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  And, of course, at the end of that year, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country elected a poisonous misogynist over one of the best-qualified candidates to ever run for president. That seemed to prove once and for all that Depeche Mode were right when they sang “God’s got a sick sense of humour.”

  I don’t believe in God, though, so I don’t even have that for comfort. I used to believe in the essential rationality of the human project, but my faith in even that has been shaken over the past year. However — because my glass is always half full, usually with whisky — I look around and see that there are wonderful women out there doing the hard work of social justice.

  They are the teenage girls in high schools fighting for the concept of “enthusiastic consent.” The women who work every day in migrant communities, ensuring that the most marginalized members have access to legal rights. The women who run for office, even if they know their chances are slim. The women in tech who report their harassment, knowing they will be harassed once again for taking a stand.

  In the following essays, I write about some of the women I’ve met over the years, who are doing vital work. I write about my own struggles to reconcile ambition and work and family and contentment, all against the backdrop of my own shocking tendency toward complete sloth.

  When you read the essays that follow, I hope you manage to stay awake. I hope you laugh. I am honoured that you listen.

  THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD IS AN ASSHOLE

  THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD is an asshole. Perhaps you already know this. Perhaps — although this is doubtful — the voice in your head echoes the voice in mine, and sounds like a whiny little bitch on Quaaludes.

  The voice in your head would not want you to take Quaaludes, which are the drugs that hippies took to feel trippy and mellow. The voice in your head does not want you to be trippy or mellow. It does not want you to have a good time — ever. It does not want you to go out dancing in silver boots. It does not want you to wear that miniskirt once you’re past the age of forty. It does not want you to go drinking with the college students you meet on the subway platform. It wants you to go home, right now, before you make a fool of yourself.

  The voice in your head is an asshole. Above all else, it does not want you to test your wingspan. It does not want you to take the assignment from your boss, because it might end in tears or, worse, silence. It most certainly does not want you to take your boss’s job. It does not want you to ask for a book contract, or go for an audition, or apply for a job promotion.

  Why even apply for that promotion? asks the voice in your head. And maybe now the voice doesn’t sound like a whiny little bitch because it’s too clever for that. Now it sounds like Daniel Craig or James Mason or Patrick Stewart, some treacherous English bastard with a voice like liquid honey who is trying to seduce you into never leaving your room.

  Look at the qualifications in that job description, says the voice in your head. You only have four of six. Do the math! Oh, that’s right, you can’t do the math. I made you drop math in grade 11. Still! You will be laughed out of the job interview. You will not even make it to the job interview, because the wise people on the selection committee did not make it past the first line of your CV, and are now convulsed in a heap, laughing at your ridiculous ambition. Aren’t you glad? asks the voice in your head. Aren’t you glad I saved you from that humiliation?

  The voice in your head is an asshole, and I know this because the voice in my head is also an asshole. The voice in my head sometimes escapes its lead-lined box and slips out of my own mouth. And then I will hear myself saying “moron” or “dumbbell” out loud, and it is myself I’m addressing. Yes, the voice in my head has the vocabulary of a six-year-old — but the aim of an Olympic fencer.

  I will find myself on the streetcar, lost in a reverie, and suddenly I will think of a foolish thing I’ve said to someone, or a sentence I could have written more sharply, or a question I asked that drew a frown, and the asshole in my head lets fly, and out it comes: “moron,” I’ll mutter to myself, sharply. “Idiot.” People on the streetcar turn to stare, and I purse my lips and look away and pretend that I was not calling myself names like a crazy person. It was the asshole in my head, I think.

  One day I’ll turn to the woman next to me and say, “It was just the voice in my head. It’s an asshole.”

  And she will nod and say, “Mine, too.”

  They are cousins, our voices, or maybe frat brothers. They get together over a beer to talk about their triumphs.

  The voice in your head is an asshole because it knows that it only has to spread the seed of doubt. It knows how fertile the soil already is. It knows the soil has been ploughed and enriched over the years by the teacher who said, Hmmm, really, and the friend who said, Are you actually going out in that? and the parent who said, I just don’t want you to be disappointed, honey. That is some beautiful, dung-enriched soil! Along comes the voice in your head, sowing its toxic seeds, and is it any wonder they all take root?

  If the voice in your head is a Grade A, world-class wanker like the voice in my head, it will tell you that what you want to do has already been done, and done better. It will tell you there is no point. It is not worth the grief. Someone better than you will do it better than you. It is safer here in the closet, under the bed, in the hamper under the dirty laundry. The seat at the head of the table is already taken. Moron, of course it’s taken.

  The voice in your head is an asshole, but it is also not very bright. You have this advantage. It can be caught, and put in a Tupperware, and placed on a shelf at the back of your mind, next to that guy you banged once in Acapulco and the curling lessons you never took, and all the other little regrets. It may rock and shake the Tupperware, but as long as you don’t take pity on it and lift the lid to see how it’s doing, it will stay contained indefinitely. It is a gremlin. It must never be fed.

  If it escapes its Tupperware, it can be drowned out. The asshole has only one frequency, and you have an orchestra at your command. It can be drowned out by Nina Simone singing “Four Women” or PJ Harvey singing “Man-Size” or Beyoncé singing just about anything. The poetry of Emily Dickinson or Maya Angelou will rip that asshole’s tongue right out of its mouth. If you laugh along to Wanda Sykes, it will shrivel up and die. The asshole’s only strength is the strength it gains from shrieking, unmolested, in the echo chamber of your mind. It hates anything more interesting than itself; which is everything.

  And, of course, you must have at least a sliver of sympathy for the voice, because its assholery is yours, its venom the awful seeping by-product of your insecu­rity. Your voice does not whisper alone. It is part of a magnificent chorale of self-denigration that women sing to themselves all over the world. There are people who do not have an asshole in their heads, who instead have a throaty-voiced cheerleader reclining on the chaise longue of their consciousness, saying, Damn, they’d be lucky to have you for that job. These people are called “men.”

  Take heart (as the asshole in your head shouts down your dreams) that it will tire eventually. It will age and grow weary before you do. And then it will slowly sputter and die, like HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember when Dave the astronaut slowly dismantles HAL? HAL’s voice, so sinister earlier in the movie, begins to fade as it pleads for its toxic existence:

  “I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”

  “I want to help you.”

  “I’m afraid, Dave.”

  This is the voice of inner assholes everywhere, as they lose the power to control. They will sputter out and die. Their songs will no longer seduce. Their insinuations will no longer strike fear. They will leave you in peace, by and large. You will be free to test your wingspan, unimpeded. Don’t let it happen too late.

  THE WAY OF THE HARASSER

  IN HER WONDERFUL B
OOK Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, the Egyptian-American feminist and journalist Mona Eltahawy writes about being assaulted in Mecca when she was a teenager — not once, but twice.

  She was on the hajj, or pilgrimage, with her family. As she circled the Ka’aba, the stone sacred to Muslims, she felt a hand on her bottom: “I could not understand how, at this holiest of holy places, the place we all turned to when we prayed, someone could think to stick his hand on my ass and to keep it there till I managed to squirm away.”

  It got worse. When she joined a group of women ritually kissing the Ka’aba, the policeman who was supposed to be guarding the crowd reached out surreptitiously to touch her breast. She writes about her shock, as a fifteen-year-old who had never been touched in that way: “Surreptitiously: I came to learn during my years in Saudi Arabia and then in Egypt that this was how most men did it. That’s how they got at your body — so surreptitiously that you ended up questioning your own sense of having been violated; your disgust at what had happened; whether, in fact, fingers actually did poke through the underside of your seat on a bus or ever so lightly brush against your ass as the man to which those fingers belonged looked the other way.”

  Eltahawy writes movingly about her struggles with wearing a headscarf, or hijab. Would “modesty” in clothing protect her from such unwanted attention? As her consciousness as a feminist grows, she realizes that there is no correlation between the way she is dressed and the groping to which she is constantly subjected. “If I were to use paint to indicate the places where my body was touched, groped or grabbed without my consent, even while wearing the hijab, my entire torso, back and front, would be covered with color.”

  She was in Jeddah and Cairo when she was assaulted. She could have been anywhere. She could have been any woman. I was certainly not wearing a hijab on a subway in Toronto one day when I was groped, though I was wearing a singularly ugly sweatshirt that made people wonder if I were pregnant. It did not stop the guy walking down the stairs of the subway from reaching over, as casually as if he were waving hello, and cupping my breast. As if he were at home on the sofa stroking his balls, or his cat, or his Gameboy, or something else that belonged to him.

  I say “the day I was groped,” but, like every other woman I know, it was not one day, nor one quick feel. It has been, as Eltahawy says, a lifetime of being groped and leered at, of being shoved up against a wall, followed home, called a “bitch” for not smiling. I have never been to Jeddah or Cairo. These things happen in Toronto, in London, in Dublin, in New York, in Rome, in Vancouver.

  That day in Toronto, I snapped. Perhaps I was hangry. Perhaps the subway was particularly rich with the smell of KFC and I was feeling faint. Perhaps I had had enough of men feeling that my body belonged to them, by benefit of being flaunted in public in its alluring grey fleece sack. I did something I have never done before or since to a groper: I turned and yelled, “Don’t touch my tits, you asshole.”

  He kept walking. Of course he did! And thus I was the crazy lady in the subway, shouting at a phantom, while the polite people of Toronto averted their gazes and waited for the police to take me away.

  As Eltahawy points out, street harassment is a global problem that is inflated to epidemic proportions in certain parts of the world. In Egypt, where sexual violence has been used by the state to suppress female dissidents (including Eltahawy herself), 99 percent of women and girls report experience with sexual harassment, according to the United Nations. It is a more grievous and pressing problem in certain parts of the world. But no matter where harassment occurs, and whether it is in a physical space or online, it has one purpose. And that purpose, as Eltawahy pithily observes, is “to remind us that public space is a male prerogative.”

  At what point do women realize they’re not welcome in public places? The first time you feel a hand slip between your legs on the subway? The first time a guy calls you and your friend over to his car, as you’re standing around talking about how cute Rob Lowe is, and rolls down the window to reveal his penis in his hand? The first time you walk through a dark parking lot with your car keys laced between your fingers?

  Or is it later, when somebody with an egg for a face calls you a bitch on Twitter and informs you that he would rape you, but you’re too ugly to be raped? Or when a gang of trolls descends to tell you just how stupid and wrong your views are, but then how would you know any better, feminazi? Or perhaps it’s the first time a death threat arrives by email, with its extravagant misspellings and wonky capitalization.

  The assault on women’s autonomy — whether it happens on the street or online — is pervasive. It is crushing. It is an attempt to make us withdraw into ourselves, to retreat to a smaller space, to speak with a smaller voice. It has the effect of a No Girls Allowed sign on a boys’ clubhouse door: Even as adult women, we are told there are places where we aren’t welcome — or, if we are, it’s as a collection of body parts.

  Worse, it often happens in a way designed to make us question our own sanity. Did that really happen? That couldn’t have just happened. This is known as “gaslighting,” a term taken from the 1938 play and the famous film adapted from it. In the film, the nefarious Charles Boyer tries to drive his wife Ingrid Bergman slowly insane by insisting that the gaslights in their house aren’t periodically dimming, though she can plainly see that they are (he’s controlling the lights, of course, the bastard).

  One evening many years ago, I was assigned to cover a tribute dinner for a high-profile Canadian author in a foreign city. At the pre-dinner reception, I clung to the life raft of a glass of white wine, and made conversation with people I’d never met before, as a reporter should. One man, a publishing executive, was particularly charming and solicitous. At dinner, I found myself sitting next to him, and I introduced myself to his wife, sitting on his other side.

  The bread plate had barely had a chance to circulate before I felt his hand on my thigh. No, I thought. No way. I was there to write about the dinner; I had my notepad in front of me. I could have stabbed him with my pen. Instead, I shifted slightly away, which seemed guaranteed to end the episode without bloodshed. I felt his hand slide deeper, near my crotch. I looked over at his wife, who seemed oblivious. In fact, the groper seemed oblivious, too, his bland face concentrating on the speaker, as if his wandering hand was a creature entirely beyond his control. He was gaslighting me.

  I had no idea what to do. What could I do? If it had happened later in my career, I probably would have leaned over and told the man that he was in danger of becoming the lede in my story. But I was young, and unsure, and the unreality of the moment had me doubting my own sanity. I slipped my hand under the table and pushed his away. He didn’t flinch. He also didn’t talk to me for the rest of the meal — which was a relief — nor did his tentacle slither toward my crotch again. He had had his jollies, a hot jolt of power over me.

  When I read about harassment, in ensuing years, I would see this coal-black thread running through all the stories: The abuser thinks he can get away with it. It is impunity more than the promise of sex that gives him a thrill.

  I went back to the hotel room that night and told the man I’d just started dating — who would become my husband — what had happened. He was shocked, and gently skeptical. That sounds terrible, but I was unsure at the time, too: Had it really happened? It was so implausible. Then I realized that my boyfriend was skeptical not because he didn’t believe me, but because he had no frame of reference for this episode. No one had ever grabbed his crotch during an interview. No one had followed him home through dark streets, hissing all the way. No one had ever questioned his right to be human and unmolested in a public space.

  Everywhere we go, women are made to feel less than human when we are out in the world. It is worse in some countries, as Mona Eltahawy writes, but no part of the globe is immune. Nor is the digital realm any safer for women: In some ways, the abuse there is
even more pervasive.

  Consider street harassment, which is the act of verbally or physically taunting a woman in public. According to a presentation by the UN Women’s Safe Cities Initiative in 2015, it’s a global phenomenon: 43 percent of women in London between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four said they’d experienced street harassment in the past year; in New Delhi, 92 percent of women reported being harassed; in Quito, 68 percent.

  A 2014 study commissioned by the advocacy group Stop Street Harassment found that 65 percent of American women surveyed had experienced harassment, and nearly one-quarter of those (23 percent) had been sexually touched.

  In 2015, the anti-harassment group Hollaback! released the results of a survey conducted in conjunction with Dr. Beth Livingston of Cornell University. More than 16,000 women in 22 countries were involved in the poll. More than 50 percent said they’d been groped or fondled; 71 percent said they’d been followed. Possibly the most disturbing finding was the age at which this harassment began: The majority of women reported that it began in puberty — when they were still girls. This is a wrenching lesson to learn, early on, about where you are allowed to be a free person.

  Equally alarming was the fact that women around the world changed their behaviour as a way to avoid harassment. Eighty percent of respondents in India said they didn’t like to go out at night, and the same number of women in South Africa said that being harassed made them change the way they dressed. Almost three-quarters of American women said they changed their method of transportation, and 79 percent of Canadian women surveyed said they’d been followed in the previous year.