Massive, massive huge amounts of elephant style solidarity to those who have been brave enough to share on this thread. I've been thinking about it all day, and it makes me so sad to think of the pain you've all suffered.
I've name changed to post this.
The beeping and the catcalling started when I was about 13 I think. Tall for my age. Visible. But very, very young for my age.
The first time I got drunk at 15, I was sexually assaulted by two boys and found wandering in the street in torn clothing by my father. No action taken.
Flashed at 16, and on a different occasion someone masturbated on my back while I was in a queue for a ticket at train station.
At 18, when I got a lift from some boys in a car (I really didn't know them, but I was drunk and very naive), two of them sexually assaulted me then took my money and left me twenty miles from home. I went to the police station, didn't know what else to do, and they didn't believe me. I remember the police officer saying "One of them was your boyfriend, wasn't he? And you had a fight and you decided to make this story up?". I left and buried the whole thing in my subconscious.
In my twenties, and suffering from bipolar disorder which often made me very uninhibited and vulnerable, I went home with a stranger who tried to put a wine bottle in my vagina. On another occasion, a different man tried to anally rape me.
Several more flashing incidents in my twenties.
In my thirties, I was out on my lunch break and a man came up to me in the street, shouted NICE TITS in my face, and when I told him to fuck off, he raised his fist to me and snarled "I wouldn't fuck you anyway you fat bitch".
A contractor who worked for me routinely used to leave copies of Nuts magazine on my desk, or ostentatiously read it when I was trying to give him work. When I asked him to stop, he wouldn't. I took it to management, and he told them that I had propositioned him, he had knocked me back and it was because I was "bitter" about that.
Into my forties now...I had hoped that I would get the cloak of invisibility, but it has yet to arrive. I was introduced to a man the other week, in his seventies, and when he shook my hand, not only did he refuse to let go of it, but stroked my wrist while keeping a death grip on me. I said "I need my hand back", and he said "don't deny an old man a bit of pleasure, love".
All of this is against a backdrop of catcalling from vans, from building sites, in the street, in every fucking country I've ever been to.
So when I say I find it hard to believe that there are women that this hasn't happened to, any of it, I'm not demeaning your experience, it's just like we've been living in a different world and I'm amazed. I bloody wish I'd grown up in your world, I really do. You must view it so differently. I'm glad for you, but I'm also jealous as hell. I don't know why my world has been this way - I'm very tall, and quite attractive i Suppose, but is that it? Can that be it?
I should say that despite all this, I like my life and I've been pretty lucky I think