Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

A man could say he was taking the day to go fishing with his son, while a mother was usually better off hiding the fact that she took a long lunch to run her child to the doctor’s office. Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn’t play our cards right.)

How did we know when behavior was inappropriate? We just did. Any woman over the age of fourteen probably did. Believe it or not, we didn’t want to be offended. We weren’t sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to show up and offend us so that we would have something to do that day. In fact, we made dozens of excuses not to be. We gave the benefit of the doubt. We took a man’s comment about the way our high heels made our calves look as well intentioned. We understood the desire for us to draw a line in the sand—this was okay, this was not okay. No such line existed, or at least not one that we could paint. But trust that by the time we were working, our meters had been tested dozens of times over. We were experts in our field.

“Trouble has a way of multiplying, doesn’t it?” she said to Rosalita, who didn’t know whether that was true, only that trouble metastasized if it went untreated.

We never understood the tendency to underestimate us, we who had been baptized and delivered through pain, who grinned and bore agonies while managing to draw on wing-tipped eyeliner with a surgically steady hand. We plucked our eyebrows, waxed our upper lips, got razor burn on our crotches, held blades to the cups of our armpits. Shoes tore holes in the skin of our heels and crippled the balls of our feet. We endured labor and childbirth and C-sections, during which doctors literally set our intestines on a table next to our bodies while we were awake. We got acid facials. We punctured our foreheads with Botox and filled our lips and our breasts. We pierced our ears and wore pants that were too tight. We got too much sun. We punished our bodies in spin class. All these tiny sacrifices to make us appear more lithe and ladylike—the female of the species. The weaker sex. Secretly, they toughened our hides, sharpened our edges. We were tougher than we looked. The only difference was that now we were finally letting on.

It was impossible to remember a time before this instinctive and immediate fear for our safety had set in, the need to glance over our backs when crossing an empty parking lot, to check beneath our cars, to bristle when a strange man walked behind us too closely, to startle when he stopped us to ask the time. The realization that this fear was particular to us came later, that, unlike the boys with whom we played in cul-de-sacs when we were little, we would never outgrow the cautionary tales. There would forever be strangers offering us candy.

Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.