u/Jaffam0nster

Coming here because I am so angry and I genuinely just don’t know what to do with it anymore. I know I’m spiraling a bit, but just feel like the world is full of rotten men pretending to be righteous and I’m sick of it.

Two days ago late in the evening I was getting home with my kids. For context, we live on a gated street that’s marked physically and on Maps as private. At the start of the street there were a couple of guys on a golf cart in front of a house which isn’t unusual. I live at the end and as my children were walking into the house, the golf cart with the two men pulled up in the cul-de-sac in front of our home. One man exited the cart and began shouting at me. I directed my children inside, closed the door, and calmly asked the man whether he had a city-issued solicitor’s badge, as required, because he seemed to be a salesperson. He stated he did not need one. I informed him that he was on my property and asked him to leave, noting that this is a private road.

He refused and continued to shout at me, wave fliers in my face, and started backing me into the bushes in front of my house. At that point, the second man came up, screaming, and said he was a board member. He insisted that this was not a private road and that as a board member, he could conduct himself however he chose. I repeatedly asked him to stop yelling, but he continued, yelling that he lives here so they can go to whoever’s house they wished. When I stated that his residency did not entitle him to scream at people, especially while another person was being told to leave the property, and that I would be calling the police due to feeling unsafe, he stepped back and both finally left, but not before the first man stood at the end of the driveway, mocking me that he wasn’t on my property (rules on the private road are a bit different so he was still in fact trespassing). A cop came out and caught them as they were trying to leave and gave them all warnings that a criminal trespass would be issued if any of them were back on the street without an invitation (shocker, none of them actually live on the street). It turns out they were trying to talk to people about voting, but never identified themselves as associated with a campaign or organization.

I emailed our HOA board to let them know what happened and to find out if the man claiming to be on the board actually was at any point. I told my father in law about it because he knows some of them and as it turned out the former board member he messaged is the one who was screaming in my face. And of course my father in law is shocked because he’s “such a nice guy”. Yeah, I’m sure he’s charming to other men and women in the presence of their husbands. But the second he sees a woman alone, cornered, he sprints up to get in on the action and throw around what small trappings of power he thinks he has. My husband was at the back of the house when all this was going on and had no idea anything was happening at first. I’m sure if he had been out there the situation would have been totally different. And I’m furious about it.

We live in Texas, I’ve been here my whole life, and this is just how so many men are in this area. I know not all men are bad, I married an incredible man, but he’s from Europe and seeing my lived experience is the first time he’s ever seen misogyny in action. And he misses the worst of it because I’m treated completely differently in his presence. I’m in a respected career that I worked hard for and am constantly called young lady, kid, little girl. I’m raising a daughter so I’ll take this incident as far as I can through official channels, if only it scares the next man just a bit before he decides to act like that. I genuinely won’t even go to the grocery store without my husband anymore because of how the men in this town behave and it’s only getting worse. I want to be soft and kind, I want my daughter to have the freedom to be the same, but I swear every time I try some weed of a man shows up to choke the life out of that kindness and I’m so exhausted by it.

If you read my whole novel, thank you. This is one incident on a pile of them and I just don’t know where to put the anger about it anymore. Women are treated like second class citizens here on a good day and like a piece of meat to be torn apart the rest of them.