On being stalked: Why I was lucky that I was male and my pursuer female.

Experiencing violence in a relationship is a terrible thing. And sometimes the violence begins when the relationship ends – when you try to break up. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been the recipient of more violence from women than I have ever committed toward them. But as I look back at an especially stressful time in my life, I realize that even when I was the victim of partner violence, I was still extremely lucky that my pursuer was a woman and that I was a man.

While there are men who are hideously mistreated by women (and a whole lot more women who are hideously mistreated by men!), in my case the forces of gender socialization and our male supremacist ideology both worked in my favour. Being stalked was bad... but it could have been far worse. I could have been a woman. And she could have been a man.

When your ex-partner ignores the word “no.” When I was a university student, I chose to end a relationship with a woman who did not want the relationship to end. Despite my repeated assertions to her that things between us were over, she continued to pursue me, in increasingly disturbing ways. From her perspective, she was doubtless pursuing her heartfelt conviction that we were destined to be together. From my perspective (and from the perspective of the police) she was stalking me.

Over the period of many months she tried to prevent the relationship from ending. But there were two specific incidents that stood out above all the others...

The break in. One day, while I was out of town, she broke into my room in the residence hall. She got in by smashing my window. Once in, she trashed the place, which included ransacking my closet, throwing my clothes all over the room, and smothering a few stuffed animals with unrolled condoms. It turned out that she cut herself in the process of breaking in through the window – and she decided to use her blood to smear rather ghastly red hearts on the walls.

When I returned and discovered the destruction, I immediately called the police. They responded quickly. I often assume that cops have seen just about everything under the sun. So it was somewhat alarming to see them raise their eyebrows in surprise when they saw the bloody hearts. The hearts were gross. And creepy.

The (attempted) assault. Another incident that stands out in my mind was the second time she came by my room unexpectedly. This time I was there. After talking with her for a little while, I asked her to leave. She asked if she could have a hug. Thinking that she would leave if I agreed to give her a hug, I did so. She then jumped up on me and attempted to force herself upon me physically. Fortunately I was a larger person than she was, and the mechanics of rape are such that my unwillingness to participate served as a limit on her capacity to go much further than just invading my physical space. I was able to physically remove her from me. Frustrated, she released her grip and turned and stormed out the door.

So what about all of this makes me lucky? Well nothing, really. But my being male made me a lot luckier than I would have been if our sexes had been reversed. This fact became continually clearer to me as women friends of mine who heard of my experiences came to me to lend their support and to share their own experiences of having been stalked by ex-boyfriends. As we shared our stories it immediately became evident that their experiences were without exception far more disturbing than mine was. And the reasons for this all had to do with the fact that I was a male being stalked by a female, while they were women stalked by men. As I listened to these stories that were all consistently worse than mine, three discernable differences between our experiences began to emerge:

Women in distress typically harm themselves, while men often harm others. Although female stalkers are comparatively rare, the ways in which my ex-girlfriend acted out her distress still had some typically feminine elements to it. It is a piece of therapeutic wisdom that women in distress will often act self-destructively, while many men will attempt to hurt others. (An example of this would be the issue of school shootings: girls are often terribly bullied, but they do not respond the way some boys do and shoot up the whole school. Mass school shootings remain an exclusively male behaviour.) So while this woman pursued me and was very self-destructive, I never got the sense that she wanted to destroy me. Rather, she wanted me to witness her self destruction. It was a stressful period in my life. But I was never afraid for my life.

The agents of social control were all on my side. The police were wonderful. Campus security was wonderful. The university administration was wonderful. They all took me seriously. They all filed reports and took action. They were respectful, concerned, and they wanted to help. Unfortunately the same things could not be said when it came to the experiences of my female friends. These women were often not taken seriously. Some were asked why they had ever dated the guy in the first place. Some were told to talk to their stalker and try to calm him down. In my interactions with authorities, no one ever blamed me for my own victimization, or suggested that this was somehow my problem to solve by myself.

The sexist notion that women are crazy. A third element that served to rally people to my side was the fact that our society is all too ready to believe that women are crazy. When I told my story of being stalked, I often got an eye-roll in response. But this eye role was not expressing judgement about me or my behaviour. Instead, it was intended to be a sympathetic reaction that said: “I hear you. Women are nuts. I totally understand.” I soon lost count of the huge number of people (both male and female) who brought up the Glenn Close-as-stalker film “Fatal Attraction” and made comments about my ex-girlfriend being a “bunny boiler.” Despite the fact that the vast majority of stalkers in our society are male, everyone seemed to know that the term “bunny boiler” meant a crazed female stalker. I still find it odd that we have no parallel term for males who stalk.

Getting help I needed – but feeling guilty. It is a terrible thing to be stalked. But my experience showed me that even in this extremely stressful time, my being a male lessened the impact. Without exception, people took me seriously. And they immediately decided that it was my pursuer who was unbalanced. I was happy to have their help and support. But I was also haunted by the fact that my female friends who were being stalked were unable to access the kind of assistance I got.

Men should not be stalked. But neither should women. It is scary and stressful to be stalked. At the very least it is an invasion upon your sense of freedom and your peace of mind. In many cases stalking also includes physical violence, sexual assault, and, sometimes, murder. People who are being stalked need our help. They need to be taken seriously. And this needs to be the case whether they are male or female.