I had a disturbing thing happen to me recently: I got an obscene phone call. What interested me about the event was not what the caller said, but how I felt afterwards: a tad amused and annoyed, but above all, surprisingly, a bit frightened.
At first I tried to shrug the call off for what it was, a prank. The call, lasting no more than five to ten seconds, came in the midst of trying to get my day jump-started, and it blended in with shower, breakfast, dressing, running out the door. But I couldn't shrug the call off into anonymity. It lingered, a slight nagging, like something caught in the teeth.
Why couldn't I shrug it off? Why wouldn't it run away with the shower water and the morning coffee? Most of the time most of us feel safe. We may feel a generic foreboding from toxic wastes percolating in our Perrier or something called "crime in the streets," but when we cross the threshold into our homes, all of that, seemingly by accord, retreats, and we don't fear that the enemy will pillage our sense of well-being while we sleep.
But an obscene phonecall -- that changes the equation. The enemy's crossed the doorsill, taken up residence in the telephone lines that run unimpeded through the house, and transformed a means of connection into invasion. But it's a subtle invasion -- not the Atilla sort, with muddy boots and blood-darkened swords, but more like a draft under the door that just briefly brushes the skin and makes it crawl. A friend of mine described it this way: It's the feeling that no matter how tightly you close the blinds, someone can see through them. There's no longer any privacy. Someone out there has your number; someone's turned your name into a shadow with a razor's edge.
What I disliked most about the whole incident was the not knowing: who it was, why he or she did it, what they wanted. If I couldn't know any of this, then I couldn't control the situation, and that lack of control, that being at the mercy, turned me cold inside. And I disliked the forced intimacy, the rude assumption that this person was going to own my ear without having to earn my trust or take the time to know me. I was a commodity, and I felt like one.
My friend calls an obscene phone call a "mini-rape"; the term is apt. For a short time, and in a very limited way, I think I felt what many women must feel: a sense of strong forces out there that do not have my best interests at heart. Tonight I feel safe in my home; but for a few days after the call I locked my doors, something I had never done before. There's been no repeat performance, and the incident's worn off. But the sound of the lock turning in the door -- I don't like that at all.
Valentine's Day
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