[Jae Rae]

The Kiss of Death for women is our training to be nice, not make a scene, etc. I feel I've spent a lot of my adult life unlearning to be nice.

I've learned to listen to my gut. Once I got off BART in downtown Oakland - not a great area - and was walking the four blocks to work. I started getting a creepy vibe that someone was following me. I ducked into a deli and turned around to confront the guy who followed me in: "Stop following me." I looked right at him. He stammered: "I wasn't following you." I waited until he walked in the opposite direction and then headed out again. A woman caught up to me and said she'd seen him following me and I was absolutely right about him. Her hit was that he was going to snatch my purse.

Another time I was walking in SF in the rain. A guy came up next to me, ostensibly to share my umbrella. He put his arm around me and touched my bottom. Immediately I swung my umbrella at him as a weapon. He jumped back several feet and then fled.

There is no good reason for a man to follow, stalk or stake out a woman. Usually these are guys with poor social skills who feel they're entitled to her stuff, including her body and sexuality, if they can take it. No need to feel ashamed or worried you're going to offend a "nice" guy. If your body tells you it's wrong, it's wrong. Usually your body is screaming the message to get away.

I worked with a guy in his 30s who used to touch the hair of the all the nice library pages who were in our early 20s. It bothered us a lot; I mentioned it to one of the other pages, but we were afraid of being thought of as troublemakers, so said nothing even though he was the troublemaker. I've learned a lot since then.