street life
don’t wink at me
Changing the side of the street I walk home on to avoid having to avoid the strenuously charming guy who always seems to be patrolling in front of his shop – often with a pretty girl hanging on his arm, always a different girl each time – and whose carefully-established friendliness and benign compliments have now veered into lewd winks which topple my thoughts into a far less interesting range of topics than they otherwise inhabit. I now wish I’d not been so friendly and I dislike having to meter my natural warmth in order to evade some stranger’s mild sexual aggression. I don’t like the sensation that he implies he and I are linked together in some kind of secret agreement. We ain’t.
2 comments on “don’t wink at me”
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I think that it is a very real fear that so many (women especially) understand all too sadly. We unfortunately know the WHY we feel that way, and that WHY is not right at all.
I think so too, Sophie, and it interests me to think how all these years I wondered why I so often had a very strong response to what seemed – on the surface – fairly harmless acts, or small-scale offences, or even seemed complimentary. For I long time I have known I could tell the difference, that every woman can, between cleanly expressed sexual interest and objectification, between a genuine compliment and sleaze, between friendliness and manipulation. But it always seemed so hard to get men to understand why the second category bothered me so much.
So happy the conversations are beginning to be more shared now, lately.