![]() ![]() ![]() That we could dole out fear and pain if we wanted. I’d never been taught that women could also be scary. ![]() Whatever age I was when I first watched I Spit on Your Grave, I was far too young. Poverty and sexual harassment and daily inequality. And of course, there were plenty of other indignities to witness too. ![]() It was a grinding down, a daily reminder that I was prey. I was six, I was eight, I was ten, and then I was in puberty, and men would shout out all the things they planned to teach me if given the chance. I remember passing a guy in an alley as my big sister growled, “Don’t look.” Of course I looked, and the man smiled at my childish shock as he stroked himself. I remember a man calling me to his car to show me he wore no pants. I don’t remember the first peeping Tom or obscene phone call, because I was still in the cradle, thrust into a world where my older sisters were already hunted. The city was a paradise and it was a gauntlet, because my father left before I was born and we were alone, a mother and four daughters. There were rumbling buses and singing ice cream trucks, crowded corner stores and constant foot traffic. We lived in the city and could walk anywhere: to school, to the store, to the huge park across the street, our bare feet burning on soft black asphalt or bruised from graveled alleyways. I was born in 1972 into a family of women. ![]()
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