The Fears that Come with Being a Woman

By Chelsey Jaipersaud | Published April 15, 2022

Every Wednesday I leave my job at 8 p.m., my keys clenched tightly in my hand and my finger continuously clicking the unlock button while I nearly run to my car across the street, constantly turning my head back to make sure no one is behind me. When I reach my car, I throw my belongings on the passenger seat and immediately lock the doors while simultaneously checking the back seat.

I always thought it was just me, but I started to see more and more women talk about this and even post videos about them checking the back seat of their car to make sure no one was there. I continued to notice other little things, such as that men do not immediately turn around when they hear the footsteps of someone walking behind them or that my male friends question why I carry around pepper spray.

I even went out with a boy who asked, “Do you plan on using that pepper spray on me?” And when I responded with, “If I have to,” he laughed and said, “You chicks are crazy.”

 Are we crazy?

According to UN Women, one in three women worldwide experience physical or sexual violence.

The United Nations defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”

Women have been a subject to violence for years and although there are laws, such as the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 in place to prevent serious incidents from happening, it is still very prevalent.

“My favorite thing in the world to do is to walk on a deserted beach for miles and yet the few times I’ve had that opportunity, if I’m alone I’m always looking and if there’s a man even off in the distance I can’t enjoy it, relaxed, anymore. I start thinking about turning around or leaving the beach,” said Dr. Emily Filardo, a Psychology professor. “I feel frightened.”

Women deal with the constant fear that if they’re alone, there is a greater chance of something happening to them. The fear that is embedded within us could have easily come from our upbringing. Young girls are often told to sit properly and dress a certain way so that they don’t draw attention to themselves.

“This is so central to childhood, it just starts so young that I feel like it’s sad, but it’s become a central part of women’s psychology,” Filardo said.

Filardo explained that girls get this talk all the time:  parents will talk about how to handle yourself in certain situations to avoid any problems that can stem from it. 

Violence against women does not only affect the woman experiencing it, but everyone else involved or a part of her life. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), children who grow up in families where there is violence may suffer a range of behavioral and emotional disturbances.

Not only are some of these young girls a witness to violence against the women in their family, but when they get older they’ll be a subject to it. Unfortunately, there are some who experience sexual violence at a young age.

“Of course there are situations which men are subject to violence, but men are less often subject to sexual violence and also not from women,” Filardo said. “Most sexual violence against men is by other men.”

As a society, it is important to recognize the violence that comes from not only being a woman, but especially for a woman who is Black, Hispanic, Asian, or other.  One’s race now plays a role in the violence inflicted on women. There are also women who are part of the LGBTQ community and women who happen to fall in both spectrums.

I am Puerto Rican and Guyanese, but my physical features reflect my Hispanic side and because of that I’ve been stereotyped for it. My race has affected the way people treat me and the way I think about myself.

The term “intersectionality,” which was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American Civil Rights activist and leading scholar of the Critical Race Theory, defines it exactly. Intersectionality is described in the Oxford dictionary as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise.”

In Crenshaw’s book: “Mapping the Margins” she stated that the violence many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities such as race and class. Not only do women have to worry about their gender, but now they have to think about their ethnicity, class and sexual preference.

“Black women are targets of rape in part because of the same reasons anyone is a target, but also because Black women in our country have been perceived as ‘unrapeable’,” Filardo said, explaining that historically because it is legal to rape Black women during slavery, and even after the end of slavery, rapes of Black women were rarely prosecuted for over 100 years. 

“By the way, something that few people know about the famous Rosa Parks is that at the time she famously refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks was already an activist, and she was working on a project for the NAACP to try to bring to justice, for the first time in Alabama, a white man for raping a Black woman,” Filardo said.

With all this to think about, I started thinking of men who have transitioned into a woman or are in the process of transitioning and whether or not they have the same fears.

“When you’re a trans woman someone views you as a guy who became a woman and women are of lower status,” Filardo said.

When a male transitions to a female, in the eyes of some men that is seen as a downgrade. It has more to do with power and giving up that power when you transition into a woman. This is where the fear can start to build for trans women.

Women are constantly thinking about what they can do to protect themselves, but what if more men start thinking about ways they can protect women? I don’t just mean finding ways to stop violence against women, but stopping the stereotypes and judgments that lead to violence as well. 

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