I didn’t understand the second sentence.
I was in my early 20s and talking with a woman friend. She lives in a nearby city, a small city. A town. On her way to the store, she told me, men regularly walked up to her and asked for blow jobs or the like. Not that it would justify their behavior, but she didn’t dress provocatively. She dressed down, in general. She said this and I had to ask her to repeat it. Of course I knew about such things and I knew about rape statistics and quite a lot about sexual abuse. But this banal sexual attacking attention hadn’t really gone past a vague mental abstraction. I realized that she and I lived in different worlds.
Once a man walked up to me and offered me a blow job. Wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it was once and it’s also not quite the same as the request.
Anyway when she told me this I flashed back to when I stayed in a rooming house in another big city. I made a call on the payphone in the hall and right after I hung up the phone rang. Some guy said he was gonna ___________________. I can’t even remember, but sexual and violent. Suddenly I felt very vulnerable and skittered back to my room and locked the door. But this was a radical exception. No one, not even the blow job offerer, gave off an aggressive, hateful sexual vibe on approach. That’s it. One instance. Whereas for my friend, this was a regular part of her life, something she worked with to avoid, had strategies to defend against and prevent.
I suppose some women have come toward me with what could be taken as a kind of hateful sexuality. But I am was not physically intimidated by any of them. No potential sticks and stones, just words.
Anyway: Her phenomenological Town X was not my phenomenological Town X.
And this isn’t of course just around negative stuff. Just that people as a rule react to her very differently then they do to me.