You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism - Softcover

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Alida Nugent currently resides in Brooklyn, where she wears dark lipstick, eats sandwiches, and tries to find dive bars that serve martinis. She is also the author of Don't Worry, It Gets Worse.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2015 Alida Nugent

Introduction

It’s an unseasonably warm winter morning, and I am in a good mood. The first thing I see when I arrive at work, twenty minutes late, is an e-mail. The subject line reads “Be Safe,” and it is e-addressed to three of my girlfriends.

“Hey,” it begins. Innocuous start. I am intrigued because the last time this friend sent me an e-mail, it was about paying her forty dollars for an all-you-can-drink brunch in Lower Manhattan.

“Looks like there was an attempted assault in your neighborhood.” I nod slowly and sip my coffee, like go on, you have my attention. “Just be extra vigilant.” It ends with a news link, as proof. I click it.

A man pushed a woman down to the ground while she was walking on the same block on which I buy my eggs, and she was now in the hospital. I think about myself on that block, hands full with bags of chips, Brie, and diet ginger ale.

The woman would survive, the article said, but her attacker had gotten away. The police released a description whose sole detail was the fact that the man “wore a sweatshirt.” The comments in the article were about how stupid the woman was for walking home so late. Again, I think about myself, walking home tipsy from two-martini happy hour. I think about two a.m., when I don’t have enough money in my wallet for a cab. I think about risk.

My friend Caroline responds to this e-mail first. “I walk that way a lot. This makes me VERY NERVOUS.” For once, I don’t find the caps overkill.

I pitch in next: “Guess it’s good I already hold my keys like they’re Wolverine claws!” I add a little humor to mask what I really want to say: “I’m always afraid of walking alone at night.” “Do we have to be worried everywhere we go?” And, of course:

“It could have been me.”

These are thoughts I have all too frequently, not just when something happens on my block, or in Brooklyn, or in New York. It’s because this type of story is unavoidable anywhere you are. Every time you read the news or turn on the TV, it’s like some sort of monstrous Groundhog Day: assaults that happen to women on a college campus, or on a street, or in the house of someone they trusted, or while on a jog around the neighborhood. And every day, we read these stories silently, at our desks or on our phones, finding reasons why it wouldn’t have been us.

Well, I don’t really walk home that late. I usually take a cab. I try not to get too drunk. I try not to take drinks from other people. I am so good at following my gut. I am so vigilant. I look behind me, even when I’m wearing headphones.

But still, we know the truth. We know that it could always, always, be us. Or it was us. Or it was our best friend, or sister, or roommate. We know that walking late could be six p.m. or one a.m. We know that our gut is sometimes wrong. We know that we like to drink, and have fun, and meet new people. We know that we can always be wrong about the people we let our guard down around. We know why we are always scared.

So, to make us feel safer, we give each other tips.

Women are full of tips. There are good tips, like which translucent powder to use and how to wear the right Spanx for particular dresses. There are recommendations of cheap yoga places and lunch spots and lemony olive oil. There are other tips—never leave your drink unattended, give your friends the address of the restaurant where you’re meeting that guy—that are more about preserving life than hairstyles. Both are normal and needed.

At the very least, these tips serve to remind me how completely absurd it is to be a woman these days. In the same GChat conversation, you can talk about the best way to use a curling iron, and whether pepper spray is legal in your state. The answer is to curl some pieces of hair toward your face and other pieces away from your face, and in New York State, at least, it is legal. Or you might talk about the best shows to watch on Netflix when you are hungover, followed by how to turn down a drink in a way that is both nice and assertive enough to end the conversation. The answer to this is Gilmore Girls, and that you are going sober for your boyfriend, Fast and Furious franchise star Vin Diesel.

I should point out that these frustrating ironies of modern womanhood don’t affect how much I love being a woman. When I wear the suggested powder and it doesn’t fade all day, and I come home with a porcelain-doll face with no creases or oil slicks, I feel on top of the world. When I get to dance to “All the Single Ladies,” or have a girls’ night out where I shovel goat cheese salads into my face, or read about other greater women like Malala Yousafzai, I’m pretty thrilled to be a woman. However, with these triumphs comes the reminder that women have only been able to vote in the United States for less than one hundred years, or that in 2010, two-thirds of the world’s illiterate were women, or, according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), a woman is sexually assaulted every 107 seconds. So. The world feels less like “how lovely to be a woman!” and more like “being a woman is objectively worse in the scheme of things!”

The night of the e-mail chain, I had to walk down that same street where the woman was jumped. On that short walk home, I was reminded of how much more real my fear of the dark is, now that I am older. Each time I step off the subway and make the five-minute walk to my door, I feel nervous. I look for safety points that put my mind at ease. People with baby carriages, couples, street lights, open stores, and other women. I find myself behind a shadowy figure who turns sharply at the sound of my boot heels approaching. She is a pretty Asian girl in absolutely stellar maroon pants. Both of us relax and half-smile when our eyes meet. We are relieved. We continue walking in a distant single file, feeling the safety in numbers.

I think about her, my friends, my roommate waiting for me when I close the door behind me, and all the women in my life that send me e-mails and give me tips. We are each other ’s relief in a world where relief is hard to come by.

It took me a long time to call myself a feminist. It took me an even longer time to say it out loud. And after that happened, I had to start explaining myself to people. A lot. This can be fun if you’re the type of person who, every once in a while, likes it when people tell you to your face why they think you’re an idiot.

Calling yourself a feminist is like making a comment on the Internet in real life: there’s always somebody who is going to disagree with your beliefs, and that person is going to express this disagreement with great passion and little digs at your life choices. Some people won’t like you as much anymore. You will be uncomfortable and end up learning nasty truths about some people you thought you respected. Believe me: I’ve dropped the f-bomb at parties, when I’ve mistaken two glasses of whiskey for comfort. Rookie mistake! Parties are awful and you should never be comfortable at them. And if you are looking for a surefire way to turn a comfortable party into a very alcohol-fueled romp through gender politics, bring up feminism.

It happens the same way pretty much every time. I’ll be in a conversation with a group of people about something topical. These people seem pretty cool, I think. One of them has a nose ring, which has been on my cool barometer since 1992. Then, I...