Being A Woman Is Kind Of Like Being A Cyclist In A City Where All The Cars Are Men

[joreth]

[Image of text: "Being a woman is kind of like being a cyclist in a city where all the cars represent men.  You're supposed to be able to share the road equally with cars, but that's not how it works.  The roads are built for cars and you spend a great deal of physical and mental energy being defensive and trying not to get hurt.  Some of the cars WANT you to get hurt.  They think you don't have a place on the road at all.  And if you do get hurt by a car, everyone makes excuses that it's your fault."] - photo via Feminists United

I've never been hit by a car or run off the road while cycling. That doesn't mean it's not a real or constant threat or that it doesn't happen often enough to be a problem even if I've never personally experienced it.

Unlike being a cyclist, though, I can't just choose to switch to cars if I want to / have enough money to. And I have been assaulted by men *because* they were male and I am female. I have been assaulted, not because someone was poor and wanted my money, or because they thought I was rude to them and wanted to teach me a lesson, but because they believed that having a penis granted them rights to my body solely on the basis that they believed my body houses the receptacle for their penises, and some assaults were because my rejection of their entitlement angered them and they believed they had a right to be angry about my rejection and a right to respond to my rejection.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I did not have permanent scarring either physically or emotionally. I'm indignant, sure, and angry at the injustice, but otherwise I got off pretty lucky, considering how often assault of some sort has happened to me.

Other people are not so lucky. They are the broken cycles with the wheel torn off and rolling down the street. Because they are cyclists in a city made for cars, and the odds are that many, but not all, will end up that way because the city caters to the cars.