Waking

I was living in a politically active housing co-op, working in a whole-wheat, granola-eating, spirulina-swilling grocery co-op, and studying European social history with Marxist professors. It was a heady time in Madison, 1977, and I was asked by some women friends to serve as a security person for the first Take Back the Night march I ever joined. So, I, Todd X, and some other long-haired men sympathetic to the burgeoning feminist movement took our places at the back of the march down State Street. Our job was to keep counter-protesters from breaking up the march. I thought it would be easy. It was not. We security guys listened to the stories of rape and abuse over the loud speakers. It was enraging, and made me feel embarrassed to be a man. But when the march got going, things began to heat up. Beefy frat boys drinking on State Street did not like women gathered to even the scales of sexual power. They stopped on the side-walks and heckled, made masturbatory gestures over giant (imagined) phalli, and engaged marchers in shouting matches. For the first time, I was on the receiving end of the male gaze. One of my fellow security guys got into it with one of the hecklers. I had to break it up and stand between them, arms extended. Another of the security guys threw a brick through the window of an adult (porn) bookstore. Cops came. People ran. It was the beginning of a long wake-up call, still going on. My static, little world where I could just stand on the sidelines and let degrading comments about women slide ended. It was my fight too now. I could smell the bridges behind me burning, could see the friendships that had been based on bashing women explode into flame, and I got the hateful look from men who now saw me as a betrayer. Having the curtains that cover misogyny pulled back and seeing the carnage hidden behind it, there was no going home again.