Yes, All Men

I used to think the low vibration under my skin was just part of being alive, like a second pulse no one else could hear. It was there in small apartments with the door shut. In elevators with too few floors. On the walk home from a night out in Reims, past the bar below my building where the men in stained T-shirts smoked in a loose half-circle, tracking everyone who passed.

It really did shape my habits. I’d let conversations end before they naturally would. I’d measure the distance from my seat to the door without realizing I was doing it. If I had to walk past those men, I’d call someone who knew the sound of my voice well enough to notice if it changed. I’d narrate my route: two more blocks, crossing now, almost there, until my key was in the lock.

I reckon men like to imagine danger as an event. They picture a headline. They think they’d see it coming. But the truth is, women know it’s often as ordinary as the way someone stops speaking in the middle of a thought. The shift in a man’s eyes when he decides you aren’t leaving yet. A laugh from the sidewalk that doesn’t fade when you keep walking.

When a woman describes this constant surveillance of her own surroundings, there’s ALWAYS a man who steps in with not all men.

Although framed as a clarification, it functions as a diversion. The subject shifts from structural reality to individual absolution. His statement doesn’t really engage with what was said; it rather works to erase it, to replace it with a reassurance about himself.

This is the part they never seem to grasp: the need to announce you’re harmless is, itself, information. It clearly tells me that your priority is curating your image, not interrogating the conditions that make women speak this way in the first place. That you’re more disturbed by the accusation in the abstract than by the fact that the experience exists at all. It’s a manoeuvre so consistent it might as well be in a handbook: disarm the conversation by making it about the man in the room, rather than the reason the conversation was necessary

So, having acknowledged and convinced myself I’d have to learn to live with this feeling, I’ve built a life with space between me and the people most likely to cause harm. The right shoes. The charged phone. A voice light enough to keep things pleasant but firm enough to close doors. Over time, it stopped feeling like a plan and became the way my body moved through the world.

Then, in the most random way possible, I met someone who didn’t activate the calculation. From the first moment, it was as if the air around him had been measured and approved by some part of me I didn’t even know existed. Being near him felt like standing in a place where gravity worked differently, where nothing pulled at me in the wrong direction. My body, usually scanning the edges for escape, simply stayed.

That absence obviously stayed with me (otherwise why would I be talking about him?)

But so did the fact that it had only happened once. One man, out of an entire lifetime of men, had ever really made my body release its grip. It shouldn’t be exceptional to feel safe. It shouldn’t feel like winning the lottery. And yet here I am, holding that single experience like proof that it’s possible, and proof of how rare it is.

Being at ease with him exposed the constant, invisible tension I carry with everyone else. And now that I’ve felt the difference, I really can’t pretend not to notice it anymore. Maybe it isn’t all men but it is every man who needs to say so.