Women Apologize to Me
“I AM SO sorry,” a woman in the sparkling-water aisle said to me at Walmart a couple of weeks ago. She was a delivery worker reaching for a case two feet away from me, in a ten-foot-wide aisle. (You guys: I estimated this width in-store—turns out correctly!—and came home and fact-checked it, because I remain, forever and yours, King Nerd.)
“Not at all!” I responded to her, with enthusiasm.
Thirty seconds later, she walked in front of me to grab another case—I was looking for a lime Bubly, but then spotted the elusive limoncello La Croix, which I had tried only once but thought of many times since—and she winced/laughed as she said, “I am so sorry!”
She still hadn’t closed more than two feet of distance between us. “It’s really all right,” I said, also sort of wince-laughing, because I was desperate to convey this: “It’s no one’s fault. I am as much in your way as you are in mine.”
Again. Neither of us was in the other’s way. I thought she would polite-stranger laugh, that empty chuckle people do to signal that everything is fine. Instead, she chuckled, but said: “I can’t let you take the blame.”
!
This is not the first time recently that a woman has needlessly apologized to me. This isn’t even the first time recently that a woman has needlessly apologized to me in that fucking section of that Walmart. I was socialized to be at least as over-apologetic as any other American white woman, but either I’ve stopped apologizing as much, or women have started apologizing to me more. Or both.
It’s probably both. It’s been a long time since I saw Amy Schumer’s spot-on “I’m Sorry,” and I’m generally otherwise familiar with the trope/trend/global crisis of women over-apologizing. Obviously. That socialization still impacts my interactions. I still apologize more than I need to at times, and find myself actively stopping myself at others. Just last week, I had to delete an apology email I’d started writing to someone because they disagreed with my opinion. (After agonizing about it for days, I concluded my opinion was justified.) I remember the apologies I was forced to issue as a child to men who definitely should have been apologizing to me, and I remember the apologies I was expected to issue as an adult to same. I have to wonder if white men who were socialized with everyone around them being so sorry all the time even notice anymore that women are apologizing to them for no reason.
And, I have to imagine that it happens to other white males more than it happens to me. My presentation is full-blown transvestite, but that’s how powerful white male dominance is: Even I get white ladies apologizing to me for being within ten feet of my body. Three months ago, at a queer Beltane celebration, I was waiting for my turn at one of the woodsy outhouses, and after a couple of minutes, a blond woman stepped out and, as she was buttoning her pants, looked right into my face and said, wincing, “Sorry.”
What would it be like to be raised having women apologize to you for the fact that they use toilets? I have no idea. I do know that when I left the outhouse and saw another white-presenting male waiting, I did not apologize to him. Is it because it’s managed to seep its way into my constitution, some of that I Deserve to Take a Shit spice of white maleness? Is it because a mechanic called me “Boss Man” that one time?
The guy waiting did say something to me. “Holy shit, that was so fast!” he exclaimed. Without thinking or missing a beat, I responded, “I was socialized female.”
He laughed, that polite-stranger laugh. I don’t think he had any idea what the fuck I was talking about. I want to say that’s fine, but I don’t think it is, actually, to be unaware of how hard it is for anyone else to take up any space. Last night, I was watching American Nightmare on Netflix, a documentary series that is about, as much as it’s about anything, cis white men who cannot think they’re wrong, and how badly other people pay for it. (Another series about same, not a documentary but based on facts: the spectacular Unbelievable.) I’m no stranger to these costs in the most devastating and personal ways myself—I’m still in recovery from my whole development being drained by them. Somehow, the deficit is still mounting.
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I’ve written before about the assault I suffered at Beltane. I sent that article to the perpetrator’s partner, to whom I happened to be connected on Facebook, along with an invitation to make meaningful restitution. A couple of years ago, I read a fantastic piece called “I Asked My Rapist for $10,000,” and I later made fantasy lists of what I would ask from mine. The ones from my adulthood, that is. (I’ve also written about confronting one from childhood, and how when I told my father he would either acknowledge what he’d done or never talk to me again, he said calmly and immediately, “Well I guess that’s it then.”) Exclusive Faggot-Witch journal prompt: What would you ask from yours?
I tried to find the rocket-science major who raped me in college, and I emailed one from my late twenties, a prominent author and speaker, that we needed to talk. The former had a super generic name that led to an unsuccessful search; the latter just ignored me. When my abusive ex-boyfriend wrote a bestselling book about his childhood abuse and how as a result, he can’t “be anything but kind or nice,” I wrote an article correcting this erasure and asked him to make repair by posting it himself.
He ignored me, too.
“If you were gonna put a price on it, how much would you say I should ask for?” I asked my oldest friend regarding this most recent perpetration. The guy had said he was sorry, after I told on him and he was reprimanded; his partner had said that he was sorry, too, crying to me. But none of that took away the stress of being violated at the event, or of trying to figure out how to leave, or of the time or emotional labor or half-dozen therapy sessions or self-esteem obliteration in the aftermath.
“A thousand dollars?” my friend suggested. “Is that too low? That’s low.”
“I was going to say five hundred," I responded. “Because that’s how much it would have cost me to leave the event early.” But I also knew that however much I was thinking was probably not enough, because I have been so systematically denigrated in so many ways for so long.
So I suggested, in a message to the partner, that $1,000 would be a minimum appropriate reparation.
The partner said he needed a few days to digest.
And then proceeded to ignore me as well.
Weeks later, I reached out to the perpetrator directly. I found his name, Max Aaron Christeaan, and his website—Free Love Spirit.com, of course—and sent him a text expressing that he, of all people, should understand the importance of financial recompense for interacting with my body, especially without my permission. Because he offers sex therapy, charging people to interact with his body with permission.
He asked if I’d talk on the phone instead—with “one of our trans counselors,” like a person he works with is an ethical referee, or a trans one makes it comfy for me, or my doing yet more work was reasonable. When I said no and restated my case, he, too, ignored me until I asked if he was going to respond.
And he said: “No”
Without even a period.
A COUPLE OF days after I went to Walmart, I went to the library.
I sent something to one of their printers through a nifty online portal (happy trails to my old printer, which I sold on Craigslist after agonizing over whether to keep it for convenience when I was about to move into this wee house on wheels). When I walked over to collect my documents, a woman standing several feet away from me said, “I’m sorry. I’m in your way.” She wasn’t, remotely. And though I told her so several times, she collected the belongings she’d placed on a table outside my path and moved.
Two days after that, I was walking into a grocery store with a superwide set of automatic sliding doors, ten feet across at least. “I’m so sorry,” some woman who was six feet in front of me turned around to say as we entered not at all at the same time, as she started walking into the store not at all in my way. She turned to the white-male-presenting guy a few feet behind me as well.
“I’m sorry,” she said to him.
I assured her there was no reason to be. The cis guy behind me said nothing.
He was young, and apparently found it expected and correct that a decades-older female would apologize for existing in even his outer sphere. She stopped walking into the store to locate herself and her cart to the far side of the doors in order to let us pass, though there was more than ample room for us all to walk in shoulder to shoulder. Which we wouldn’t have! Because she was so far in front of us! Still, she waited, there in that corner of ingress, until we’d made our way through.
I…honestly cannot fathom what I would be like had I been socialized like that guy. It explains a lot about how some people act, I guess. Inside the grocery store, a white-presenting cis dude came whipping around the corner of an aisle. He did not knock anything over with his dick. But he nearly crashed right into me as I was making my way toward the coconut milk.
He stopped short, as did I, to stop from colliding. He looked right into my face, and I into his, and he said absolutely nothing.
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