For this week’s newsletter I was planning to give you a tiredness update - I know, you lucky things! - but then Sarah Everard got killed walking home and so yesterday I wrote about that instead.
Then, last night, I read Marisa Bate’s newsletter on the same topic and she put things so well, so with her permission I’m sharing her words here instead.
By Marisa Bate
Where to even start? For me, I think back to being at a summer play scheme on Victoria Street while my mum was at work. I was 7 or 8 years old. Every Wednesday, we’d be marched down to the nearby newsagents with a sweaty 50p in our little hands to buy sweets and then onwards to St James’s Park for games. But before we left on this adventure, the adults looking after us made sure we’d taken off our name tags in case a stranger tried to “talk” to us. By “talk” they literally meant “lure”, “steal”, “kidnap”. Later on as a teenager, many at my school knew Milly Dowler. When I got to university, one of my friends knew Meredith Kercher. And just like they’d said, strangers are lurking and girls go missing.
Another memory. I'm a bit younger. We're in a hotel in Italy having breakfast. I can feel someone looking at me through a window. I can see his eyes, the top of his head. Look mummy. I point to him. Then he’s gone. But my mum knew this man because she’d already realised he was stalking us. She went to the police. I remember the investigators in blue jeans and cream linen blazers speaking in English with my mother. Together they devised a trap (us) and they caught him.
Long before then, when I was just a baby, my mum had another stalker, on and off for years. He’d ring the doorbell, ring the phone, fingerprints were left on windows. My brother can remember my mother screaming “just fuck off!” down the phone to the menacing silence at the other end. He was never caught.
So really, even before I was groped one day at school, even before I had to complain about the regular customer at my Saturday job because he always stood in a spot that meant I had to brush by him, even before the wolf-whistling, even before the time a whole pub full of men banged pool cues on a window so hard I thought it would shatter as I walked past . Even before a man in a van stopped and asked me for directions and got his dick out and started masturbating, even before a group of men cornered me on the way to a friends house on New Year’s Eve and as I called my boyfriend crying, one of them said, give it up lads, you’re frightening her, even before the things I don’t want to write here, even before all of that— I knew there was a threat. And that threat came from men.
And that is where this starts: the threat. It is all we’ve ever known, and we know it so well. Your heart beats hardest when you’re alone at night, when there aren’t many people in the carriage, when you feel someone is walking behind you, when you realise the road is quiet or Google Maps has taken you to an alley. But sometimes it is there in broad daylight, too, when the bloke next to you leans over at 7.20am on the Jubilee line, and with thick, sweaty lips whispers, “You have beautiful legs”.
You have been warned. Don’t get in a minicab, don’t drink too much, don’t be too late, stick together. Because your mother knows the threat too, she’s felt it like hot breath on skin too, she’s walked home with ever-quickening steps and a thumping heart too, and she knows that threat is a blanket as thick as nightfall and as constant as the tide, just like you do. And she tries to stop her worst nightmare, which will also become your worst nightmare, from becoming your reality, so your life comes with warnings, and the warnings become tragedies in headlines, and now the threat - however statistically unlikely - is real. But it is also familiar. It is all you’ve ever known. It is just life. It is just something women have to deal with. Like pay gaps or being killed twice a week by a current or former partner. It is just what we know life to be so we don’t fight it, we just protect ourselves and each other: text me when you get home.
And then, when Sarah Everard disappears, it is like a bolt of electricity running under our skin. Our collective, inherited worst nightmare has come true, and we know it could have been us, and that surge of rage and sorrow and agony runs through us, and we cry for a woman we never met but we knew in some way because she was all of us. And all the silent years of threat and fear push our beating hearts into our eardrums and into our throats and down deep into the despairing pits of our stomachs.
I have plenty of thoughts about the police. And I will write about those another day. But now it’s late. And now I am 35. And I have had enough.
We also need to talk about the way we respond to white middle class women when they go missing, and how we respond to Black women, Asian women, Indigenous women, all women, when they go missing. And that conversation must have its moment.
But for now: her name was Sarah Everard.
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A few other thoughts that I’ve seen this week:
A friend on Facebook asked why there was not the same reaction when Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry were killed walking home in June 2020. She wrote: ‘What is it about their deaths that failed to trigger the same wave of collective sisterhood or womanhood that seems to have been elicited this week? I've been wondering if it's because International Women's Day has made us more collectively sensitive or 'primed' about what it means to be a woman out at night alone. Or if it's a case of the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back. Or is it, and I really hate to think this, that there are collective biases at play that have prevented people connecting what happened to these sisters as relating to what women in general experience.’
Max Morgan wrote a great blog post about what men can do.
Here is a quote from it: ‘Yes, guys, most of us are not rapists or murderers of women, but how many of us can truly, genuinely, say we’re doing everything in our power to dismantle patriarchal power structures, to call out borderline (or even more obvious) behaviour in our friendship groups and families, to examine our own behaviour and consider whether it might be contributing to the climate of fear in which women permanently abide?'.
WHAT I’M READING
This article in the Atlantic article explains why our pandemic brains are f**ked. To use a technical term.
You can view the rest of what I’m reading here:
On a lighter note...
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Thank you to my sister for introducing me to Tikka the Italian Greyound, gay icon - she/her/kween and ‘an actual bad bitch.’ Check out her fashion tips on Instagram.
WHAT I’M BUYING
Nothing! I listened to a great talk between writer and activist Sarah Wilson and shelf-help founder Toni Jones. Sarah was talking about the joy of minimalist living. She wears the same shirt she had since she was 18, reuses packaging as bin-bags and owns something like 15 pieces of clothes. I came off the call wanting to be just like her! I will live with less and feel lighter - physically and spiritually!! I will become a post consumerist anti-capitalistic trailblazer! The next day I was googling ‘spring summer cardigans.’
That’s all for now - except to say Happy Mother’s Day to my mum who reads this every week and gives me a text appraisal, including one where she told me it was ‘excellent value for money.’
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Her Name Was Sarah Everard