I’m tired, and conflictedly enough, ashamed, of being so scared all the time. I know as a feminist — and skirts and heterosexuality and the occasional foray into kitten heels and eyeshadow aside, I’m apparently a man-hating-feminist stereotype — I shouldn’t live in fear, but I do.

Fear of my own body, my own opinions. And I know I’m not the only one. Shit, as females, we can’t talk about things that maybe some of us do that are wrong, like maybe even raping dudes, without facing someone’s ire and it sucks.

I know that I, personally, this person, should suck it up and be braver, but frankly, even in theoretically safe spaces like feminist blogs on the internet, I’m scared. Scared, essentially, when it boils right down to it, that they’re going to find me, find all of us — that they’re going to go straight for all of our weaknesses — and then they are going to kill us.

There is a famous quote to that effect and I really feel that it is true. Men fear women’s mockery, and women fear men’s violence. Even when we are alone.

I hope this doesn’t sound unhinged.

Illustrative anecdata from my own life: In high school, I was not a happy camper and wound up in a therapy group with a boy who had been admitted to a mental hospital for depression and suicidal tendencies. He told about how, at a party shortly before his admittance, he was so drunk he couldn’t move very well or speak coherently, and a girl began performing oral sex on him, which he couldn’t stop. His girlfriend dumped him over the incident, part of the reason he’d landed in the hospital. He called what had happpened rape, so I imagine one of the doctors had given him “permission” to name it in that way. I had a lot of trouble believing him, even though he was sitting there in a psychiatric hospital, in a room full of people telling ugly truths in an effort to get better. If he’d willingly cheated while drunk and felt bad about it, no one would have judged him for saying so. It might even have been easier for him to tell the story that way, make it more believable, say he was depressed because of guilt and being dumped. Though I didn’t say anything, I suspected him of making up a story to cover his own mistake, or at least of enjoying what had happened more than he should have. Because guys always want sex and always have the upper hand. I guess he was lucky the therapists took his word for it.

This is not to be all “the poor, poor men”. As I said above, the reason people take the line I took as a teenager with regard to male victims of female attackers isn’t that men are downtrodden, it’s that they are expected to be invincible and sexually voracious, and dismissed if they “allow” weak women to get the better of them or admit they did not want a sexual encounter.

But his friends just called him a “pussy” for putting up with it. So a man who is abused is not only being abused, but is openly mocked for being weak enough to be abused. Not because he loves his wife (twisted as that love may be), but because he won’t learn her good by being violent back. How scary is that?

I once – just once – saw him speak gently and politely to her to ask her not to denigrate him in front of his friends, and she acted like he’d screamed epithets at her. Maybe that’s a small difference, I don’t know – men escalate when confronted? But that isn’t right either.

The other thing is that men frequently just won’t say anything to women who casually abuse them (I’m thinking here of a friend who had a female “friend” who used to hit him on the back of the head very hard when she was annoyed at him). It’s so enculturated that men can’t be hurt by women that the men involved don’t believe it’s abuse.

MRAs are a special little group all their own with only the most tenuous grasp on reality, so I can’t really count their opinions as worthwhile.

Plus, if some MRA ever decides that feminists. just. don’t. CAAAARE about bad stuff that happens to men, or will just never ever ever admit that women can be abusive, this is one concrete incidence – one of many – that someone can point to in order to prove them wrong. It won’t make a difference to them, of course, because they’ve already committed to ideology over reality. But for people who are committed to reality, it will be evidence against them.