Design by Natasha Gaither P E R S O N A L E S S AY
Intuition
I
t was snowing as I walked down High Street one February evening, furious. Why had I left Jonathan Edwards College so fast? Why had I known, in a split second, that I could no longer stand to be in that room? I had just told John, my now-ex boyfriend, that I felt uncomfortable in my encounters with his friend Mark, another man. Mark and I knew each other from class freshman year. We never hung out one-on-one, but during group hangouts after dinner, or when I sat next to him during a meal, Mark would only address ideas about philosophy and theory to the man I was with. He’d nod, if anything, in my direction, while angling his body towards the other man. If I attempted to join the conversation, he’d pretend that he didn’t hear what I said. The only time Mark showed personal interest in me was when he learned I was single. Immediately, he asked me to dinner and spent the entire night talking about sex—staring deep into my eyes, he talked about the wonder of sexual harmony, clearly trying to get me to sleep with him. As soon as I started dating someone, Mark resumed ignoring me, apart from the occasional appraising once-over of my body. I was no longer available for sex, and therefore no longer of interest to him. Immediately after I relayed my experiences to John, he turned to our friend Alex, the other man in the room. “But I’ve never seen Mark do anything sexist,” John said. “Do you think he’s sexist?” This question, addressed to Alex, not me, was startling. Something felt off—I was talking about my experience with Mark, not John’s, and not Alex’s. I left that room in JE before I even knew I was leaving, before I recognized that the icy feeling driving me to my feet was fury. As I crossed Elm Street and strode
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A personal essay by Beasie Goddu
through Cross Campus, my thoughts began to crystallize. John had asked another male to validate my discomfort. There were several problems with this: first, that John doubted my feelings in the first place, and second, that he had needed confirmation from another male to confirm that my intuition—my sense, as a woman, that I was encountering sexism—was ‘correct.’ I don’t believe that men should be excluded from discussions of sexism—far from it. But neither John nor Alex had any right to decide whether my feelings were valid. Nowadays, I know when I’m in danger, and I know when I have to leave. I know when I’m safe, and when I can let my guard down. But I wasn’t always confident in my judgement. First, I had to identify their source. These feelings of intuition arise not from my brain but from my gut. So what is intuition, really? For me, it precedes rationality. It manifests before I read a situation analytically. It’s a feeling, but not an emotion. I cannot remember life without it, but it only started to feel important in adolescence, when I began to think more critically about my gender in relationship to others. At around sixteen, I was no longer able to leave my sense of female identity, and the particular intuition that came with it, at the door. When I entered a space with other people, I began to notice how they reacted to my performance of gender. Some guys looked over my whole body. I began to learn, based on their glance, whether to avoid or approach them. Over the years, this intuition has intertwined itself with my relationships with men in all the spaces I inhabit: the street, the library, parties,
