I had parked my car and was walking to the apartment when a male neighbor, taking a smoke, started to talk to me about the weather. I smiled, talked back, but the number one emotion I felt was fear. And then I thought about it. Any time I meet a man on the street, walking by myself, a feeling that may have once been flirtatiousness in my younger days, or a desire to appeal, has been replaced by fear.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that when men look at women, sometimes it feels as though they are  looking at something to eat rather than a human being.

Maybe it's stories in the news, including recent gang rapes, lead pipes.

Maybe it's that I'm smaller than most men, and, evolutionarily, the smaller ones in the litter get picked on.

I've had the pleasure and the annoyance of working with elementary kids these past few months, and a theme has become as prevalent as it could ever be. Boys love violence. All boys? No. To the same degree? No. There's one particular boy who watches The Walking Dead with his dad, about 7 years old, who, whenever we do anything, or whenever he is talking about anything, resorts to blood and guts, and heads being chopped off, and how cool is that, and red red red red red red red. Regardless of the fact that I explicitly blame both his dad and our society for being obsessed (though devastated with school shootings and murder and theft and war -- of course), he scares me. I see a little boy standing in front of a peer who's bleeding or hurt or fighting, too enthralled with it to react (which, by the way, has been proven, where children were pitted against each other: those who play violent video games, and those who do not).

In one of my classes we're doing "book talks," and one girl presented a book that gave reading strategies, specifically for boys. I was turned off right away. I mean, you can't fight the statistics that boys are much more reluctant readers than girls, but it's obvious why: boys are not encouraged to read when they are young (at least not all boys -- and usually the ones who enjoy reading on their spare time are picked on). They are encouraged to make a gun out of anything and shoot, and play sports, and specifically to cheer on the violence in sports (in fact, out of about 25 kids, half boys, every single boy thought that hockey was about the fights more than playing skills), while girls are encouraged to be nice and quiet. If you like sports, you must not like reading. And if you don't like sports, you must not really be a man. And if you do like reading, well, it must be about sports teams or war or violence, and you should suggest these types of books for your boy readers, to get them hooked.

A moment when I was perhaps the most scared in my life wasn't when I was about to jump out of a plane, but when I was walking to a new apartment in the north end, alone, in the dark, when a man began to run behind me. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped my keys and couldn't manage to find the right one. Turns out he just lived there, too -- luckily, I've said to myself more than once.

I mean, I want to knock the heads together of young girls who can't do anything but play princess and mother in their spare time, yearning for the one day they are made complete by their husbands -- but my bigger beef is with the men who consume on women. Just last night on CBC the editor of some magazine that features beautiful women openly admitted that they seek these women out "not for their brains, but for their bodies, purposely objectifying them." He went on to say that it's perfectly natural for men to objectify beautiful women because men like beautiful things like cars, which are also featured and objectified in the magazine -- and men do not see all women like this, not their mothers or sisters, but the pretty airbrushed ones in magazines well those are for looking and perhaps masturbating because men like that. And if she didn't want to be raped, why was she dressed like that. And women like to be pretty for boys (it's true), they spend all that time plucking eyebrows and shaving legs and straightening curls or curling straights and putting on cremes and eyeliner and fake eyelashes and perfumes and dieting into skinny shapes then putting silicone in those boobsboobsboobsboobsboobsboobs if they didn't want me to look that shirt wouldn't be so tight -- breasts aren't really a part of a natural body they're things it's sex and women are for sex and it's almost as if they aren't really human anyway.