Do I Sound Angry?

I followed the bullshit safety checklist perfectly. A random guy spat on me anyway

Some picture of a pavement I took

So a couple of weeks ago I was out on a walk when some random guy spat on me. I wrote a short note of my shock at the time and since then I have been trying to write this essay... well, no, actually I’ve been avoiding it. I keep opening a draft and then just closing it again because every time I try to type it out, it starts sounding like some deep, preachy internet think-piece. I hate that.

I don’t want to write some grand lesson about society. I’m just... well, I thought I was mad, but I’m not. I’m just very shaken by it.

And I wished I was just pissed because anger is easy, you know? You can just be mad and sort of move on. But being shaken… it stays with you - it lingers.

It makes you realise how pointless all the little things we do are. Like, think for a second about the checklist. We all have it, even when you don’t realise but it’s there. You step off the pavement. You look at your phone, you keep your head down. I do it on autopilot now. And we do it because we genuinely bought into this idea that it keeps us safe. But I was just standing there. I wasn’t doing anything at all. I followed all the stupid rules and he just walked by and did it anyway.

So what are you supposed to do with that? Once you realise the checklist is bullshit, I mean. You just walk around knowing it’s all down to luck? That’s the part that is so fucking exhausting. We spend so much energy trying to manage our own safety by shrinking down, and for what? It doesn’t protect you. It just makes you smaller.

I really don’t want to sound like a victim here. I hate that word, and I’m not one. But I have had my fair share of absolute bullshit from men. Random men on the street, and men who weren’t random at all. From being called a “miserable cow” by a stranger while I was literally just sitting on a park bench watching my boys play, to being spat on, to actual physical abuse - my sister’s ex husband nearly broke my jaw one time and more. This is not a sob story, it’s just what has happened.

Though it is funny how stating facts out loud like this exposes the people who have spent their entire lives in comfortable little bubbles….. I had a comment recently saying, “If you were my daughter I would implore you not to have any more children.” Erma okay lady….the absolute audacity of people who know nothing about actual survival giving you their two cents no one has asked for.

But anyway that’s a whole other essay. The point is, I was just standing there on the pavement. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do...keeping my head down and yet here we are…it still wasn't enough to stop some miserable bloke from deciding my existence was offensive to him.

Spit is just... it’s feral. It is so deeply violating because it’s not just an attack, it’s an attempt to make you feel like absolute dirt. I didn’t even have a reaction ready. You just freeze. The dumb checklist doesn’t tell you what to do when the rules fail, so your brain just defaults to wanting to scrub your skin off and hide. Which is exactly what I did. I went straight home, locked the front door, got into the shower straight away and practically glued myself to the sofa (carpet in my case - no sofa set yet) with my boys for the entire weekend. Because how the hell are you supposed to just wipe it off and go to Tesco to buy milk after that?

And this is the part where the shock finally starts to wear off and the annoyance actually sets in. Because sitting on the floor all weekend is fine, but eventually, you do need milk. And it pisses me off that I even had to waste a weekend feeling like this. It is the absolute theft of my time and my peace of mind. Some miserable bloke gets to dump his foul mood onto a stranger and just keep walking, probably never thinking about it again, while I lose three days of my life trying to scrub the feeling of him out of my brain. Fucking piss taking.

Because when you actually think about it, the whole thing is just so incredibly cowardly. Street harassment isn’t some unpredictable force of nature. It is entirely calculated. That guy didn’t spit on a 6-foot-2 bloke. He picked a woman walking by herself, because his brain did the maths and decided I was a safe target to dump his rage on.

It’s just this pathetic setup where some blokes get a free pass to act feral, and the rest of us are expected to just, I don’t know…take the hit? just absorb it and if you pay enough attention it isn’t just the street, it’s the default setting for everything. A woman gets raped, and what happens? Instead of the focus being on the fucking guy who raped her, people immediately start looking for her mistakes. What was she wearing? What time was she out? Was she drinking? It’s like so maddening like what are you actually hearing yourself right now?! We are obsessed with finding a reason to blame the woman for just existing in the world, rather than holding men accountable for what they actually do. The “boys will be boys” nonsense.

We don’t interrogate his violence; we interrogate her checklist. We dig for the exact moment she slipped up, because if we can prove she broke a rule, then the rest of us can pretend the rules still work and the absolute icing on the cake is that, after it happens, you are expected to just get over it gracefully. To be “resilient.” It’s exactly why that woman in my comments used that word. Society fails to keep the streets basic-level safe, allows men to act entirely feral and unhinged (and i’m being very graceful here just calling it feral and unhinged), and then pats women on the back for surviving the very environment it refuses to fix.

I am so thoroughly sick of being called resilient. Resilience isn’t a compliment. It’s just a word people use when they want you to quietly absorb the world’s absolute bullshit without making too much of a fuss.

And it’s the women upholding this system that absolutely kill me. Like come on girls. Really? Oh you know the ones….The women who rush in to defend, excuse, and protect this exact kind of male entitlement. We love to pretend this is just a simple divide between men and women, but it’s not. There is a whole army of women out there actively raising the next generation of blokes who take up the entire street. They teach these boys that their feelings are the loudest, most important thing in any room. They coddle their anger. They make excuses for their disrespect. And then they act shocked or worse, they blame the victim….when that exact unchecked entitlement gets unleashed on a woman minding her own business on a Wednesday afternoon.

By the way, while we are at it let me just say this directly to the women currently doing exactly that. You know who you are. You’re the ones making the excuses right now.

And let’s be clear, I am not talking about women surviving abusive relationships. I am talking directly to the mothers who are comfortably choosing to coddle this behaviour because it’s the path of least resistance. You smooth over his tantrums. You excuse his complete lack of respect for boundaries because "he's just having a hard time right now." Stop it. Stop teaching him that his feelings are the loudest, most important thing in any room. The bloke who spat on me didn't just fall out of the sky. He was raised by someone who made his comfort more important than everyone else's safety.

He was raised by someone who made his comfort more important than everyone else’s safety.

If you read enough of these internet essays, this is exactly the point where the writer is supposed to pivot to the silver lining. This is the paragraph where the music swells, and I tell you how this experience taught me to be braver, or how I’m not letting a stranger’s darkness dim my light. lol..i’m not even sure why I am laughing but my god, I hate that kind of writing. It is so fucking dishonest.

I haven’t found a single profound lesson in any of this. Getting spat on didn’t make me wiser, and it didn’t unlock some hidden well of inner peace. It just made me tired, and angry, and hyper-aware of how much absolute nonsense women are expected to quietly navigate before breakfast. I don’t want to find the beauty in the ashes of the social contract. I just want to walk down the road without getting covered in some random bloke’s unparented rage.

Do I sound angry? Is that making you a little bit uncomfortable?! Let me guess... this is the part where I should probably soften my tone or make a self-deprecating joke so I don't come across as bitter. Yeah, no. I'm skipping that part. Because the truth is, we should be uncomfortable. We should all be absolutely raging. But since most people would rather just look away, I'm just going to leave this right here.

With so much love,

Salwa

I don’t write neat, tied-with-a-bow internet essays, and I don’t have a publisher telling me to tone down my anger. I write what is actually happening.

If you are as sick of the polite, wrapped-in-a-bow internet bullshit as I am, upgrade to paid. Your financial support is what keeps this space completely independent, keeps me at this laptop, and keeps these essays free for the women who need them and the men who definitely need to read them.