[An answer suggested itself recently through a meaningful encounter.]
I had just parked my car. I was walking up to the corner of Ardmore and Park, near my home in Portland, Oregon. I saw a girl approaching the same corner, coming down the hill from Washington Park. She was walking with her dog. I slowed my pace and waited for her in order to keep 6-feet distance. This happened during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Be careful,” she called to me.
I assumed that she was advising me not to approach her dog. However that turned out not to be the case. “There is a man…” she continued. She did not stop walking or even slow her stride. This encounter all took place in about 30-seconds time. At this point, she was clearly choking back tears and struggled to find words she could stand to say out loud. “He is saying he likes how people look in their clothes.”
She was closer to tears, and she was still walking. She had clearly been hurt by this man. I could guess she had been objectified, threatened or worse. She did not look as if she were limping or as if she had been knocked down or dragged.
“Sweetie, I am so sorry,” I said.
She continued to warn me. I am an old woman, by the way, approaching 60. She was maybe 12 or 13. She was trying to take care of me, the adult. “He is up by the stairs, on the trail. Be careful.”
She was walking away. I thought to ask her if we should call the police. Something stopped me from saying it. I had time to speak one sentence before she was gone. I did not have time to make sense of it all until after it was over. I said, “It is a very good thing that you had your dog with you. That dog loves you and would never let anything bad happen to you.”
“Thank you,” she said over her shoulder., still clearly trying not to cry. I was glad to feel that I had connected with her as the adult to the child. I had managed to care for her a little.
I cannot think of a more deeply moving encounter I have had in my life. I felt as if my own soul, or the collective soul of sisterhood had walked by me in that moment. I recalled the shock and terror of early realizations of objectification and endangerment: exhibitionists, stalkers, pornography in Dad’s apartment came back on me in a rush, the man who pulled up and asked me out the window of his car if I wanted to be a model. Of course I wanted to be beautiful and seen. Well, then, I should get in his car. He had a studio he would take me to. Such a rush of feelings for myself, my sister, the girl with the dog. Her posture had been upright. She had been energetic. But the effort of bravely holding back tears tends to collapse the ribs at the diaphragm, to disable the breath, and round the spine. I so did not want this for her, or for any of us.
Looking back on what I did not say, and what I did say, I can’t conclude anything. I am not very sorry about not mentioning the police. I am glad I invoked love, and its nearness by naming her dog. I am glad I invoked protection.
Getting back to the bigger question of what I want to offer a world in which there are myriad dehumanizing, objectifying forces, I think of George Floyd and the police force that took away his breath. I think of “human resources” and people’s work being taken from them with little regard for their personhood or happiness, how happiness is trivialized. I think of the Hustler magazine cover at Dad’s apartment with a naked woman being fed through a meat grinder to the wonder of my 12-year old eyes. I heard that the Taliban is exporting live girls hidden in coffins as part of their human trafficking goals.
In the face of dehumanizing forces, in the face of objectification, the discounting or disregard of the subjective experience of another, what would I give the world? I would give the people themselves back, their humanity and subjective experience. All I want for that precious girl walking her dog is that she will let the tears flow and move beyond them in full possession of herself, at her full height, with all her energy, with her greatest joys first in mind. I wish for her to always gather the best of herself together in her own warm embrace, and to always say, “This is who I am. I define and make myself according to my pleasure and take no one’s input at all to heart.“ I would give her the freedom to prize her humanity and prioritize her feelings, her goals, her values. I would give her a safe place to simply be who she is. I would give it to all of us.
