“You said there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“—and no one has to buy a gun.”
Now I had their attention.
“Fear is an emotion, a glandular reaction. It’s physical. It affects what we do, how we think, and how we feel. Fear is the body’s response to an understanding of real and immediate danger. Remember those key words: real and immediate. Your glands flood your body with a variety of hormones, like adrenaline. Adrenaline instructs your body to rev up the parts and processes essential for you to fight or run, and to shut down the nonessentials. So, for example, the capillaries in your face close, making you go pale. Your digestion—from saliva production to excretion—turns off, so your mouth goes dry.”
“Is that why I get sick to my stomach?” Tonya.
“Yes. You get queasy because your stomach, usually churning away constantly, essentially freezes. Your heart and respiration rates go up—your heart pounds, you feel breathless—to get oxygen, lots of oxygen, to the long muscles of your arms and legs, getting you ready to respond at your maximum. Fear is a good thing.”
“But getting scared isn’t.” Pauletta was stubborn.
“There’s nothing good about being in danger, no.” Except that it means you’re not yet dead. “But fear, when you are already in danger, is a good thing. Adrenaline also affects the way your brain works.”
“Panic,” said Jennifer, nodding.
“Not necessarily. What happens in times of real and immediate danger is that your unconscious brain, a kind of emergency expert system, takes over. Panic is a system conflict. It’s what happens when your conscious and unconscious brain fight.” And melt down, and all sense just runs and hides. That had happened to me for the first time last year, in New York. Tonya was saying something. “I’m sorry.”
“I said, like a robot trying to compute when the scientist says, I always lie.”
Nina made robot-in-a-loop motions, like something from a bad 1980s music video. The tension was beginning to ease.
I blinked. “Yes. Very good. Just like that. And just as a robot in these stories is always naïve, our conscious mind can be, too. It can persuade itself of things an idiot child wouldn’t believe.” I shook off memories of last year. “I’ll come back to that, because it’s important.” It was the heart of everything, but I couldn’t get there from here. “For now, I’d like you to think a bit more about what fear is and where it comes from.”
I stood. They watched warily as I walked to the back of the room and my satchel. Tension was high again. I retrieved the packet of blank three-by -five index cards and the box of Sharpies and handed them out.
“On this card I want you to write the one thing you’re afraid of, that you hope taking this class will help with.”
“Small card, big pen,” Nina said.
“That’s because I want you to keep it short. And add, at the bottom right, a simple yes or no, in answer to this question: Have you ever been assaulted? By which I mean physically or sexually attacked.” There were a dozen ways to define assault, but for my purposes, that would do. “You won’t be reading these aloud, and I don’t know your handwriting, so be honest, be specific.”
Caps popped as they came off and the air filled with Sharpie scent— Tonya sniffed hers meditatively; she’d have a headache later—there were lots of faraway looks, some scribbling. Sandra’s pen moved vigorously but never touched the paper.
“Time’s up. Cap the pens, please, and pass them back to me.”
“What do we do with the cards?”
“Hand them to Nina.” There was some standing, some timing of the thrust of card from their hand to Nina’s: attempts to disguise who had given what. “Nina, shuffle them and give them to me.”
She did. While they sat down again, I sorted the cards rapidly into the yes pile, three; the no pile, six; and the blank card. I set the cards to one side, facedown.
“According to the 1985 London WAR study, eighty-one percent of women sometimes or often feel frightened at home alone in the daytime. This percentage rises for when we’re outside or it’s night or both.” I looked around the circle, waiting until everyone but Sandra stopped looking at the cards and met my eye. “So what, exactly, are we afraid of?”
Sandra lifted her head. Her face was waxy with intensity, the tiny muscles in her brown irises pulled so tight that in this bad light the plump fibers had an amber sheen. I’d seen a woman look like that once whose boyfriend had their son in a cupboard with a gun against his head. She was ashamed. She couldn’t tell me; she wanted me to know.
“In an earlier class I gave you Department of Justice statistics on the chances of avoiding rape if you fight back.”
“Seventy-two percent if he’s unarmed, fifty-eight percent if armed with a knife, fifty-one if armed with a gun,” said Tonya.
“Many of you expressed surprise at that.” Nods. “That’s because the information we get, every day, from TV and newspapers and online, is all about the rapes that are completed, the lives lost, the pain suffered—preferably with blood and body parts and panicky eyewitness accounts. Why? Because that’s what gets an audience, and the bigger the audience, the more the media can charge for their commercials. More than eighty percent of us spend our lives afraid because that helps soap makers and computer manufacturers sell product.”
“Same old same old,” Nina said. “The military-industrial complex.”
“The capitalist system,” Christie said. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d turned purple and exploded. “Someone was talking about this at school last semester. The patriarchy.”
“The patriarchy,” Nina said. “Haven’t heard that word since I did women’s studies in college.”
“They had college back then?” Pauletta said.
Nina ignored her; she was getting excited. “I remember now. Some big feminist, one of those dead ones, said men teach us to be afraid to control us.”
Andrea Dworkin: “We are taught systematically to be afraid. We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we will be women… ,” in Our Blood, though I had no doubt she’s said it in some form or other in all her books. The male conspiracy against women. When it came to the media I had always thought corporate greed was a much simpler explanation.
“It’s been estimated that the media publicize thirteen completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. If you round up the chance of getting away from an unarmed attacker from seventy-two to seventy-five percent, that means you have a three in four chance of getting away.”
“Or kicking his fucking head in,” Suze said.
“And then if you take the thirteen-to-one completed-versus-uncompleted -rape media figure, it means that the papers and the news underreport fight-back stories by five thousand two hundred percent.”
“Math makes my head hurt,” said Katherine.
“Imagine you’re listening to WSB while you drink your mocha and drive to work. Imagine it’s a slow news day, so you hear about a grand-mother who fought off a rapist with her umbrella. Think about the other fifty-one women who got away.”
Tonya got it. Her eyes shone, and it was a different shine than Sandra’s. “Much of what we call fear is actually worry about imaginary situations, ” I said. “It’s learned. It can be unlearned. When you read about someone being raped, remember the three others who got away. On those rare occasions where you do hear about a woman getting away, remember the fifty-one others who did, too. Better yet, don’t read or listen to that kind of news.”
“Not listen to the news?” Jennifer looked shocked.
“The news exists to make people anxious, so that they keep watching, so that the provider—the website, the network, the publisher—can sell advertising space. But anxiety and worry are not the same as fear. There’s very little useful about them. Worry, or stress, or anxiety are responses to long-term or persistently imagined danger, not real danger, not immediate danger. Horror and dread, again, aren’t usually about the immediate, but about the future: the suspense of waiting for what you think will come. Note that: think. When you lie awake at night and start imagining mad axe murderers or hooded rapists, we’re not smelling them, not hearing them, not feeling the vibration of their footsteps.”