‘Run Like a Girl’ by Rachel Andrews

NIGHT RUNNING

A November evening. I’m running in the dark. The grey cold shrouds me, street lights are beginning to clank on. I’m on a downslope, ten minutes from home. I feel a thud by my right eye, as if I’ve been fiercely smacked. There’s no one around and I stand for a second or two, confused, until I notice at my feet a tennis ball, which must have come whizzing from one side of the street to the other. ‘It was them,’ shouts a boy across the road, pointing down an alleyway. The alleyway is dark, silent, the culprits, whoever they are, already sucked into the night. I pick up the tennis ball, take it home. Over the next few days, my eye socket turns yellow, green, purple, black. I consider my options. ‘Is there a running track nearby?’ There is no running track nearby. Besides, I run on the streets because it is free, because I feel free, because I can run at a time and distance of my choosing, because I can run alone if I need to. I run so I can forget who I am, what I am, the body that is mine. Let’s not kid ourselves. I mull again over my choices. Should I run with my mobile phone, which is cumbersome and awkward? Carry some pepper spray? Run only in daylight? Am I overreacting? I’m angry, frustrated. I’m helpless, too. Exhausted. My whole life, checking myself: how I walk, where I walk, what I wear, where I run, if I run. Now, here too, in my small home city? In the end, I change my route, try to avoid alleyways. I still run in the dark. I’m nervous, steeled for trouble. But in the winter, when the black folds in by four in the afternoon, what else am I supposed to do?

BODY MEMORY

March 28, 2018. A rape trial has ended in Belfast. Two members of the local rugby team, young men with international careers, prestige, and swagger, have been acquitted after a three-and-a-half-hour deliberation. I’m not going up against the Ulster rugby, the young woman messaged her friend, before she was persuaded to go to the police anyway. Here is Ulster Rugby, on a WhatsApp group, the day after the night before. We are all top shaggers. There was a bit of spit roasting going on last night fellas. It was like a merry go round at the carnival. Rallies are planned across Ireland to protest the verdict. The hashtag #IBelieveHer circulates on social media. Then the pushback. A man on Twitter explains the situation. The woman got involved in a threesome; she was caught out; she cried rape. The man is concerned for the rugby players, the 4 lads and their families. ‘Think of the damage,’ he writes. Think of the damage. Those lads. We’ve been here before. But let’s go again, one more round for the cheerleaders. A female writer friend involved in Gaelic games observes: I love sport but there can be huge ugliness there as well ... entitlement, contempt for women, the idea that these men are still heroes/legends to so many.

Yes, and the body has memory, writes Claudia Rankine about the bad line calls and comments that suggest the black body of Serena Williams has no place on the historically white space of the tennis courts. The phrase lodges inside me. When I run on my city streets, my body holds the memory of the WhatsApp messages, of the Twitter feeds, of the eight days the woman in Belfast spent on the witness stand, of the cross-examinations by four different barristers. It holds the memory of the female runners who were murdered in Michigan, New York and Massachusetts in 2016; the memory of Mollie Tibbetts, twenty-years-old, killed in 2018 while out running near her home in Iowa; the memory of the whizzing tennis ball; the memory of the catcalls and whistles that have been caught and kept down through the years, when I have been running in Strasbourg, Chicago, London, Dublin.

‘Smile, it might never happen.’ ‘Nice, very nice.’

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Hi, can I talk to you?’ ‘Mmmmmmm!’

Once the body has been traumatized, it can never return to a time before the intrusion; its felt memory is forever anxious, disturbed. We protest the verdict in Belfast because the woman’s distress is felt through her, by us. We protest because our bodies know the dead weight of the shame, feel the constrict of the blame, anticipate it before it comes our way ... they’ll say it was consensual, she messaged her friend, I was up for it, stupid little girl now regretting it ... We know what it takes to push up from under that heaviness, the load we carry from the moment we come into our being, the load that tells us that if we didn’t want it we shouldn’t have gonetherewornthatsaidthosethings. Thing is, she said, I would report it if I knew they would get done. But they won’t. And that’s just an unnecessary stress for me ... it will be a case of my word against theirs. I’m holding the memory of her words as I run, they are imprinted onto my physical self, embedded into my consciousness, these memories that can never be erased.

IN HER PLACE

In her 1980 essay, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, Iris Marion Young examines the way women are socialized to experience their bodies in a male-dominated environment. ‘Woman,’ she writes, ‘lives her body as object as well as subject.’

The objectifying regard which ‘keeps her in her place’ can also account for why women frequently tend not to move openly, keeping their limbs enclosed around themselves. To open her body in free active and open extension and bold outward directedness is for a woman to invite objectification ... For many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space. *

When I run I look straight ahead, jaw set, arms held steady at the side. I’ve kept running, on the whole, despite the stares, the comments. Sometimes, it all gets too much. My sister tried running on the streets of Paris, but backed into the enclosed space of the gym after she was teased and humiliated by men on the street. I’ve also joined gyms, periodically, and it’s true they can feel safer: you are less exposed, there are other women. I’m still living my body as object, though, and the gym, with its mirrored walls, its loud, persistent music, encourages this. In the movie What Women Want, Mel Gibson plays a cynical ad man, who gives himself an electric shock and for a time can hear the thoughts of women. He figures out how to target running shoes to the female market, by imagining up the road as a place where women can set themselves aside, drag themselves out of the game – the only thing the road cares about ... is that you pay it a visit once in a while. Nice pitch, Mel. Nice illusion, too. It’s an illusion I’ve bought into, buy into still. It is what women want, what this woman wants, at any rate. Despite everything, when I run in open space I still hope to carve out my own self-determination: do I get 15, 20 minutes, before I am pulled back into my body, before the cage closes around, seals me within?

Since Young wrote her essay, there’s been something of a push towards female body confidence. Beyoncé has placed a version (sculpted, sculpted) of the voluptuous female body front and centre on stage and screen. Serena Williams, who has contended with The New York Times deconstructing her physique as implicitly unfeminine, posed for Sports Illustrated in a thong bikini. Lindy West, Roxane Gay, have asserted a public space for fat women in their journalism and memoir-writing. West and Gay push at capitalism, at patriarchal mores, at the decree that women make themselves small, neat, that they fold their arms, cross their knees. (You’re like a giraffe, my shorter friends would say to me, you should bend up your legs, put them away.) They shout loud, because they have to, their voices arched against those that would pound at girls and women, that would repeat the mantra I have heard across a lifetime: take up less space.

* The essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ also forms part of Young’s essay collection On Female Body Experience, which was published in 2005.

*

My daughter, aged 11, is tall for her age, close to the tallest in her classroom. ‘I don’t like being this height.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to be small, like the other girls.’

Beyoncé notwithstanding, a lesson already learned.

*

In the mid-1970s, for a project she titled ‘Let’s take Back our Space’, the German artist Marianne Wex snapped photos of men and women on the streets of Hamburg, and collated them into the distinctions between the ways men and women move through the world. Her sitting male subjects lean forward, their legs thrown apart; the women sit upright, legs pulled together. When the men are standing in repose, they open their bodies, lean up against structures; the females stand straight, fold their arms, cross their feet. Wex’s work still makes sense today, in the era of manspreading (an ad on the New York subway: Dude ... Stop the Spread, Please. It’s a space issue) and at least some form of public discussion about the way the male body often colonizes the space it occupies, just as women reduce the space they take up. Women runners have written open letters to male counterparts, reminding them that we live with the threat of violence, or more subtle forms of bodily invasion, and asked them to take account of this when they run. An Australian website even laid some basic steps:

• Don’t run directly behind us at the same pace. Either overtake or fall behind.

• When you’re overtaking us, say something like, ‘Passing on your left’. And then pass quickly.

• Don’t hang around running trails or paths wearing a hoodie and doing nothing in particular.

• Smile and/or wave as you run past us — we like feeling like we’re part of a community. But ignoring us works fine too, if that’s your thing.

• Don’t stop and chat. Mid-run is no place to strike up a new friendship.

• Keep eye contact to a minimum. Anything longer than two seconds is creepy.

• Give us a wide berth when you’re passing and share the footpath. Even better, step off to the side. You already have global domination; you can give us a bit of concrete. *

On a day in spring, I go out running. It’s one of those hazy Irish days, cloudy and milky cool. My route takes me up suburban hills and down them. Today is quiet, it’s the weekend, there are few people about. After a time, I hear footsteps thumping to my rear, the heavy breath of another runner coming up behind. I don’t turn my head, afraid of giving myself away. I keep up my stride, cross my fingers. Please be a woman, I think.

* Published by www.news.com.au in 2016.

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

What would a city that is safe for women look like? asked the Guardian in 2018. Better lighting, fewer obstacles to hide behind, no dark alleyways or high walls, more eyes on the street. A few years back, I worked a late shift in a newspaper, finishing somewhere around 11.30pm. Especially in summer, when the bright fades so slowly into night, I would waver. Could I walk, or should I take a taxi? I did not earn much, taxis are expensive, my house was only half an hour on foot. Plenty of times, I chose to walk. But I was not at ease. I didn’t dawdle, crossed the street to avoid anyone who might be walking behind me, or coming in my direction, especially if they were male, especially if they were alone. If a patch of road was dark, I dodged it if I could, rushed through it if I couldn’t. The city centre was not far, but it receded fast behind, the area quickly turned still, residential. I walked past quiet houses, closed doors, long gardens behind tall gates. On the most silent of the streets, I would step off the footpath into the middle of the road, putting space between me and the huddles of darkness, the danger in the shadows.

The problem, of course, is that cities have been designed by men, for men. The territory belongs to them, and they make claim to it. LeFevbre’s famous ‘right to the city’ envisaged the urban as a collective space, a meeting ground for ideas, a shared creative environment. When I run, I feel only a glancing sense of these observations. I cross territories, running on roads that have been colonized by the car, or into suburbs I am not supposed to permeate. I could think of myself as a spy, an infiltrator, except that I cannot make myself not be seen. Instead, I am running the gauntlet of my fears, my anticipation. Which street to turn onto? Which road to cross? Which risk to avoid? I am watchful, defensive, prohibited.

When I finished university, I bounced through European cities. I spent time in the US. Some places were better, some worse. None of them were mine. ‘New York City is, like most cities, a manscape,’ writes Rebecca Solnit. ‘Walking down the city streets, young women get harassed in ways that tell them that this is not their world, their city, their street; that their freedom of movement and association is liable to be undermined at any time; and that a lot of strangers expect obedience and attention from them.’ *

I’ve been followed by men I didn’t know in Marseille, in Geneva, in Strasbourg, in Paris. On a main street in Chicago, a fat man walked up to me, pinched my bum, darted away giggling as I shouted after him. In Brussels, where I lived for a summer, so oppressive was the unwanted attention I began wearing jeans, even when the sun blistered down. I tried running in London, but struggled to carve out a route in a metropolis that was constantly changing, one street opening up, another closing down, construction sites everywhere. I loved London, plotted its streets according to the songs I had listened to as a teenager: Gerry Rafferty sounding out Baker Street, Lloyd Cole singing Charlotte Street. I hung on these male singers’ coattails, looked for a similar ownership. I could never find it. LeFevbre’s thesis has been adopted by feminist organizations highlighting the connection between urban planning and architecture that is designed for only men’s behaviour and needs. It’s hard to know how seriously they are being taken. Responses to the Guardian article, which spotlighted ways of supporting women to exist confidently in public space, veered from curious (Interesting. I had never considered the role of architecture and city planning in women’s safety) to dismissive (Cities by their nature are full of massive risks to well being ... It has nothing to do with gender). In San Sebastián, on Spain’s north coast, a new bylaw ensures all entrances to new housing buildings are on street level, which avoids the creation of hiding places. In Vienna, the government improved street lighting, widened pavements, designed social housing for the needs of women. In Melbourne, a few years after nine CCTV cameras were installed on the street where Jill Meagher was raped and murdered, the council debated their removal, arguing the project was too expensive to maintain.

* Solnit wrote this as part of her introduction to the essay ‘City of Women’, which featured in Nonstop Metropolis, a project that reimagined New York City through a series of maps.

*

It wasn’t a woman behind me. It was a man, coming up too close, too fast. If I had known then that somebody could see me, would I have felt less anxious? Would I have felt less afraid?

WHY RUN?

May 2018. Running in evening time, days elongating with the season change. The air is clear, still, no wind. It’s been a tough day, leaving the house is akin to a breakout. But my legs are tired, heavy even at the start. I have to will myself to not stop and walk. Another runner spreads out in front of me, her legs kicking up fast. The dipping sun streams in and out of the trees. It’s been such a long winter, and it’s still not really warm. We had snow in March, now they tell us the floods are coming. Turning uphill, straight into the sunlight, rays pulling downwards into the hills, the clouds grey-white, tugging along. My pace has picked up, I’m feeling better, my legs have continued moving, one following the other. A wise friend once said: ‘It is not about being happy, it’s about keeping going.’ Maybe this is what running is, at least what I would like it to be, if I could only set them aside, all those other considerations. Running is keeping going, forward. As I near my home, I see a white cat from the neighbourhood crossing through someone’s front garden. I watch him jump up and over a wall, his ears flattening as he sniffs the earthen ground, his fur both fluffier and dirtier than I remember.

The following sources were invaluable in writing this essay:

• Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the right to the city, published in his 1968 book of the same name.

• Claudia Rankine’s work on body and memory in the book Citizen, published in 2014.

• Rebecca Solnit’s work on re-imagining New York City, particularly the essay ‘City of Women’, published in 2016.

• Iris Marion Young’s essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, first published in 1980, as well as her work on female body experience.

• Marianne Wex’s photographs from the project Let’s Take Back Our Space.

• I also sourced articles from thejournal.ie, irishtimes.com and theindependent.ie in relation to the Belfast rape trial. I sourced these originally between April and May 2018.

• The information from news.com.au was originally sourced in April and May 2018.

From issue #9: autumn/winter 2019

About the Author
Rachel Andrews’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, n+1, Brick, The Stinging Fly, Longreads, and The Dublin Review. In 2018, she was runner up in the inaugural Hubert Butler Essay Prize and in 2017 was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize and the Notting Hill Essay Prize.