Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: #everydaysexism

  • the men who hate women

    Hi Callum! Good morning

    I’d like to ask your advice as I don’t know now what to do with my free trial. Can we suspend it? Can I apply it to a different training group?

    I attended two sessions at the riverside park with Chris. Was super looking forward to it and excited to commit to my fitness and wellbeing. There were incidents in both sessions which made me uncomfortable and Chris’s response has just been ‘good luck finding a new group.’ He hasn’t offered to tackle the issue and when I replied with a summary of what had made me so acutely uncomfortable I actually left early, he didn’t bother to respond at all.

    I wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy. This is a female-based group in which women should be respected. We shouldn’t have to put up with our own trainer warning not to work too hard on our upper body strength because ‘Nobody likes a lady with a thick neck.’ A wave of disturbance ran through the women around me when Chris said that. Women’s bodies are our own. We’re not there for him to rate and deem more or less attractive. Women are entitled to be strong. We can be competent, powerful, fit, and active. If a professional personal trainer can’t uphold this, who will?

    The second session a man standing beside me, huge guy, made an off-colour remark that I found very distressing. Being still out of condition, I lay down a moment on my mat. A woman said, hey, it’s not lying down time yet! And this man with a big smirk remarked, “Darl, it’s not that kind of establishment.”

    Again, a ripple of unrest and disgust through the women present. Women were saying things like, Gross, that’s off, let’s all pretend we didn’t hear that. How disgusting that he feels it’s ok to evoke the spectre of prostitution and ‘establishments’ in which men have to bribe women for sex. How awful that even the trainer won’t speak up! (For comparison, imagine the trainer’s response if a customer made a remark of an equivalent level of racism). Women are used to being sexualised, at every opportunity, from the age of 10 or 11: most of us in this group were in our 40s, 50s and 60s so we have now been putting up with this trash for three or four decades. Why should we have to pretend not to hear sexist, degrading remarks which make women feel unsafe, in a professional training session which should be a safe space? We’re all wearing skin tight lycra and bending over with our butts in the air. It’s so upsetting that even here, your trainers don’t take care to make sure women feel welcomed and safe and respected.

    I’ve told a friends and random women serving in shops etc about this encounter and their response in every single case was the same. Don’t be fooled by the fact that women are conditioned to think it’s pointless to speak out. We hate it.

    Regards,

    Cathoel Jorss

    You might like to pass this on to your trainers to try to wake them up:

    https://houseoflovers.com/literature/street-crimes/

  • out of nowhere

    My dad trained me to be raped, by minor and persistent infringements which he would not withdraw or desist in, no matter how I protested. He taught me saying No had no importance. I had no sovereignty over my body. For he would still cup my butt in his hand, rove his eye over my breast and comment on it. This started when I went into puberty and in later years the family made the excuse that he had done it to all of us: but not my brothers, no. Or, they said, he had always done it, as a mark of his harmless affection. But I remembered. It started when I grew hair and curves. It never happened when we were children.

    I was – I am – spirited, and fought back. When I told him to stop he looked invariably surprised and injured. “Oh, but darling, it’s only a bit of fun.” He would say, “I’m only tormenting you, pet.” I tried carrying my breakfast into another room when he sprawled at the table with pubic hair showing through the loose fly of his pyjamas. I tried sewing up the fly of his pyjamas in a scarlet thread. Right into his seventies he used to call me and my mother “my two girlfriends.” No amount of rage on my part could ever get him to let this go. In my teens I tried again and again to talk to my mother, who kept insisting I had a ‘dirty mind.’

    Dad used to come in at night to ‘say goodnight’ – always to me, never to the boys – and would fall asleep on my bed. When a boy at university when I was 17 started raping me regularly, these attentions from my father, creepily, stopped. It was like he had handed me over. After nearly a year I found the courage when this boy’s violence intensified to overcome the shame and tell my mother. I begged her not to tell Dad. They broke through the flimsy lock I had begged for on my bedroom door and beat the crap out of me. Calling me a slut and a tart. They stripped the sheets off me while I cowered. In the bed where I’d passed out from sexual pain so many times one held me down while the other walloped. Next day a neighbour my own age crept round, she had waited til Mum went out. Was I ok? she asked. She described how she had listened in agony, thinking she ought to call the police. She said, very quietly, “I thought they were going to kill you.”

    For years afterwards every time my father visited he would bring with him stored up stories of women who, supposedly, had concocted malicious fictions about rape as a way of destroying the careers of blameless men.