*Trigger warning for discussion of rape culture and imagery in the form of a nightmare.*

Writer’s Note: I apologize to those for whom this article brings back the trauma of a personal experience. You do not have to read the rest of this piece if it causes you pain. In fact, if that be the case, I’d encourage you to not continue reading. The number of views this article may or may not get means nothing compared to your struggle and pain. Please know that I am with you and that I care about you.

Last week I wrote an article about the sexism that exists in the workplace when it comes to women’s dress codes. This week, I would like to address a topic that goes hand in hand with the double-standard of women’s dress and appearance – the male gaze.

I touched on the male gaze briefly in my article last week without actually stating the term itself, which I find awesomely coincidental. In my article, I said, “The standards for professional dressing were created by men and for men so that we may please their eyes but remain frozen in the cages they have locked us in.” I have italicized and bolded the phrase “please their eyes” because that is the very definition of the male gaze.

The male gaze is, by Wikipedia’s definition, “the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure.” But the male gaze is not just a theory and does not just apply to art and literature. It applies to everyday life. The male gaze is an action. It is catcalling, it is whistling, it is dress codes and Victoria’s Secret ads. It is eyeballing women anywhere and everywhere they are. This is the beginning of my experience with the male gaze.

At my current place of employment, my job title is that of “intern.” As such, I get assigned a lot of random projects that sometimes hardly have anything to do with what department I actually belong to. (Anyone who has ever had an internship probably knows too well what this is like.) I take each assignment with a smile though and finish the job efficiently and with 110 percent of my effort.

One particular week I was assigned the task of redoing a huge whiteboard in our lunch room. There were charts for organizational purposes on this board, but they were almost never used (not that I’d blame them). The charts were made with strips of magnets as lines that were easily moved or destroyed and the whiteboard itself had probably not been cleaned in six months, hence the lack of usage by employees. I was asked to use vehicle pin striping to make permanent lines for the charts, replacing the second-rate magnet strips. I also personally tasked myself with creating new labels for the board and giving it a thorough cleaning.

For those of you who have never worked with vehicle pin striping, here are some tips. First, you have to be very, very precise when laying it down on the board. It can easily become crooked. Second, you have to know exactly where you want it to go. Pin striping is not the easiest material to peel off, though you do have a pretty good chance of saving your work within the first ten seconds of realizing your mistake. Third, it takes forever to do. I spent three days on this project and had to ask for more material to be bought because I ran out before the board charts were even halfway done.

For three days straight, I was in the lunch room putting black vehicle pin striping on the whiteboard. (This was no small whiteboard either. We’re talking about a classroom-sized whiteboard.) As you can probably gather from the name of the space (lunch room), employees were always walking in and out or sitting down to eat. Some would arrive early for their shift and sit at one of the tables in the room until it was time to clock in. Everyone was watching me work, and it was incredibly awkward. I just continued to focus on my project and didn’t bother too much with the ebb and flow of people. I drew my rough drafts of the charts using a level, a tape measure, and a dry erase marker. I cut my pieces of pin striping with scissors and prayed that my lines were straight.

But even on the first day, I became very uncomfortable with my work environment. As I was working on my project, my back was turned to the rest of the room. I was up and down on a step ladder constantly and didn’t care to ever look behind me because I knew most of the employees, my coworkers, who were passing through the space. I could identify them by their voices, so there was no need to turn around unless someone addressed me. But at about two in the afternoon, I stepped down to double-check my drawn-on lines and turned to face the room for the first time in twenty minutes. Sitting at a table was one of the newest hires at our company, and he was watching me quietly, almost as if his intention was for me to not notice his presence. The expression on his face and the way he was carrying himself and acting made me very, very uncomfortable. For how long had he already been there?

I tried to ignore the thoughts running through my head telling me to go back to my desk and continue working on the board tomorrow, but I needed to get as much work done as possible before I would be leaving on vacation for two weeks in just two days. Thus, I remained in the lunch room and tried to work without turning my head to check to see if this guy was still there. Not a single other person was in the room besides the two of us. He didn’t even have a phone in his hands. In fact, he had nothing in front of him. He was just sitting, watching me work silently with a look of odd pleasure on his face.

Thankfully, the clock finally displayed 3:00 p.m., my time of departure for the day. As I gathered up my things, more employees for the second shift began to filter into the room, making me feel a little more comfortable. As I left the room, though, the guy was still watching me while making small talk with others from his shift.

For the next two days, this behavior continued. I would be diligently making progress on the white board and at around two o’clock this guy would walk into the lunch room and take a seat. He would watch me until I left for the day. Unlike the first day, there was at least one other person in the room for the remainder of my days working on the project, but they were always other men. On day two of my pin striping, this guy even weirdly advised me on how to use the tape measure I had in hand as if I didn’t know how to use it. Luckily, he did so from his seat at his table and did not come to where I was to show me, but his commenting on my work from across the room was daunting enough. I awkwardly said, “Thanks,” so as not to seem rude, but he seemed even more pleased with himself that he had “helped” me. He still continued to never pull out a phone or read an announcement on the lunch room tables. He just watched my back side quietly as I tried even faster to finish this job so I could get out of there.

For those three days, 3:00 p.m. was my saving grace. I have never been more ogled or gawked at in my life. More importantly, I have never felt more uncomfortable in or out of the workplace. Every single day I worked on this whiteboard project, all I wanted to do was leave the lunch room. I wished for someone to give me yet another project to do, but this board remained my highest priority. I felt unsafe with this stranger staring at me while I worked, but I never told anyone about the events that had transpired.

Then that same guy appeared in my dream, or, rather, nightmare, only a few days later. In my nightmare, I was in my home town at my local high school, and for whatever reason, this guy was there in a room with me. We were the only two in the room, and it was dark. He tried to grab me, and as he gripped my arm brutishly, I yanked it away and told him “No.” I began to run as fast as I could to anywhere other than the school. I was terrified. I didn’t know where to go that he would not find me. I ran, and, I ran, and I ran; meanwhile he was chasing me, trailing not too far behind me. The minute I had yanked my arm from his hand, he had told me in very direct words, “I want to rape you.”

I looked for hiding places as I ran across town. I had never ran so fast in my life. I thought about stopping at my ex-best friend’s house, but I knew he’d be able to find me there. He’d know to look there. Finally, I crouched behind a bush, as I could no longer see him behind me. I pulled out my phone to call my boyfriend. His house was the only place I could think of that would be safe. This guy didn’t know I had a significant other, so he would have no reason to try to look for me there. Thoughts spun around my head as the phone continued to ring. My boyfriend was not answering. I knew I had to act fast, so I hung up and put my phone back into my pocket as I checked my surroundings.

I darted out from behind the bush, knowing that the only place I could still try to go would be my house. This was my last resort since he’d know where I live and would be able to easily break in, but I needed to get somewhere before he caught up to me. As I reached the end of the road I was running on, a boy who had lived in my neighborhood for years was driving by. I screamed his name and he stopped in his tracks as I yelled, “Could you please drive me to my house?!”

I woke up before I heard his answer. I cried quietly to myself with my back turned to the rest of the hotel room my family and I were staying in. I could not let them know about what had happened. My terrifying experience with the male gaze led to the manifestation of every woman’s worst nightmare in an actual nightmare.

I was not myself for the rest of the day. I could not stop replaying the nightmare over and over in my head, and I cried a few more times. I grew even more afraid of the guy who had been watching me uncomfortably at work. Because I knew I needed to tell at least one person about the events of my dream/nightmare, I talked to my boyfriend about it. He reassured me that everything would be okay--that I was safe and that he understood if I wasn’t myself that day.

I have never told anyone, not even my boyfriend, about the incidents at work. I have never told anyone that the guy who was watching me was the one in my nightmare.

I am sharing this with all of you because no woman or man or child or adult or teenager or elder or person of any sex or gender should live in fear of rape.

I remember just a few years ago when the “#NotAllMen” debacle started. The “#NotAllMen” movement was created by men to protest that not every man is of bad intentions or wants to cause women harm. Women everywhere countered the “#NotAllMen” argument with a movement of their own – “#YesAllWomen.” In this instance, one particular tweet from the “#YesAllWomen” movement sums up my experience and others like it perfectly. (See tweet below.)

Our society’s obsession with the male gaze is a breeding ground for the exploitation of rape culture. When women are viewed as objects created simply for men to get pleasure out of, the door is swung right open for rape to be treated as if it doesn’t matter. Rape culture normalizes male sexual violence against women and views all victims as being at fault. You’ve surely heard those around you victim blaming women for rape or violence, saying things like, “she was asking for it.” Let me be clear with you. NO ONE IS EVER ASKING FOR IT.

I was not asking to be stared at. I was not asking to be watched while I work. I was not inviting anyone to look at my body as if it were created just to pleasure their eyes. I was simply existing.

When I returned from vacation, I had found that the guy was still working at our company, despite the rumors of a bad temper going around. Even to this day, a month later, I see him on a regular basis. My stomach knots up each time he smiles at me. Being in the same room as him makes me afraid. But my summer is nearly over and soon I will be going back to school. The nightmare will never go away, though, because I, and others like me, live it every single day.