“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording —all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”
I know women who were teenagers during WW2 who talked about the immense freedom they had as teen girls. They could sleep on the beach at night. They’d walk home alone after a party. From the way they talk about it, you’d think there wasn’t a war going on or that some of those nights were interrupted by air raid sirens.
How was this possible? Easy - just conscript every able-bodied man between the ages of 15 and 60 and put them in military compounds that they aren’t allowed to leave. Remember this the next time a woman muses about having curfews for men so women can walk alone and night, and everyone scoffs at how that wouldn’t solve anything, somehow.
