On the morning of the eve of International Woman’s Day, I think to myself, what have I done for womankind in the past 365 days?

Not much, my inner critic says.

I call her Negative Nancy. We all have one.
Some bigger than others.

I brush away my initial thought.

In this past year, I didn’t find myself on the streets, marching, or stamping my feet, shouting.

Even though there is plenty reason to do so.

I didn’t see myself ranting on Facebook, posting on Instagram.

Though I’m proud in the past this is what I did so.

Memories remind me of injustices passed.

The story I have to tell comes in two parts.

As history has always done so,

Had a lightness and a dark.

Where do I start?

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The Dark:
On the Eve of IWD 2023, it was my turn to choose a movie on Netflix.

I went to the ‘New & Popular’ tab. My mouse scrolled over a thumbnail of a woman’s face. She was blonde, she looked sad. The cursor of my mouse hovered over her face for a moment longer, until the trailer started to play.

Chilling * Psychological * Thriller.

The three genres used to describe.

The woman starts to move in the tiny thumbnail, and I watch her walking slowly, carefully, down a supermarket aisle. She looks over her shoulder, and doesn’t do so casually.

She is fearful.

Intrigue arouses and I scroll down to read more.

“Feeling isolated after moving to Bucharest for her husband’s job, an American woman suspects she is being stalked amid reports of a local serial killer”.

Bingo. My cursor presses play.

What is it with this obsession with serial killers?

I ask myself but I already know the answer.

Because it’s real.

My interest in crime thrillers and serial killers started back when I was young; and it actually came from my mum. She was obsessed with watching the Crime Investigation channel on Foxtel.

I still remember the position she’d sit in on the couch, watching as she folded clothes.

Growing older we watched these shows together, but I never knew the rest of the world was obsessed too. It wasn’t until the past few years that I noticed that a lot more people shared this interest, borderline obsession, with serial killers, too.

It’s quite bizarre. Podcasts are fairly gnarly, I haven’t brought myself to listening to one yet. And Dahmer, the series… Well, we all know how much of a hit that was on TV.

Crazy really, if you ask me.

And yet I find myself always a little too keen when something new comes on the screen.

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The movie starts.

A couple arrives to Bucharest, the capital city of Romania.

The taxi driver speaks to the American girl but she doesn’t understand.

Her husband translates. He said you are beautiful. He shrugs off the rest.

They arrive to an apartment and the land-lady lets them in, muttering in Romanian.

Our protagonist walks across the space and stands in front of a very large window.

No curtains.

She looks out at the stark white buildings with peeling paint in front of her.

Their apartment is beautiful but their view, not so much.

The movie continues.

Julia is home alone all day while her husband is at his new marketing job, sucking up to his boss during office hours. He comes home late after entertaining clients over cocktails every evening.

Julia feels like she is being watched. The smile that once adorned her face has turned into a thick red line, plastered permanently across her face for the duration of the film.

Worrying.

I can’t help but believe Julia when she first confesses to her husband that she thinks that she’s being watched.

She can see the silhouette of a man in a window in the building across the street, to the left, one level up.

Her husband can’t see him but he sticks his middle finger up at the alleged window, anyway.

The days go on and Julia starts to lose her mind. She leaves her house, and tries to ditch this feeling of being followed by going into a cinema that’s playing ‘Charade’ with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.

She gets lost in the film for a little while. That is until a man sits directly behind her seat.

He leans in, and starts breathing down her neck.

She loses it, runs out the cinema.

The story continues.

But her husband doesn’t really believe her.

Even though there’s been four women killed in Bucharest, three with their necks slit, one with her head chopped off.

Grim, and frightening. Julia is terrified.

But when her husband and his colleagues talk about “the Spider”, that’s what they’ve called this serial killer, they almost laugh it off, change the conversation in one quick breath.

They start talking about work or some other bullshit.

It’s always bullshit when a woman isn’t believed, when she’s gaslit.

But I hear it all to often. I bet you see it too.

Julia’s Watcher keeps watching her.

This sinking feeling that what she is experiencing is real, and this is happening to her, grows.

I know she’s not losing her mind, even though she’s made to feel this way.

The movie continues.

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Many feelings were brought up for me in this film. Fascination, watching Julia’s face, she’s beautiful. Her relationship with her husband starts out sweet but then quickly turns sour. He’s moved her to this strange and foreign country and he has, essentially, left her in a room all day while he puts everyone and everything else first, bar her.

I watch Julia as she looks out the window, sorrowfully. We women have felt this all before.

The feeling of being watched. Some are more aware of it than others.

Some are more used to it than others.

Living abroad in South America taught me to be hyper-vigilant. It’s not called paranoia when women are hurt every day.

Living in Sydney and venturing into the city to take the reins of my own life also taught me to be careful out in public, catching trains, or walking the stretch between the bus and the bridge home at night.

You really don’t know who could be watching you, waiting to hurt you.

My parents taught me ‘stranger danger’ as I am sure yours taught you.

Do you fear it, too?

I have a feeling that if you’re a man you haven’t experienced it like we have.

I guess you’ll never know the fear.

Women, we are vulnerable. It’s not because sometimes we struggle to open jars, or because at certain times of the month, our breasts are sore, and our stomachs hurt.

We are vulnerable for so much more.

It’s because of this feeling of being watched.

Of never knowing if, by the off and very unlucky chance, that someone may actually be there, standing in the dark, looking in. With the intent to hurt us.

This evil intention is real. I hear it every day. News of women raped and killed, and no, it’s not just in foreign countries. People that we know, hurt us, too.

It’s not just strangers in the dark, hanging round the corner while you walk home, often times it is right inside of our homes. But this is not another D.V. spiel.

Unfortunately there are still a lot of men who remain on my social media that I know, for a fact, roll their eyes and think I’m exaggerating. They don’t do enough to stop it.

Maybe they are gaslighters, too.

I just don’t think you do enough, because when you get drunk, the slurs come out, between your mates. Have you ever stopped for a second and said,

Hang on mate, don’t talk about your ex that way.

Words like cunt and slut are used too often.

It is International Women’s Day and in the end, this is just a confession, about how I feel, that things have remained the same.

What are you going to do about it today?