Have you noticed how racists feel the description of their racism is worse than the actual offence? Someone will say something that’s steeped in hatred and if we say, that’s racist, they bridle. “Are you calling me a racist?” To name the crime, it seems, hurts worse than the attack itself.
It’s also true of men who use violence. So many of them are cowards who seem to feel that the description of their deeds — a story like this one, anonymous and public — is more unforgivable than threats and intimidation, insults and blows.
Last night I learned the violence of the man I had been learning in recent months to slowly love. He seemed so outraged by the deliberate pain inflicted by my ex. He showed his gentleness and all his curiously and then, all of a sudden, over nothing: you dirty, nasty, evil woman.
Get your stinky white skin away from me. Skin cancer sick old white skin.
He was lounging on my tiny verandah as he said this, using my light socket to charge up his phone. You have to go, I said. I was trembling with rage and fear. And he spat. In my face. And that is what I’ll always remember.
Imagine spitting in somebody’s face. This is how we treat genocidal dictators and men who rape children. No fury could ever carry me there.
So I shoved him. I threw his shoes over the verandah. Just go. Go now. He doubled up a fist and shoved it towards me, to show me. I’ll punch you.
Paunch, he said. I’ll paunch you. Like a come-on from a cruise ship Lothario.
This was around twelve hours ago.
We need to learn to stop teaching our men to train all their rage on us and blame all their anger on women. All around you don’t you see it so incessantly: in advertising, in porn, in the entitlement of cat calls, in the idea that any man becomes a woman when he says so, in the women who say when they phone, sorry, it’s only me, in the girls who are told if he pushed you — it must mean he likes you.
This man does not like me and this is not love. When he left he said over his shoulder You are a loser, no one loves you. It’s my birthday in eight days. Birthdays hurt in this season of my age when I tried so hard and hoped so long and longed to have a child, when I was so measurably fertile and no decent man made himself known. It rained heavily overnight and this morning I went down to the garden and brought in this bouquet.
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