Swansea beach

Content warning for sexual assault

When I was 19 and sitting by myself on a cold beach in Swansea — I was wearing an actual coat — a man nearby took out his penis and started wanking while staring at me. He was white, and looked like he was in his thirties. He had fine shoulder-length blonde hair that was blowing around in the wind.

He was about 20 feet away. He had silently taken up position on top of a little sand dune in front of me, filling the sky. He was staring intently at me with something in his face: anger, disgust, malice.

But all that came second. I was reading a book, so it was the noise that I heard first. What’s that? And I looked up, as I was supposed to. The frictive swish. The sticky, clicky swick-swick-swick as he jerked his foreskin over his glans.

It was the noise that pinned me in place, and it’s the noise that I still remember now.

It was frightening, yes; there was nobody else around, and I didn’t know whether he would try to rape me. But more than anything else it was horrifying. He was like a maggot, striving in the darkness, no separation between form and purpose. There was no cognition, no explanation, no context. It was like looking up from your book and seeing someone eating a baby. I couldn’t place him. What on earth is happening here? Swick-swick-swick.

He was an ordinary man. He had limbs, a face, a brain. He was wearing clothes, so I assume he went into shops and bought things. There was a bag lying on the dunes at his feet, so I assume he had possessions. He definitely had parents; probably acquaintances, a home.

And yet he chose — he chose — to dislocate me, to permanently injure my sense of control and belonging and autonomy and safety. He had chosen all of this before I had even looked up from my book. And I can’t fathom, I literally cannot comprehend why you would choose to do that to an individual sitting in front of you, someone who hasn’t harmed you; someone you’ve never met.

It upsets me that I have spent my precious time wondering what he was thinking.

My initial response was to turn back to my book and pretend to carry on reading for five minutes. Swick-swick-swick. I kind of admire young me for this; it was objectively batshit, but I was in an objectively batshit situation through no fucking fault of my own. Non-compliance was my only weapon. I calculated that the absence of a response would be less gratifying for him than any of the other options.

I think this might have worked, because he was still fruitlessly jerking when I ‘reached the end of the chapter’, neatly packed up my sandwiches (I had gone off them) and walked away. I didn’t know whether it was better to look over my shoulder (to check he wasn’t coming after me) or not look over my shoulder (swick-swick-swick). Such is the dilemma of the modern girl.

What I wanted to do was kill him. This isn’t a figure of speech; I’d still like to kill him. I mean, let’s face it, men like this are a fucking waste of skin. If I could have been certain I’d physically be strong enough, and that I’d get away with it, I would have bludgeoned him or strangled him and not felt a moment of remorse from that day to this. Imagine how much you’d enjoy the news coverage: ‘Wife of murdered postman/civil servant/doctor pleads for information as police hunt continues.’ It would have been brilliant, and awfully cathartic, honestly. Because he wasn’t the first man to do something like this to me. He wasn’t the second. He wasn’t the third. You get the picture.

But I live in the real world, where women go to prison if they kill men like this on the ‘insufficient’ grounds that they are worthless sacs of gristle and shit. So I assume he’s still out there: passing women in the street, giving women his coffee order, dandling granddaughters on his knee. I’m left with the rage and the disgust, and it has nowhere to go.

I think maybe men, good men, don’t realise what the rage does to you. It’s become a commonplace that every woman you know has experienced sexual assault. I doubt any man reading this (Metropolitan readers being who they are) would dispute the significance of that. But I do think, really, that you don’t understand what it’s like: not the assaults themselves, but what it does to you, to carry around the accreting weight of fury over decades. To never achieve catharsis. And to know, with absolute certainty, that nothing will change.

I have watched the unfolding of the Mandelson/Epstein scandal and found myself unable to operate effectively. I can’t keep on task. How can it be that we’re watching this happening, again? As I write this, Harriet Harman is on a podcast pointing out that Mohammed Al Fayed may have trafficked and raped hundreds of women. He died in his bed in his nineties; the Met Police did not pass most of the complaints on to the CPS. The Guardian is reporting that a man has pled guilty to raping and assaulting a woman whose husband has already pled guilty to drugging and raping her; four other men are pleading not guilty. In Britain this week a man was convicted of raping several babies. He was working in a nursery. What the living fuck are we supposed to do with this?

So what I do is: I sit and stew, and I think. And what I think is, the outer edge of male sexuality is the fundamental factor that determines female subjugation. Women cannot fix this, and men have shown that they don’t want to. A tolerance of male sexual extremity is priced into our society and culture. Our systems accept that it will happen; all we can do is get out the swabs and buckets afterwards. There’s not a thing women can do about it: its drive, its implacability, its violence, its all-encompassing range. We just have to hope that our assaults will be small and survivable.

And I think we never talk about this, not in a serious way.

Women (and children) live within the bounds of the threat posed by male sexual predation. It sets the terms on which we are allowed to exist (wary forbearance, limited expression); it shapes our consciousness (complicit, ashamed). It determines the things human society accepts as the price of admission (the near-universal female experience of assault), and the things we absolutely cannot imagine (anything that would act as a structural brake).

Let’s face it: a female-dominated society would long ago have established a thousand different norms. Adult men would be assumed capable of sexual abusiveness until they had concretely established otherwise. Men would have to offer up their phones and hard drives for forensic investigation when applying for a job, joining a gym, moving home, joining a dating app or opening a bank account. Any ‘he said/she said’ cases would be explicitly legally weighted in women’s favour. You’d need your wife’s consent to get Viagra.

But that sounds nuts, doesn’t it? It would have some really unfair outcomes (ha!), and it goes against everything we believe about how justice and society works. And that is, of course, my point. It is extraordinarily hard to construct a plausible narrative about a society that effectively curbs the extremities of male sexuality. Those who try to imagine it sound like lunatics. Ask any political lesbian.

So can we please at least acknowledge — can we at least say it out loud and look it in the face — that in our actually-existing culture, in order not to inconvenience the majority of men who, yes, do not do this shit: in order to accommodate you, to not be unjust and unfair to you, to not limit your life chances, to not get all fucking hysterical about it — we accept that women’s safety and happiness and ability to thrive is permanently and consistently impeded.

And what I think is, ordinary feminism looks ridiculous and whiny to outsiders because we can do nothing more than tinker around the edges of this fundamental problem. Feminist action on male sexual violence — brave and difficult as it is — can be nothing more than a desperate rearguard action. Excuse me, sir, can South Yorkshire Police please more accurately record the numbers of men raping young girls in Bradford!

And I have to live in this world, this world in which a surprisingly large number of men search for rape-themed porn, and a bunch of lads in Downing St remove a talented woman so that Jeffrey Epstein’s friend can have her job. I live in the world where the Epstein affair is broken down in lots of different ways — a scandal about ‘paedophilia’ (so much more piquant than boring old misogyny for the jaded Westminster hack), an exciting political horse race, a chin-stroking conundrum about the moral bounds of lobbying, a scripted nod to ‘the victims’ — but is never viewed through the only lens that brings it all into focus. And I wonder why I can’t concentrate.

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For more on the male gaze (as if there isn’t enough already):