A well-intentioned social media uproar after Sarah Everard’s murder shows the impossibility of mitigating misogyny. “I live less than five minutes from where Sarah Everard went missing. Everyone is on high alert,” an apparently feminist man named Stuart Edwards tweeted on March 9.
It had been six days since a London Metropolitan police officer kidnapped 33-year-old marketing executive Sarah Everard while she was walking home, and one day before her remains were discovered in Kent “Aside from giving as much space as possible on quieter streets and keeping face visible,” Edwards continued, “is there anything else men can reasonably do to reduce the anxiety/spook factor?” The women of Twitter seized the opportunity to share their thoughts.
Walking home is not safe for many women, especially trans women and Black and brown women. Walking home is safe, or does not carry a threat of unsafety, for white men, individuals who are disproportionately responsible for attacks on the first group of people. Dozens of women on Twitter offered their perspectives on what men should do to make them feel safe: “If you’re walking behind a woman, even at a distance, and it’s dark, cross over to the other side of the road and walk there instead,” one user said. Another suggested that men, “Give all women space. Never run close to them when jogging, esp in the dark — I’m endlessly astonished at how many men do this. Offer to walk female friends home.”
Asking women how they might feel less anxious on the street will not resuscitate Everard , or any other woman whose abuse, kidnapping, harassment, rape, and murder was not seen as universally objectionable and therefore did not garner international media attention. The question itself is a gross understatement of the “spook” that Everard likely felt prior to her own kidnapping. Still, Edwards got what he wanted in a deluge of commentary from women who both A) praised him for asking the question and B) offered advice that ranged from suggesting men cross the street or talk on the phone loudly to one’s mother, as if men with mothers have never raped.
I wondered what the appeal was of this tweet. That the author be thought of as conscientious? That he be seen as trying? That there should be a designated space for women on Twitter to respond to and contend with the unsafety of the world? Or that safety can be seen as achievable, delivered to women by men via a series of discrete acts, such as giving space and keeping one’s face visible? (An alternate read: Space can be giveth and space can be taketh away; predation involves masking, safety requires unmasking by way of a hood, cap or hat; an alternate, alternate read: men’s undressing makes them less scary to women, whose undressing makes them more attainable to men.)
The question of what men can do in public is not an unnecessary one, but its presence on Twitter seems to imply a solution to what largely feels like an unsalvageable issue. It’s a question of who and which bodies control public space, of who and which bodies hold institutional power and thus interpersonal power, and of who and which bodies get to return home at night without unearthing the adrenaline and anxiety that comes with the possibility of attack.
Representations of safety do not create safety; symbols of respect do not suffice for material respect.
The language in the replies focus mainly on space, the room between a supposed unthreatening and misunderstood man and a paranoid woman. Edwards’ language hints at an awareness that the mere physicality of men presents a threat to women, but this is where self-awareness ends. That’s likely because the tweet is less about self awareness than awareness of the self’s impact on women. Edwards is aware that men cause harm, and that men support and directly benefit from patriarchy, but is not yet aware how he participates in patriarchy. This is evidenced by the fact he wants his dangerousness explained to him. Mostly, this language is instructive of and would seem to suggest that distance begets safety and closeness predicts violence.
Is that really all there is to a safe walk home? For men to keep their distance from women? If it’s the potentiality of men that is frightening — rather, the potentiality of a cisgender man enacting his own cisgender heterosexual masculinity — then men are most often scary in the lead-up to harm. The lead-up is when you don’t know what will happen. During the harm there’s little question about what’s happening to you.