from college flasher to town rapist: take back the night
i wasn't going to update. then i realized there was something really important i wanted to write about:
i used to carry a can of mace (pepper spray) on my keychain. yeah, that was a long time ago. i was in college. and i probably didn't really need it then. looking back, i think the only thing it would have protected me from at the time was a man known as the flasher. he used to lurk around in the woods near a lake on campus where a lot of people (including myself) used to go running, and occasionally would expose himself. there were composite sketches of him posted all around school.
now i wish i carried mace again, though i wonder if it'd only be a false sense of security. i don't think i've mentioned this before, but there's a serial rapist in the town i live in. he's been attacking women for the past six years...which is as long as i've been living here. he enters apartments when women aren't home and waits in the bedroom for them. his composite sketch was just released this week.
what makes this all so unnerving is that last month, he attacked a woman in my apt. complex, and it's not like i live in a crummy area. it wasn't my actual building--i live in the highrise and the crime occurred in one of the surrounding garden style apts in this complex. i didn't know that was what it was until very recently. but i do recall seeing a bunch of yellow crime scene police tape blocking off the area back in april.
it's not right that i have to live in fear. and maybe it sounds lame that i have to be scared that some guy in a ski mask will jump out and try to hurt me when i go down to the basement of my building to do laundry or take my trash to the dumpsters. even friends and family who have seen my that part of building have warned me to be careful down there. anyone who knows me also knows that i'm a runner, so this also unnerves me.
i totally regret not taking self-defense for my p.e. credits in college. it makes me feel a bit vulnerable esp b/c i'm not a big, powerful person, and basically anyone could potentially overpower me. although i'm good at endurance sports like swimming and running, and i sometimes lift weights and do yoga, i have no impressive arm strength to speak of. do i have what it takes to punch the living daylights out of an attacker? seriously. violence against women makes me mad.
back in college i took it for granted that there was so much attention given to the topic. considering where i went to school, it was a given that there was a lot of discussion and awareness on it. it's not that i was apathetic towards issues of violence to women. but in my head at the time, it hit the saturation point where i thought i'd heard it all before and knew all there was to know about it.
every april tons of people i knew used to go over to nearby northampton to participate in the take back the night rally. and during survivor awareness week, students who had been victims would anonymously chalk the sidewalks with messages to their attackers, and wear white or black ribbons. stuff like that.
now isn't it funny how, so many years later, i finally want to go take back the night? ...but how? maybe it's the feminist reawakening in me after all these years. do i enroll in self-defense? do i stop running and turn into a couch potato? do i buy pepper spray for my keychain? do i participate in (the city that i live in) take back the night rally? really? do i use the buddy system everywhere i go, and lose my sense of autonomy? i don't know that there are really any answers.
i honestly don't know what else to say.
