So I’m having dinner with two of my friends from high school. We haven’t seen each other in awhile, my one friend is pregnant and there’s so much to talk about and catch up on that we spend practically our whole dinner in a constant fit of laughter (my friends are some funny ladies). It’s a perfect night until a guy decides to approach our table.

He tells us a joke that isn’t especially funny and pretty sexist, but he’s friendly and older and was eating dinner all alone, so we laugh at his joke and say a few nice things, and he walks away. We all share that, “WTF was that” look and then return to our dinner.

We’re almost ready to leave when he comes back. “Just one more,” he says, smiling. Then he proceeds to tell us a rape joke. The punchline is basically someone saying that an 80-year-old woman should be happy to get raped because she “still has sex appeal” or something like that. We kind of all laughed uneasily and hoped he’d go away, which he did, but not after telling us we should all come to his gas station because he’d give us “a little gas for free.” Obviously we all found the prospect of spending time at a gas station with a man who thinks women should be thankful for rape to be super appealing.

So he goes away again, but the waitress chases him down because he forgot his book. He takes it, then comes back to our table. “Have you read this? I just got it from the library.” We make some friendly yet dismissive comments and he’s off again, this time, thankfully, for good.

We all have our keys in our hands, but decide we should probably wait awhile before following him into the parking lot. So we do, and we go home, and here I am. Here I am thinking of all the times men have hurt me and threatened me and made me feel like I should be thankful for it. Here I am thinking about how hard it was for me to leave the house, and how it seems like every time I do, I’m just reminded of how unsafe I am. Here I am hating myself for not telling this man to just fuck off and hating the fact that this will happen again and I’ll probably laugh again simply because I’m afraid of what might happen if I did anything else. And all I wanted was a nice night out with my friends.

You can’t understand this if you’re not a woman or if you’ve never been a woman. You can sympathize, but you can never truly know how it feels to know that every time you leave the house there’s a chance you’re going to be harassed or worse, or that the worst things that have ever happened to you will happen again, or that someone will make a joke about your pain and expect you to laugh, and when the moment comes, you will.