Too much emotion can be used against you. Too little can be used against you too.
If my safety repeatedly comes second to your comfort, access, ideology, reputation, pleasure, or convenience, I have learned something about you.
And Black women know another layer of that dance.
We know how quickly anger can swallow the original event. We know what happens when the reaction becomes more interesting than what produced it. A Black woman can enter a conversation describing something that happened to her and leave it defending the volume of her voice, the look on her face, the words she chose, whether she was respectful enough, whether she frightened somebody else while explaining that she herself had been frightened.
That history does not disappear when we enter a locker room, hospital, shelter, prison, dormitory, restroom or changing area. We carry knowledge with us because experience taught it to us.
Even the history of enslaved Black women sometimes entered these conversations in ways that made my spirit recoil. Someone would invoke the racist history of Black women being denied womanhood, sometimes suggesting that because enslavers brutalized Black women and denied them the protections associated with respectable white womanhood, contemporary female boundaries should therefore be opened wider. I heard something very different in that history.
I heard a warning about what happens when Black women’s bodies are treated as available.
Enslaved Black women were worked, beaten, raped, forcibly reproduced, separated from children, and denied authority over their own bodies by a system that regarded human beings as property. (And here you are referencing it like the ‘good ole days?’) Their womanhood was not protected from exploitation because somebody had discovered a liberating truth about sex. Their humanity was being violated for power and profit. I could not turn that history into an argument for asking women to surrender boundaries around their bodies. My ancestors’ dehumanization taught me to take those boundaries seriously.
Perhaps that is why the expectation of “kindness” never settled the question for me.
I love kindness. I like to share. I have benefitted from it from others. I have watched a small act of tenderness help somebody make it through an afternoon they were not sure they could survive. I have watched women offer one another clothes, rides, food, child care, money, a couch, a listening ear and the quiet dignity of being believed. I know what kindness can do because women have been handing it to one another in grocery bags, church basements, shelter bedrooms, beauty shops, kitchens, and whispered telephone calls forever.
I also know women have been asked to perform something else under its name.
Sometimes kindness means a woman is expected to make herself uncomfortable so somebody else will not feel rejected. Sometimes compassion becomes an expectation that she silence the alarm going off inside her. Sometimes inclusion requires her privacy to become negotiable while everybody else’s emotional comfort remains sacred. I could not call every accommodation kindness simply because a woman was the person being asked to provide it.
You do not have to keep presenting evidence of your humanity to people who have already decided your boundaries are negotiable.
Women deserve a kindness that reaches us too.
We deserve the tenderness of being believed before we have assembled a courtroom case. We deserve privacy without having to reveal trauma to justify wanting it. A woman should not have to tell strangers that she was raped, molested, beaten, stalked, or terrorized before they understand why undressing around males might be intolerable to her. Her body does not become public property because she cannot produce a painful enough biography.
There are women carrying histories nobody around them knows. The woman beside you at the gym may have survived something she has never told her closest friend. The woman quietly changing in the corner may be rebuilding a relationship with her body after violence. Another may simply want privacy because privacy feels good, ordinary and human to her. She owes no tragedy as admission price to her own boundary.
Society has spent generations teaching women to question their instincts and then questioning their judgment when something goes wrong.
Girls deserve that ordinary dignity too.
They should be allowed to grow inside their bodies without being drafted into adult political arguments they cannot possibly understand. A girl learning to manage menstruation, breasts, body hair, changing clothes and the strange new self-consciousness of adolescence already has enough on her plate. She deserves spaces where her developing body is neither a public lesson nor an instrument for demonstrating somebody else’s acceptance.
Years of advocacy had taught me another lesson I could not shake: once something goes wrong, society becomes remarkably creative about finding the woman who could have prevented it.
I had watched it happen too many times:
She should have known.
She should have left.
She should have reported him.
She should have reported him sooner.
She should not have gone upstairs.
She should not have trusted him.
Her parents should have watched her.
Her friends should have stopped her.
She should have screamed.
She should have fought.
She should have stayed calm.
She should have been nicer.
She should have been more suspicious.
There is always another assignment for the woman.
And then we ask why some of us are reluctant to surrender a boundary before anything happens.
Recent cases involving college women have brought that old machinery into view again. Allegations are followed by blame, shame, minimization, selective readings of facts, double standards and extraordinary hostility toward young women whose lives may already have been turned upside down. When the young woman is Black, another familiar quiet can settle over the room. Black girls and young Black women can discover that everybody who speaks so passionately about protecting Black people suddenly has errands to run.
Pay attention to who becomes irritated when women ask what happens if something goes wrong.
I have lived long enough to recognize silence as information.
My position on female spaces grew from all of this. It came from shelters, court rooms, and crisis work, from women telling the truth in rooms where somebody was finally willing to hear them, from girls blamed for the behavior of grown men, from Black women expected to carry everybody while bleeding quietly themselves. It came from watching institutions discover compassion for the person accused of harm while rationing it carefully to the person saying she had been harmed.
There are people I no longer walk beside because of where I stood. I wish them well. Life is long, and anyone who has done serious work around violence learns eventually that companionship and conviction do not always travel together. Some roads get quieter when you refuse to trade what you know for belonging.
The quiet does not frighten me the way it once might have.
There is a deep peace in knowing that your compassion includes you. There is peace in allowing your own wisdom a chair at the table. There is peace in knowing that another person’s disappointment does not automatically mean you have done something wrong. Women spend so much of life being trained to read displeasure on other people’s faces that we can forget to read ourselves.
Acceptance is not agreement. Sometimes acceptance is simply saying: I see clearly who you are, what you prioritize, and what I need to do with that knowledge.
I want something richer for us.
I want women to experience kindness that does not require self-abandonment. I want girls to know that privacy is not hostility. I want Black women to feel no obligation to turn ourselves into the world’s service center, endlessly processing everybody else’s pain while ours waits in the hallway. I want women who have spent years being called difficult, selfish, unkind, angry or intolerant because they maintained a boundary to know the quiet pleasure of coming home to themselves.
That is where I eventually arrived.
I did not need everybody to agree with me. I did not need to believe everybody was dangerous. I did not need fear to run my life. I needed enough respect for women and girls to take seriously what happens when one person is dangerous, because somewhere, sometime, one person will be.
And when he shows up, I already know the questions society is likely to ask the woman standing in the wreckage.
I would rather have stood beside her before she ever had to answer them.
Calling Women “Hateful” for Wanting Safety Is Abuse Dressed in Decorum – WE Survive Abuse
When “Being Nice” Becomes Dangerous: Reclaiming Boundaries After Trauma – WE Survive Abuse
The Dangerous Man Does Not Always Look the Way We Were Told – WE Survive Abuse
Women Being Excluded from Communities: N3LYNNN and the Locs Community – WE Survive Abuse
12 Quiet Ways Self-Abandonment Shows Up – WE Survive Abuse
Why Women Protect Single-Sex Spaces—Even from “Nice Guys” – WE Survive Abuse
You Don’t Find Your People By What They Post—You Find Them By What They Protect – WE Survive Abuse
‘Go Along to Get Along’ Is How They Silence You—Here’s Why You Must Speak Anyway – WE Survive Abuse