"The week the Bloor and Christie suspect was revealed by the police, a male friend walked me home through the neighbourhood where the attacks took place. It was late on a Friday night, and he insisted on accompanying me after sharing dinner and ice cream, noting the sheer lunacy of me doing it myself after the constant reports, tweets, blog posts, Take Back The Night and self-defence course invitations. While we were walking past Bloor and Grace, where one of the assaults reportedly occurred, two extremely drunk boys, estimated to be in their teens, staggered towards us and slurred their directions. We obliged them, and watched as they stumbled on their way, towards the subway. In that moment, I realized they were enjoying a freedom I had never had and could never have. Blind drunk and exposed in the middle of the night, they wandered gleefully, happily and safely, conversing with strangers and inviting attention. The very things the written words that week had told me I wasn’t allowed to do. The idea of it — their liberty vs. my need to be gratefully, soberly escorted by virtue of my sex — enraged me. In fact, we should all be enraged, every moment of every day, in a way that words can never express."
From “What can’t be published,” The National Post. Also: “It is more than 20 years since Paul Bernardo’s gruesome Scarborough attacks, and the conversation still hinges on what women should do to protect themselves.”
I don’t even want to tell you to Google Paul Bernardo if you don’t know who he is. Suffice to say he’s Canada’s most notorious serial killer, and before he graduated to killing young teenaged schoolgirls he was the Scarborough Rapist, terrorizing his neighborhood in Toronto in a period of panic and predation that I remember well. This is an important read.
(Via Discover.)
