Girls, you have to trust your instinct to say no

I received an e-mail the other day from a teenager who had been approached at a farmer’s market by one of the vendors. He told her that he was new to the area and was hoping for friends. She seemed like a peaceful person, and he’d like to get to know her better.

Flummoxed, she said the first thing that came into her head, which was that she would have to ask her dad. And, indeed, she did ask her dad, and her dad told the vendor that he did not like his idea. That was the end of the matter, except that my reader felt so embarrassed, she asked me what I thought she should have done.

I told her that she had done the right thing. Unsure of how to handle the overtures of an adult stranger, her first instinct was to consult someone she trusted. And, impressively, instead of second-guessing her instinct as babyish, uncharitable or cowardly, she acted on it. She sought her father’s advice, and her father stepped between her and the stranger and said “No.”

Now, perhaps my reader’s father should have spoken in a friendlier fashion to the fellow, but I am certain that my reader made the right decision for herself as she was at that time. I hope her subsequent embarrassment does not discourage her from trusting her instincts the next time she is approached by a stranger.

One of the difficulties of being a girl is the mixed messages that you get from parents and teachers. On the one hand, you are told to smile at adults, to be friendly, to be nice, to show an interest in what they say and, above all, to respect them. But on the other hand, you are also told never to speak to strangers. So when an adult stranger approaches, you are caught between the lesson to be polite and the lesson to be silent. No wonder my reader’s first instinct was to ask her dad.

Young women second-guess themselves all the time. Speaking as someone who grew up around a lot of carefully brought up young women, I can tell you that the capacity of young women for guilt and shame over their thoughts alone is enormous. At university, I knew young women who would have burst into tears had someone accused them of harbouring, for example, a single racist or otherwise uncharitable thought. Such women are potential victims of any man clever and venal enough to exploit this.

There are women who, deeply uncomfortable by the presence of a man walking behind them or standing before them in the elevator, will not move away or eschew the elevator, simply because the creepy man is of a different race from themselves, and they do not want him to think they are racist. My response to this is, what does it matter what a complete stranger thinks? Who cares? Whatever colour he is or isn’t, whatever language he speaks or doesn’t speak, he’s bigger and stronger than you. On a dark, deserted street or behind closed doors with a creepy stranger, ethnic sensitivity means squat.

Lest you suspect me of an overly dark view of the relationship between women and men, I should say that I have been thinking and reading quite a lot about the Cleveland kidnapping victims. It makes me very uncomfortable knowing that the then 14-year-old Gina DeJesus was the best friend of Ariel Castro’s daughter Arlene. Did it ever occur to Gina that Arlene’s dad was kind of creepy? And, when he offered her a ride, did she dismiss her feelings that he was kind of creepy by thinking, “Well, you know, he’s Arlene’s dad, and I don’t want to be disrespectful?”

And I think this because when I was 12 or so, a bearded stranger stopped his car beside me and offered me a lift. It had been banged into my head for a decade never to get into a car with a stranger, so naturally I said, “No, thank you.”

The next day at school, one of my classmates told me with disgust that his dad had mocked me at their dinner table. He had offered me a lift, and I had looked at him as if he were “some kind of pervert.” In short, this boy tried to make me feel deeply ashamed of my instinct, and he must have succeeded as I still remember it 30 years later.

But for all I know his dad was a pervert. Even if I had recognized him, and even if I had remembered he was my classmate’s father, that would have been absolutely no reason to trust him. Girls should be encouraged to trust their instincts to say no or to seek advice. Being safe beats “being nice.”

(Cummings McLean is a Canadian writer and author of Seraphic Singles.)