Secrets and the Internet

Hello dear readers,

Apologies, I’m a little behind the week mark, I appear to have lost track of time. This week: The Internet. And its myriad possibilities.

So, I’m spilling my secrets. Because online, one has a strange anonymity – one which can be used, or abused; one which can empower, or diminish; one of comfort in a camouflaged mask to strive to protect, or one to reveal in the pixelated daylight of honesty.

I feel that the anonymity provided by an online persona can be innocently exploited; I exploit it myself. But used nefariously, its far-reaching tendrils can creep into the lightest home and darken a mindset, can destroy and ruin and decay. But in the shady corners of cyberspace, uncontrolled and unlit, who is stopping this? Can it be stopped? Should it be stopped – for one user of facelessness for protective purposes may be unmasked and endangered, scrutinised for falsifying, while measures for prevention of internet crimes are a step behind those perpetrators they truly seek? Are we entitled to obscurity, or are we threatened by it?

How strange it is to me, when perusing my site stats, to find 90% of my readers live in North America. How strange that people I’ve never met will read these thoughts cast adrift into the ether by a little woman thousands of miles away in a small village in England. My readers will never see my face, they will never hear my voice or shake my hand, but they are able to read my deepest thoughts, my secrets, things I haven’t told some of my closest friends. Frightening, and liberating. Refreshing, and startling.

You might not know the colour of my eyes, but you know that I had my first kiss when I was nineteen.

You don’t know what my laugh sounds like, but you can know that I am in love with a man who lives over two hundred miles away and who has no idea.

You don’t know how tall I am, but you hear that I have doubts about my career choices which I have never really voiced; I am passionate about biology and nature and conservation, but I realised very recently that I’ve only come this far academically because I was blessed with an impressive memory. I’m not built for science. Analytic thinking is not natural for me. I am artistic, not analytic. And sometimes I wonder where I will end up and whether I will do well, by chance, or whether I will be stuck somewhere in perpetual uncertainty.

Anyone could pass me in the street and not know that I have probed and questioned myself for a long time now, and only recently come to the conclusion that I’m about 70-80% straight (it fluctuates), and I’m finally comfortable with that. And you wouldn’t know that I’ve never told anyone that, and you wouldn’t know I felt that way. You wouldn’t know how I first started questioning and doubting myself at secondary school when my friends would discuss which cute teachers they fancied and I thought I was a complete freak because inwardly I thought a few of the female teachers were hot. But sitting thousands of miles away, with a different time on your clock and different weather pressing against your windows, a little screen in front of you is telling you that about a stranger.

I don’t know whether to be creeped out or exhilarated, liberated. Although right now I’m a bit too numbly tired to feel either, and instead write as I’d write to myself, because through this medium we can connect with like-minds as far away as opposite poles. I like the feeling that there are other people I could meet no other way, who can share my stories as I read theirs, a long-distance exchange which is the other, brighter side of anonymity; that of kinship with strangers and the removal of isolating barriers, and acceptance, and the exchange of opinions and broadening horizons and mutual support.

And, of course, cat videos. Lots and lots of cat videos.

Yours honestly, but not entirely,

Georgie.

In Other News, Vehicular Access Issues

My friend P has made a couple of appearances here before, and no doubt will again. This week’s escapade involves her and a friend going out for coffee. P’s friend drove them there. And when they wandered out of the coffee shop afterwards, and meandered across the car park to come home, P took her eye off the ball for a split second. She opened the car door and was halfway inside it before she looked up – and spotted her friend getting into a different car a few spaces away. Her friend was just looking at her, agape. P was clambering into some random stranger’s car! Apparently they made a quick getaway after that. In their own car, thankfully.

Street Harassment and Why It’s Important

Good evening, readers.

I hope you are well. There is much, much going on in the world this week that will give many, many people reasons not to be well. My thoughts are with those people at this time.

It seems almost churlish to bring up a subject such as street harassment in a week that has seen our news full of war, death, hostages, murder, disease. However, there have been some marvellous things in the news as well, for example the money raised for a disabled victim of robbery, and for a family whose home was burgled and burnt down. These stories help to restore one’s faith in humanity at a time when it feels like conflict is all around us and bound to get worse.

Street harassment crops up relatively frequently in my posts, because it’s a pet hate of mine. This is an activity with many defenders – it’s just innocuous, harmless fun, a compliment, throw-away, careless, quickly forgotten. And caller and call-ee just carry on with their days as though nothing had happened.

I don’t agree. When somebody calls out something in the street – even if it’s something that, coming from a friend or your mum, would be a compliment – feels wrong. It’s like somebody just undressed you with their eyes, and you can feel that you’re being violated in somebody’s imagination. The feeling of vulnerability will bite you as though the person really is seeing you without all your clothes on, as if they’ve discovered something personal and you can’t trust them with the information.

What makes the caller feel as though they are entitled to give their opinion, uninvited? Even in debating, where the point is to share opinions and persuade, you have to be invited to share your thoughts. I don’t need to hear them. The fact that you even think about women who are just walking by, minding their own business, in that way, is probably an issue. They’re just people. If you can’t switch off lecherous thoughts for the five-minute walk to the bus stop, I think you have a problem.

But you’re just showing your appreciation, right? We look good and you want to let us know. Well, we probably already know we look all right. Usually people have a cursory glance in the mirror before they leave their house. But the fact a stranger shouts it at us is not comforting – it’s the opposite. It’s frightening. It brings thoughts of unwanted advances, creepy guys, all the what-ifs our mums impressed upon us as kids about taking lifts from strangers and walking down dark alleys alone. You become that person we shouldn’t take a lift from, with the implied consequences. You’re that person hiding in a dark alley with gloves and duct tape.

I know, that seems super extreme. But these fears are ingrained in us from being children. And suddenly, if somebody yells at you in the street, you are confronted with them. These fears and possibilities fill our brains, whether we realise them and coherently display them, or not. Or at least, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking, where does it go from here, where does it stop? Now I know what you want to do to me – how do I know you won’t actually do it?

And I think street harassment is important for this reason – it normalises the objectification of women. Or other kinds, such as insulting trans or gay people, are intended to separate one group from others. We’re just walking to work, to a normal job, in our normal lives, and somebody pounces on us and implies we’re inferior to whichever group we’re excluded from (be it men, straight/cis, adults, whatever).

It’s where it could lead. We don’t know you’re harmless. We don’t know you’re nice. You frighten us. Which makes me think it’s also about power and domination, a frustration. Feeling a need to vent frustration and anger on strangers in the street, whether from a sexual perspective or not, it pretty damn weird in my book. I don’t need help getting out of my jeans, mate – you need help in sorting out your life.

I hope you have a wonderful week, kindness abound,

Georgie

In Other News, A Long Time Ago…

Should I say this? I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t. But here it is.

A few years ago, my Dad worked for a funeral parlour. He enjoyed it – he said it was quiet, and you never got any complaints from the punters. But one time, when me and Mum were out, Dad was looking after my brother and he got a call from the funeral parlour. They had a body and they needed help shifting it. Dad said he couldn’t, he was on babysitting duty, but his mates were persuasive and called in a favour. So Dad bundled my little brother, aged about six, into the back of the car and off they went.

“Stay in the car and don’t move,” Dad told my brother.

Of course, as the blokes brought the body out (covered, but even my brother knew what it was), he obviously had his nose pressed against the glass in a sort of horrified transfixion.

In true Dad style, my father just got back in the car, started the engine and pulled away. He simply said to my brother, “Don’t tell your mum and I’ll take you to McDonald’s.”