Freedom, fear and fury in a bell jar

Standing alone on the side of the road, I cast a holding spell, breathing softly, deeply, truly, in and out. “This is what it feels like to be alive,” I think to myself and begin to run. Slowly at first, more a joffle (jog-shuffle) than a sprint but I don’t mind, knowing how important it is to give my muscles, joints and bones the precious time they need to catch up to my heart. I glance down and survey my feet as they fall. Cushioned by cornflower ASICS Gel Nimbus 26s, I am satisfied by their spongy rhythm and settle in. 

“Running to blue, sweet 32”,^[5]My older sister Sally and I ran the Brisbane marathon together this year in early June. It was our first time running a long distance event together and when people ask us, ”How was it?”, we … Continue reading I whisper, and the countdown begins. I turn right, then left, and weave my way down Moggill Road towards the highway overpass. I keep a steady pace; not too fast, not too slow, and soon find myself approaching Kennewell Park. The rise and fall of my chest shallows as the path narrows and shadows lengthen. I try not to look into the dead eyes of the monolithic Moreton Bay figs, hovering on the edge of the playground. Their wraithlike roots appear to be silently slithering towards the footpath, and I will my feet to move faster for fear of becoming trapped and tripping. Reaching the end of the park, I veer off the main road and make my way along its south perimeter. I feel a cold chill as the darkness of Aragon Street^[6]The street in the image at the top of this post is Aragon Street, Indooroopilly. My eldest son Max lived in a house there a little while back and it was always a good place to run past in the dark … Continue readingopens its mouth wide and scrapes its teeth on the back of my neck. I wonder briefly whether I should have taken a less predictable route, and oddly remembers the warning given to Virginia Woolf’s willful subject^[7]Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, Duke University Press, 2014; see also https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/08/29/collection/ Rose Pargiter in The Years^[8]Virginia Woolf, The Years, The Hogarth Press, 1937, pp. 26-30.. ”You are not to go alone, you are not to go alone”, her older sister tells her, when Rose announces she wants to go to Lamley’s to buy a box of ducks before the shop closes on the shadow side of twilight at 7pm. I try not to think of what happened to Rose as she tiptoed, walked, trotted, ran and galloped from the house and back again. I will my breathing to steady; after all, I only had to cross the train tracks, follow the river, and run another 8km before sunrise would welcome me into the city. 

 

Fear^[9]These are the online media reports I found which make reference to women assaulted by running since 2019. There are many before that date, and there is a marked increase in reports once we began to … Continue reading

2019

13th January. Hunt for violent offender after woman knocked unconscious while jogging.

21st May. Police release alarming CCTV vision of the moment a female jogger was assaulted at Marion. The chilling footage shows a woman jogging alone along Oaklands Rd about 5.40am last Thursday.

17th September. Police are investigating the assault of a woman jogging at Tennyson Dunes earlier this month.

3rd December. Woman sexually assaulted while jogging in Melbourne’s north.

2021

1st July. On a Friday evening in July last year, 23-year-old Bree* was jogging along a pathway in Subiaco with her headphones in when a stranger attacked her from behind, putting her in a chokehold.

2022

5th August. A woman in her 40s was sexually assaulted while out for a morning run on Friday morning in Broome.

2023

13th January. Terrifying footage of the moment a woman was attacked from behind while going for a run has been released.

14th February. ‘Horrific injuries’: Woman attacked by man while jogging in forest near Ballarat.

2024

31st January. A Melbourne woman running along a trail in the city’s southeast was attacked and sexually assaulted by a man riding a bike last month.

4th February. Police appeal for help to find Ballarat East woman Samantha Murphy: A search is under way for a mother-of-three who failed to return from her daily run during one of Victoria’s hottest days.

12th May. Police hunt for man after woman attacked while running on Brisbane walking track. 

8th June. Manhunt underway after female runner attacked near Brisbane.

From catcalls to murder: Research reveals this is what 70% of female joggers face on every run.

I make my way to Jaycar and buy a personal alarm for $14.95. Weighing less than 50g, this pocket-sized guardian angel features a button touch torch to illuminate the shadows and a pull-ring to trigger a 130db siren. This little powerhouse of protection promises to keep me safe the next time I set out in the dark alone on an early morning run. My purchase reminds me that I am running in a city that is made for men and I am continuously told that it is my responsibility to keep myself safe. I am told not to wear headphones, I am told to take my phone with me and turn location services on, and I am told to make sure someone knows where I am running and when to expect me home. I am also told not to run in the dark and not to run unaccompanied.^[10]I am reminded of the work of sociologist Fiona Very Grey who notes that “‘Women and girls are routinely having to evaluate what the right amount of panic is, to direct their movements and … Continue reading

 

“The girl learns to actively hamper her movements…she must be careful not to get hurt…that the things she desires to do are dangerous for her” (Iris Marion Young, in “Throwing like a girl”).^[11]See Iris Marion Young Young, 1980, “Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality”, in Human Studies, 3(1), pp. 137-156.

Like Iris Marion Young, I reflect that “much has changed for women since I was a little girl”^[12]Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: ”Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays”, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 3. in the 1970s. Thank you to brazen hussies^[13]A phrase I have delightfully borrowed from Brazen Hussies (2020), a documentary which celebrates the social activism and the grass-roots  nature of the women’s liberation movement in … Continue reading like Zelda D’Aprano, Alva Geikie, Dulcie Bethune, Merle Thornton, Margot Nash, Anne Summers, Germaine Greer, Eva Cox, Margo Nash, Susan Ryan, Pat O’Shane, Lilla Watson, Shirley Smith, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Dulcie Flower, Faith Bandler, Clementine Ford, Jane Caro, Ginger Gorman, Annabelle Crabb, Julia Gillard, Rosie Batty, Chanel Contos, Grace Tame, and Brittany Higgins, we take refuge in women’s shelters and we take to the streets on the 8th March each year in empowered collective action. We benefit from the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984 ensuring equal pay and workplace rights. We exercise reproductive rights, with improved access to contraception and the right to make choices about our own bodies. We look to the parliament, the senate and the house for kick-ass female political leadership that champions equality and challenges the status quo. If we are white-settler-colonial-cisgendered-heterosexual-able bodied women like me, we are learning how to be allies and stand in solidarity with women not like us in their fight for recognition and rights. We utilise digital platforms to mobilise movements like #metoo and March4Justice; and, we follow in the footsteps of activists who seek to break the silence and amplify voices against domestic violence and sexual harassment. It would be easy to find comfort in this gratitude if it weren’t for the Status of Women Report Card 2024 which reveals that while women have shattered ceilings and forged paths, we still traipse through complex webs of inequality where the threads of disparity in pay, safety and opportunity continue to entangle us. We remain underpaid, undervalued, underemployed, and unsafe in public and private in ways men aren’t, with even worse statistics for First Nations women, culturally and linguistically diverse women, queer women, and women with disabilities.

I like the work of Iris Marion Young. She is most often cited for her influential political thinking on democracy, social movements and the five faces of oppression (exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence) but I have always been drawn to her words because of what they tell me about female experience as lived and felt in the body.^[14]Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: ”Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays”, p. 7. In the pause between my last run and the next, my brain stretches Iris’s feminist existential phenomenology onto my body to fold over skin and bend with sinew to better inhale and exhale the philosophical concepts of situation, facticity and freedom she uses to better understand female lived experience. She tells me to see and feel my female body running life’s course, navigating a path where the terrain is shaped by societal norms yet crissed and crossed with personal autonomy. This race is my life story and a narrative women share, a relay of physical essence and ambition, paced in harmony with fellow runners. She tells me every woman runs her own race, facing the given landscape with a spirit that’s uniquely hers, her strides^[15]The word ”stride” is used deliberately here. Stride a runner’s unique fingerprint, a blend of rhythm, space, and pace. It’s the measure of the ground each footfall covers, the cadence … Continue reading a testament to her individuality amidst life’s collective marathon.^[16]Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience, p. 16. She experiences her body as both a thing and a capacity, a running shoe through which she interacts with the world and asserts her agency, crafting her identity in the interplay of sociocultural influences and personal freedom.^[17]Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience, p. 18. She tells me, however, that women navigate a course laid with societal hurdles and expectations which act as invisible constraints, unfairly restricting our form and pace, and dictating the rhythm of the race we seek to run. In relation to our sex-and-gender-specific female subjectivity, Iris tells me, “women are not as free as we ought to be”.^[18]Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience, p. 3.

I like the work of Iris Marion Young because in her words I saw and continue to see the way that my female body experiences the world – the ways that it can move and the ways it cannot. Her 1980 essay, “Throwing like a girl”^[19]”Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment, motility and spatiality” was first published in 1980 in Human Studies 3(1), 137-156 and reprinted in On Female Body … Continue reading, reverberates in my head and takes hold of my thinking and wondering about my experiences of ”running like a girl”. I never thought of myself as a girl who could run, finishing last in the 400-meter race at the athletics carnival every year in primary school confirmed and cemented the view that running was something my gauche and graceless body could not and should not do. Even now when I contort into my compression running gear, I am returned to that baby-fat body in black bloomers – the unbearable weight of my entire being laid bare for everyone to see by the tiny high cut regulation gym shorts more akin to skimpy underwear than active wear. I hated those bloomers because they displayed all that was wrong with my body – I was not tall enough, I was not thin enough, I was not fast enough and therefore, I would never be enough. Although her work is now over 40 years old, Iris tells me in the simplest of terms of the personal and political impact of societal and cultural constraints like these imposed on women’s bodies and movements. She tells me that as young girls we are taught to move, behave and appear in limited ways in spaces whose limits are constructed and controlled by patriarchal definitions of femininity.

An image of Sylvia Plath’s “bell-jar” arrives vividly and tortuously into my thinking and wondering. Often compared to Shirley Jackson’s work, particularly due to Plath’s haunted admiration for Jackson’s novel The Bird’s Nest,^[20]In Heather Clark’s biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2021), she shares that Sylvia had nominated Shirley Jackson as one of five American … Continue reading The Bell Jar  (1963) is a semi-autobiographical novel that follows the story of Esther Greenwood, a young woman who spends a month in New York as an intern at the magazine Ladies’ Day and falls into depression following her rejection from the summer program. The narrative artfully transforms these events into a poignant critique of Esther’s younger self, the crushing weight of patriarchal constraints on young women to conform, and the broader world that stifles our growth into autonomous individuals. ^[21]Mollie O’Leary’s 2019 essay, “Sylvia Plath’s poetic redemption: Patriarchal encoding in the body and language” sheds further light on Plath’s struggle to express … Continue reading The falsehoods, apathy, and cruelty of broader society that either force lived female bodies into conformity^[22]Is it of no surprise that as I write these words, I change my outfit no less than seven times? I look in the mirror and sigh. What was I thinking? My new pixie cut does nothing to highlight my … Continue reading or break them when they resist, is a shadow that falls often across Plath’s journal writing and poetry to bring them to light. She felt smothered and stifled by femininity ^[23]Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen Kukil, 2000, Anchor Books, p. 16. and professed a jealousy of men in so far as she desired to be ”active and doing, not passive and listening”^[24]Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 98. Sylvia declared,

“being a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than a penis and a scrotum; to have my circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity… all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl”.^[25]Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 77.

There are traces of Simone de Beauvoir in Sylvia’s lament.^[26]I don’t know if Sylvia Plath ever read Simone de Beauvoir, but they lived in the same era. Sylvia passed away only a week before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a landmark of … Continue reading In the introduction to The Second Sex (2011),^[27]Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011. Beauvoir states with clarity and surety, “Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity” (p. 5), “freeze her as an object” (p. 17) and ensure that “in her heart she is definable for herself” (p. 279). Traces of Beauvoir can also be found in Sylvia’s poetry where she moves to, from and in-between despondency with and defiance of her short, famous and revolutionary phrase, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (p. 289). In ”Stings”^[28]Sylvia Plath, “Stings” in Ariel, Faber & Faber, 1965, p. 60. Sylvia refers to women as ”winged unmiraculous women, honey drudgers” seemingly consenting to their passive role, but in seeming triumph declares in ”The Arrival of the Bee Box” that the coffin that contains the swarm is only temporary if she just stood back and ”undid the locks”.^[29]Sylvia Plath, “The Arrival of the Bee Box” in Ariel, Faber & Faber, 1965, p. 59. Small jeweled dolls^[30]Sylvia Plath, “Purdah” in Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber, 1981, p. 244., engines, mausoleums and wax houses^[31]Sylvia Plath, “Stings” in Ariel, p. 62are other metaphors Plath uses to represent her struggle against patriarchal containment for ultimately, she had a self to recover – indeed, a queen^[32]Sylvia Plath, “Stings” in Ariel, p. 61. from inside the bee box.

Both Sylvia and Iris bravely address the dangers women encounter when they resist conforming to the societal and cultural limitations placed on our autonomy and physicality. Their writing underscores the objectification we endure and the manner in which we are indoctrinated to limit our movements to align with a patriarchal ideal of womanhood. Furthermore, both shed light on the grave consequences of such objectification for us, including the risk of physical violation and the most extreme form of such spatial and bodily invasion – the threat of rape”. ^[33]Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience, p. 45. “The girl”, writes Iris “learns to actively hamper her movements…she must be careful not to get hurt…that the things she desires to do are dangerous for her”.^[34]Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience, p. 43. “A female”, writes Sylvia, is “always in danger of assault and battery”^[35]Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 77. and chillingly forewarns, ”only a dead woman is perfected.”^[36]Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Vintage, 2021, p. xxii.

Fury

On a Monday night in mid-May, I glance up at one of the suspended TV screens while running on the gym treadmill^[37]Running on the treadmill at the gym on a Monday night has always been a recovery run after my long run on a Sunday. I don’t run inside because I am afraid – it’s convenient and asks … Continue reading and see a reporter standing at the foot of Mt Coot-tha. She reports that at 10:15am yesterday, a female jogger was pushed and held down in an attempted sexual assault on the Cockatoo Trail. Her assailant “remains on the run” and “women in the area are told by police to stay vigilant” – women are advised to stay vigilant, WOMEN. I fume. Mia Freedman’s recent headline, ‘Why can’t we go for a f**king run?’ matches my movement and my thoughts pick up speed. They begin to scorch and blacken the lining of my brain.^[38]This phrase is inspired by a thought held by Susannah, Shakespeare’s daughter, in Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell upon noticing the social ostracisation of her grandmother – “The … Continue reading Why are we and not men being told to be alert and watch our behaviour? Why aren’t men being told to stop hurting women? Talking to other women like me who have always found a certain kind of freedom in running, they now only run in groups and carry makeshift sprays, personal alarms, and even screwdrivers to protect themselves while on the trails. The fear I hold about running outside, alone and in the dark turns and burns with fury. ”Beware, beware”, Sylvia Plath’s words smolder in time with each foot fall on the rubber mat, ”Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air”.^[39]Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” in Ariel, p. 11.

Walking the Jacksonia track at Mt Coot-tha a month later at 10:15am on a Saturday morning with my partner Darren, we noticed home-made A4 flyers posted on signage. The first reads,

 

 

 

 

And the second,

 

 

 

 

Darren and I wonder who put them there and what affect they hope these black and white printed sheets might have on stopping violence against women who choose to run alone. Would a man skulking in the scrub see these words of protest and immediately cease and desist with his plan to sexually assault the next solo female who passed him by? Probably not, but perhaps like Turia Pitt, whoever put them there wanted to do something about the likelihood of this happening – again. They wanted other people to see 2 flyers, 21 words, and 12 numbers with a no-frills message – enough, it’s time for those men (because it is not all men) who hurt women to take responsibility for their actions and change the misogyny script. For now, it seems that the only thing I can do is let go of the fear, hold onto the freedom and let my writing about violence against women run with me.