I remember the first time a man ever made me feel uncomfortable. It’s hard living in a world where women are just bodies and not souls, something to be on display. An object of desire. A means to an end.
It always starts early. Our girlhood bodies are not even allowed to mature into women before their ripeness is assessed, prodded with roaming eyes and wolf-like teeth. We are told to cover ourselves, shrink and hide ourselves until we go unnoticed in the world to protect our bodies from what goes bump in the night.
I know you are one of these men, Daddy. You have roaming eyes and wolf-like teeth. You are the very thing you have always told me to protect myself from. You know yourself and who you have been designed to be, and you want me to protect myself because you know you can’t protect me from a design programmed to seek and destroy.
We were at the restaurant, a rare occasion after the divorce that all of us were together for my ninth birthday. I felt adult eating at such a fancy restaurant, even if it wasn’t all that fancy. I wanted to go to the bathroom myself to apply the new lipgloss I got as a present, a thing that made me feel even more adult. And there was a man, because there is always a man, who stopped me to talk to me.
This felt like more than heeding the warning about talking to strangers. He licked his lips, concealing wolf-like teeth, and said I smelled good. I said thank you politely because polite is what I was designed to be as a girl, although my gut felt like lead. He asked me how old I was, and when I told him, he said I was too pretty and looked too mature to only be nine years old. I fought down the scream in my throat, tried to ignore the sweat in my palms. This man smelled like you but with the spice of danger.
You and I had never been close, Daddy, so I was surprised when you came to my rescue. The man walked off without another word when he saw you coming. You were angry, so very angry, an archangel seeking vengeance. You grabbed my hand, and we stormed out of the restaurant. I didn’t even get to have my free dessert for my birthday. I was being punished for something I had done.
My mother was frantically trying to pay the bill and apologize for our rudeness, just like we women were designed to do. As I turned back, I saw the man with wolf-like teeth smirk to himself. People usually stop doing something they think is wrong when they feel as if they have been caught, but that smirk told me he didn’t think he was wrong.
From school to church to the street, there have been many men with wolf-like teeth, seeking to sink them into the ripe flesh of young girls. Dangers don’t always lurk in the darkness. I am slow to trust the smiles and the declarations of beauty. Should we be devoured, it is our fault for being fast, not concealing our budding breasts and hips. The wolf is hardly ever blamed.
The questions I have for the wolves: How do you protect your daughters if you, too, have sharp teeth?
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