A train, a living room, and why I’m fighting

Scene I: Five American students who are studying abroad in Europe are on a train back from a festival. The ride is pretty long, so they exchange stories to pass the time. Four are math majors, one is an English major. The English major K* is particularly excited by the storytelling, and is the most frequent contributor. She calls her first story her “stalker story” (“Everyone has a stalker story.”). She talks about a disturbed boy at her school who was put into a mental hospital after intentionally flooding an entire dorm, but was released and returned to campus. This boy had developed an obsession with her, secretly videotaping her conversations with friends and posting these on YouTube, alongside his own masturbatory fantasies and rants. He slept outside her door and once came into her room covered in blood after intentionally smashing his head on a water fountain. After he forced her into his room and threatened to kill her, she went to her campus security for help.

They told her that he’s exaggerating and it can’t be as bad as she
says. After the videos on YouTube become more and more violent and
threatening, she went to the police to get a restraining order. They
said they can’t serve it to the boy unless he comes to court. He didn’t.
In the meantime, he had once again been kicked out of school, but
another group of male students smuggled him back on campus. When K* and
her best friend encountered these students by chance at the library, the
boys physically attacked the two, chasing them all the way to the
campus security office. K* told the campus security that the boy was on
campus illegally and even gave them the apartment where she was sure he
was staying, but the campus police didn’t believe her. Much later, it
turns out that K* was exactly right. Her best friend transferred. One of
the math majors asks how long ago this was, and K* reveals that this
was last semester, and the reason she is in Europe is that “he can’t
follow me across an ocean.”

The other students are practically speechless, so K* goes for another
story. This time, it’s about going to a club her first week in Europe,
pushing a guy away who is getting too close, and being punched in return
while club employees look on. Her friend, the one who made K* go to the
club against her intentions, ignored her requests to leave and told her
to “shake it off.” K* assures the other students that this was not
nearly as bad as the time she was almost kidnapped, grabbed by a man in a
truck and dragged along the road while she was out for a run around the
Army base where she lived.   It upsets her, because now just the sight
of a group of young men is enough to reduce her to panicked tears, which
makes her feel bad for being “judgmental.” “I guess I just have bad
luck,” she sighs.

Scene II: Mid-afternoon at the apartment of another American study
abroad student. Two girls are in the living room, ostensibly working on a
problem set. It’s been a few hours and they’ve been going around in
circles, so the talk gradually turns to gossip, as it always does. One
of them has recently been dumped by her boyfriend and cannot talk about
much else. She is concerned; she has been talking to her parents and her
father warned her that her ex probably thinks she is “a very slutty
girl.” The thought breaks her heart, especially because since her ex
never asked about her life, so she never had the chance to “explain”
that she usually did not start having sex so soon in a relationship. She
blames herself for “jumping into bed with him,” and for telling him
that it was not appropriate to go around saying that he didn’t care
about his appearance “because he didn’t have to make an effort to get
laid.” She wonders if she should have let it pass, or if he was right
and she did make sex too easy. Soon the topic is exhausted and the girls
move on, to how two other members of the program have been playing
games with their friend by telling her to chase a boy who the two know
is not interested, and then to how happy they are that one of their
friends has been going out more, since she had spent the first half of
the semester staying in at the insistence of her boyfriend an ocean
away.

Cut to me later that night, thinking about the conversations I’ve had
over the past two days. I’m lying in bed with my nightly stomachache, a
friendly reminder of the anorexia-turned-binging-disorder that started
in middle school and may be with me for the rest of my life. My floor is
covered in cast-offs from this morning and last night: multitudes of
pants, shirts, and jackets rejected in favor of clothes that allow me to
hide more.

This is why I am a feminist.