I remember when I was a young teenager an older woman gave me some advice which stayed with me: If you ever get a bad feeling about a situation, trust it. Behave as if the feeling is true and extract yourself from the situation if you possibly can.
She elaborated on this, and I can’t remember what she said exactly, but there were examples. One was: If you think someone is following you home, assume that they are and respond accordingly, by, for example, trying to hide somewhere. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And you hid for no reason, but there’s nothing wrong with overreacting in a situation like that. Actually I think she said: You will never regret overreacting in a situation like that. There are instances when this advice has been very useful to me.
For example, I remember when I was about 16 or 17, I was walking home one night from a night out. It would have been 2 or 3 in the morning. I was on my street and a car drove up behind me and parked a few metres in front, slightly further along on the pavement, at a spot which I was soon to walk past.
The spot where it parked struck me as odd. It was in front of a bolted gate, but outside a building which I knew wasn’t residential and wouldn’t have been open at night. I thought the car had seemed to stop very suddenly too. I couldn’t think of why someone would be stopping so quickly outside this particular building so late at night.
This was enough to make me apprehensive about walking past it, so I crossed the road and walked into the garden of the nearest building. This wasn’t a residential building either, so there wasn’t necessarily going to be anyone around to help. But I decided that walking further down the road was riskier, and this building was surrounded by a brick wall and a large garden so I knew I could hide there. I didn’t want to run and let them know I was alarmed.
I walked up the drive, as if this was where I had intended to go all along, and then crouched down and crept across the front of the building, then back along the wall surrounding the drive, out towards the street. I hid between a bush and the front wall, which was really a mix of a wall about waist height and then a metal bar fence above that.
I wanted to have easy access to the street and to avoid backing myself into a corner if the car followed me into the drive. I didn’t want to peer through the fence but I could tell the car had turned its lights off.
Then I heard the car door open and someone got out and walked up and down the street. A light turned on. I don’t think it was the car light because it seemed to move and the car wasn’t making noise. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was a torch. If it happened now I would assume a phone, but phones didn’t all have torches at that time. I thought a person with a torch was walking back down the street, towards where I was hiding.
Something about the torch struck me as almost more alarming than the car. I texted my brother to ask if anyone was in the house, said there was a strange car, and so to come out to the street and make noise if he was there. I don’t remember how I phrased it, but I think I only sent one message and didn’t spend long writing it. Perhaps if the phrasing was chaotic that communicated a sense of urgency.
Then I could hear someone shouting something from the car. The person who was walking around walked along the edge of the wall where I was hiding. Then there was more shouting, from the car and in the street. The person ran back to the car and I stood up. The car sped off.
My brother, who would have been around 14 or 15, was standing in the street with his friend. One was waving around a baseball bat and the other an umbrella. Not the most menacing display, but enough of a disturbance to whatever the people in the car had planned, anyway.
I thought of this when the Russell Brand news came out this week. Not because that advice of “If you ever get a bad feeling about a situation, extract yourself if you possibly can” would have been of any use at all in that context.
The car story of mine (which is nothing like how harrasment or sexual abuse generally tends to work, or anything like most of my experiences of it either) is the type of instance when such advice is most pertinent, and even then it wasn’t really much use. The more salient factors were that this happened on a street I knew well and that I had someone nearby who could help me. Trusting that bad feeling and extracting myself was only one part of the solution, even in that case.
And I believe that predatorial people like Brand are skilled at creating environments and situations in which bad feelings are very hard to act on. Either because you fear professional consequences. Or because their behaviour is so transgressive and unpredictable you are worried it will escalate in an unforseeable direction. Or maybe because you are so young you don’t trust your read of the situation. Or because they are very good at presenting themselves as wounded or vulnerable and making you feel guilty about that. I think most of us feel a sense of obligation and guilt towards other people, and these people don’t. But they are very good at manipulating those feelings in others.
Actually I believe this is a source of enjoyment to them. Or maybe enjoyment is the wrong word, maybe it’s more like entertainment. Or maybe it doesn’t give them any good feeling at all, but nothing else they do does either. But I do think that taking up space in your life, and taking up your time, making themselves a problem for you to manage, is part of their project. And that this something they have a lot of practice in, and will actively work to do. And so, it is naive to think that, if someone like this wants to drag you into their orbit, then extracting yourself will be easy, or even possible.
So I don’t think that advice is useful in a situation like Brand’s at all, but it did come to mind anyway, because I think it speaks to how our culture treats and socialises women. And the operations of a predator like Brand, and the fact that he is enabled to operate like this, is inseparable from this.
Extracting yourself from a situation which makes you uncomfortable is a non confrontational, unaggressive response. And still, I did need to be given permission to do this, and told this is something I shouldn’t be embarrassed to do. And I don’t think this is specific to me.
I think that, if you are a woman, behaving as if the main responsibility you have is to yourself can actually feel slightly transgressive, even in situations which are plainly potentially unsafe. So this was actually very good, useful advice. And I thought I’d pass it on here. Not because it is applicable to every or many situations, but because it might come in useful in a few. And because it might help you see some things a little differently, and perhaps carry less guilt.
Till next time xxxx
Some Recent Work and Updates:
I wrote about celebrity culture and social media and Nothing Special, a book which says something new about all of this, without ever talking about it at all for The New Republic.
I wrote about Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes for a little book slot piece.
I spoke to the Irish Examiner about writing my book.
****My book is out in the US in a few weeks so pre order please.****
Flowers: