Introduction

Everybody Has a Tipping Point



The funny thing is that when mine came, in March 2012, it wasn’t something dramatic or extreme, or even particularly out of the ordinary. It was just another week of little pinpricks: the man who appeared as I sat outside a café, seized my hand, and refused to let go; the guy who followed me off the bus and lewdly propositioned me all the way to my front door; the man who made a sexual gesture and shouted, “I’m looking for a wife,” from his car as I walked wearily home after a long day. I shouted back, “Keep looking!” but as I trudged home, I started for the first time really thinking about how many of these little incidents I was putting up with from day to day.

I remembered the university supervisor who was rumored to wear a black armband once a year to mourn the anniversary of my college admitting women. I thought about the night that a group of teenage boys had casually walked up behind me in the street and then one of them grabbed me, hard, between the legs, forcing his fingers upward against my jeans. I recalled the boss who’d sent me strange e-mails about his sexual fantasies and mysteriously terminated my freelance contract with no explanation almost immediately after learning I had a boyfriend. The university supervisor whose e-mail suggesting we meet for our first tutorial said, “I’ll bring a red rose and you bring a copy of yesterday’s Telegraph…” The senior colleague who, on my first day working as an admin temp—age just seventeen—propositioned me via the company’s internal e-mail system. The guy who sat next to me on the bus and started running his hand up and down my leg—and the other one who sat opposite me and began masturbating under his coat, his confident eyes boring into mine. I remembered the men who cornered me late one night in a Cambridge street, shouting, “We’re going to part those legs and f*ck that c*nt!” and left me cowering against the wall as they strolled away cackling.

And the more these incidents came back to me, the more I wondered why I’d played them down at the time—why I’d never complained, or even particularly remembered them, until I sat down and really thought about it.

The answer was that these events were normal. They hadn’t seemed exceptional enough for me to object to them because they weren’t out of the ordinary. Because this kind of thing was just part of life—or, rather, part of being a woman. Simply, I was used to it.

And I started to wonder how many other women had had similar experiences and, like me, had just accepted them and rationalized them and got on with it without stopping to protest or ask why.

So I started asking around—among friends and family, at parties, even in the supermarket. Over the course of a few weeks, I asked every woman I met whether she’d ever encountered this sort of problem. I honestly thought that if I asked twenty or thirty women, one or two would remember something significant from the past—a bad experience they’d had at university, perhaps, or in a previous job.

What actually happened took me completely by surprise. Every single woman I spoke to had a story. But not from five years ago, or ten. From last week, or yesterday, or “on my way here today.” And they weren’t just random one-time events but reams and reams of tiny pinpricks—just like my own experiences—so niggling and normalized that to protest each one felt petty. Yet put them together and the picture created by this mosaic of miniatures was strikingly clear. This inequality, this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second thought, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you’d care to look. And if sexism means prejudice, stereotyping, or discriminating against people purely because of their sex, then women were experiencing it on a near-daily basis.

The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn’t exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds—what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me—you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have “gilded lives”! You’re making a fuss about nothing. You’re overreacting. You’re uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, lighten up …

You really need to learn to take a compliment.

How, I wondered, was it possible for there to be so much evidence of sexism alongside so much protest to the contrary? Gradually, as I became more aware of the sheer scale of the problem, I also began to understand that it was an invisible one. People didn’t want to acknowledge it, or talk about it—in fact, they often simply refused, point-blank, to believe it still existed. And it wasn’t just men who took this view; it was women, too—telling me I was getting worked up about nothing, or being oversensitive, or simply looking for problems where there weren’t any.

At first, I wondered if they were right. People weren’t exactly falling over themselves to share my “Eureka!” moment. This could be like my ill-fated but utter conviction, at age eleven, that it was actually “helicockter,” not “helicopter,” and everybody else was pronouncing it wrong. Perhaps I was just overreacting and women really were equal now, more or less. I thought I’d take a look at the statistics, to see if we had in fact finally reached a level playing field.

At first, being UK-based, I looked at the statistics there. I found that at the time, in early 2012, in this supposedly “equal” society, with nothing left for women to want or fight for, they held less than a quarter of the seats in Parliament, and only 4 out of 23 cabinet positions. That just 4 out of 35 lord justices of appeal and 18 out of 108 high court judges were female. That it had been more than thirteen years since a female choreographer had been commissioned to create a piece for the main stage at our Royal Opera House. That in 2010 it was reported that the National Gallery’s collection of some 2,300 works, contained paintings by only 10 women. That our Royal Society had never had a female president, and just 5 percent of its fellowship was made up of women. That women wrote only a fifth of front-page newspaper articles and that 84 percent of those articles were dominated by male subjects or experts. That women directed just 5 percent of the 250 major films of 2011, down by nearly half from a paltry 9 percent in 1998. That a Home Office survey as recently as 2009 had showed that 20 percent of those polled thought it “acceptable” in some circumstances “for a man to hit or slap his wife or girlfriend in response to her being dressed in sexy or revealing clothes in public.”

Then I looked at the crime statistics. I found that on average, more than 2 women were killed every week by a current or former partner, that there was a call to the police every minute about domestic violence, and that a woman was raped every six minutes—adding up to more than eighty-five thousand rapes and four hundred thousand sexual assaults per year. That one in five women was the victim of a sexual offense and one in four a victim of domestic violence.

In the few years since I completed that eye-opening research, very little has changed. And the comparable stats for the United States are broadly similar: At the time of writing, women hold one-fifth or less of seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Only 35 women in history have ever served as governor, compared to more than 2,300 men. Just 4 of the 112 justices ever to serve on the Supreme Court have been women. The New York Times reported in 2014 that women run a quarter of the biggest art museums in the United States (but only five of the thirty-three with the largest budgets) and earn about a third less than their male counterparts for doing so. Eighty percent of the reviewers and authors of reviewed books in the New York Review of Books in 2013 were men, as were almost 80 percent of the “notable deaths” reported in The New York Times in 2012. Data from the U.S. National Science Foundation reveals that women make up just 20 percent of architects, 17 percent of economists, and 11 percent of engineers. Only 5 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are women. The full-time pay gap is around 20 percent overall. Around one in five women in the United States has experienced rape or attempted rape at some time in her life, and more than one in three have experienced intimate partner violence. On average, more than three women every day are killed by a current or former partner.

And worldwide, one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.

Those stats did very little to convince me that everything was okay and I shouldn’t be worrying my pretty little head about it. In fact, they had the opposite effect. I started wondering whether there might not be a connection between ours being a society in which so many women become so accustomed to experiencing gender-based prejudice that they almost fail to even register it anymore, and the fact that men dominate political and economic spheres and so many women suffer some form of sexual violence. The figures certainly didn’t allay my fears and convince me I was making a mountain out of a molehill—far from it. They suggested an urgent and essential need to pay attention to the “minor” incidents—each and every one of them—in order to start connecting the dots and build up a proper picture of what was going on.

I didn’t for a moment think that the problem of sexism could be solved overnight. But neither did I see how we could possibly even begin to tackle it while so many people continued to refuse to acknowledge that it even existed. I thought if I could somehow bring together all those women’s stories in one place, testifying to the sheer scale and breadth of the problem, then perhaps people would be convinced that there was, in fact, a problem to be solved.

At least that would be a start.

So in April 2012, I started a very simple Web site where people could upload their stories—from the niggling and normalized to the outrageously offensive and violent—and those who hadn’t experienced the problem firsthand could read them and, I hoped, begin to realize what was really happening on a daily basis.

Without any funding, or means to publicize the project beyond my own Facebook wall, I thought perhaps fifty or sixty women would add their stories, or that I might be able to persuade a hundred or so of my own friends to add theirs.

Stories began to trickle in during the first few days. Within a week, hundreds of people had added their voices. A week later, the number had doubled, then trebled and quadrupled. I started a Twitter account, @EverydaySexism, and found that people were keen to discuss the phenomenon there too. In exactly the same way that raising the subject in a roomful of people led to more and more women chipping in with their own examples, the idea spread through social media like wildfire, snowballing and gathering momentum as it traveled.

Suddenly stories began to appear from America and Canada, Germany and France, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Tens of thousands of people started viewing the Web site each month. Before two months had passed, the site contained more than one thousand entries.

There were people who said I might be making it all up, or that it didn’t prove anything because the stories couldn’t be independently verified. And that’s true (the verification part, not the making it up) and applies to the project entries quoted in this book. This is important, so while we’re here, let’s clear it up. The project was only ever intended to be used as a qualitative source, just like many other highly respected social studies and research projects that rely on reported evidence. Yes, we should be aware of the possibility that an entry has been fabricated. But really there’s no incentive for anybody to make things up. First, the project consists of so many accounts that there’s no fame or attention to be gained from adding a false story—each one is just a drop in the ocean. Second, because IP addresses are automatically submitted with the entries, we’re immediately alerted when anyone submits more than one story. On the few occasions when trolls have posted a small batch of sarcastic and exaggerated entries, it has been easy to spot and remove them. More important, though, now that tens of thousands of women have added their experiences, the stories are corroborated by each other—they’re repeated and echoed by those of other women, of different ages and backgrounds and from different countries, with the same themes arising again and again. These accounts are also supported by the thousands of girls and women I have met at schools and events over the past few years, by women who have contacted me in confidence, and women I have interviewed for this book. They’re all saying very similar things. It would have to be an awfully big coincidence for so many of them to be making up the same story.

The stories kept coming. Then one day a journalist contacted me, asking about running a feature on the project. Other papers and magazines swiftly followed, then radio and television programs. I began to write regularly for the national and then international press, chronicling the accounts as they streamed in and highlighting common themes. Articles about the project appeared around the world, from Grazia South Africa to the Times of India,French Glamour to Gulf News, the Los Angeles Times to the Toronto Standard. Every time the project was featured in the foreign press, I’d receive e-mails from women in those countries asking if we could start a version of the project for their country too. Within eighteen months, we had expanded to eighteen countries worldwide.

Hundreds of women and girls wrote to me about their experiences, describing not only what had happened to them but also how they’d felt guilty or unable to protest, how they’d been made to feel that whatever had happened was their fault, or that they shouldn’t make a fuss. The first time the true scale of what I had started to uncover really hit me was when one woman wrote to me saying, “I’m 58 so I have too much to say in a small box. Here are some highlights arranged in decades.”

The stories came from women of all ages, races and ethnicities, social backgrounds, gender identities and sexual orientations, disabled and nondisabled, religious and nonreligious, employed and unemployed. Stories from the workplace to the pavement, from clubs and bars to buses and trains. Of verbal harassment and “jokes,” of touching and groping and grabbing and kissing and being followed and sworn at and shouted at and belittled and assaulted and raped.

This is why the project, which initially set out to record daily instances of sexism, quickly came to document cases of serious harassment and assault, abuse and rape. In the early days, as the first stories of this kind were recorded, I wondered why people were coming to us, why they weren’t sharing and being supported elsewhere. And then I started to realize that there wasn’t anywhere else. Thousands of these stories had never been told. Thousands of these women had grown up in the confident assumption that these violations were their fault, that their stories were shameful, that they should never tell anybody. Yet their experiences weren’t “out of place” among the tales of daily, niggling, normalized sexism any more than the violets “don’t belong” in the same spectrum of colors as the oranges and greens. You can’t separate one out and look at it without the others, because together they create a full picture. Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice—from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence—are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can be when the minor, “unimportant” issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women’s bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.

And so we accepted all these stories, and more, until in April 2015—exactly three years after the project was launched—one hundred thousand entries had poured in. This is their story. This is the sound of a hundred thousand voices. This is what they’re telling us.



Copyright © 2014, 2016 by Laura Bates