The Stalker in the Grocery Store: Is an Urban Legend Working Against the Political Empowerment of Suburban Women?

Several days ago, an acquaintance on Facebook cut and pasted a post from “a friend of a friend” telling the story of a woman being followed by a creepy guy in an area grocery store and then having her car blocked by the guy as she tried to leave. This supposedly happened one town over from us, in Avon. The story was remarkably similar to one I remember having made the rounds on Facebook a few years ago, except that in the earlier story, the woman was actually attacked in her car. Since I knew the earlier story had been debunked, I confess I didn’t pay a lot of attention to this one. Indeed, it wasn’t long before another person posted in the comments that the story is an urban legend that has been debunked on Snopes.

Then, a few days later, another person in a Facebook group to which I belong posted the story again. This time, however, she said she had heard it had happened in a few different towns — that in one case, it had happened in Avon, and in another case, it had happened in Torrington. This person did not take the fact that these two identical stories were being reported as having happened in two different towns as a sign that the story wasn’t true. Instead, she took it to indicate that there was a really creepy stalker out there who was “working” the broader area, showing up in different towns to harass and intimidate women in grocery stores. The story always ends with an admonition to its women readers to be careful out there, to be on your guard at all times because you’re always at risk, that no place is safe, not even your suburban Walmart or Stop n Shop.

Even after this second sighting on Facebook, I let it go. I hoped that someone would come along and provide the Snopes information to the person who posted to the group, but I decided not to be that person. I figured it didn’t really matter if people were passing around a somewhat alarmist but ultimately not harmful urban legend. What’s the harm in suggesting that women be alert? After all, bad things do happen sometimes. There was a rare stranger-rape case in our town a while back that remains unsolved. It is an awful fact that women face risks that men do not. Not usually in crowded, well-lit grocery stores, but still…

Then, reading an article in The Atlantic (“The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Re-Elect the President,” by McKay Coppins), I came across the following:

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough — about 100,000 members — he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture” — which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers — that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

Suddenly, the viral story about suburban women (multiple women! in towns right next door!) being followed, threatened, or endangered didn’t seem so harmless. Such stories, instead, seem as if they could easily be part of a concerted effort to sow fear. Of course, the people sharing the stories in my Facebook feed aren’t thinking of them that way — they are acting out of a sense of sisterhood, raising the alarm to urge other women to protect themselves. But what about behind that? Why do these stories spread as they do, and what interest do they serve?

Well, here’s one thought: The other news about suburban women right now is that they have woken up. They are energized, empowered, and mad as hell. They are voting. They are running for office and winning. They are flipping districts. They are less likely to be referred to dismissively by the media as “soccer moms” and more likely to be acknowledged as a political force to be reckoned with. How can the other side — the Republicans who are losing these suburban districts, or the forces of patriarchy more generally, who are feeling threatened — fight that? Other than on right-wing radio, it’s probably not going to work to say, “hey you gals, get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed.” That’ll just make college-educated, middle- and upper-middle class suburban women madder and more energized.

What you can do, though, is make them scared. Stir up fear of the other, of strangers, of public spaces and public activities. Make sure that the dangerous man is nameless and (in some versions of the story, in which he wears a hoodie) faceless. Get women thinking that, if they’re not even safe going to the grocery store by themselves, then they must be super-duper unsafe doing other things out there in the world like, say, knocking on doors for their preferred political candidate or running for office themselves. Better bring your husband along when you go shopping. Better always be looking over your shoulder and assuming the worst of anyone you don’t know.

There’s something else that has been going on in Connecticut for the last year or so that also relates to this — something real, and scary, and also about suburban women — indeed about a woman who formerly lived in Avon, the town where the scary grocery store story is based. Since last spring, hardly a week has passed (sometimes, hardly a day) when there has not been a front-page story in the main daily newspaper about the disappearance and presumed murder of one white, college-educated, suburban Connecticut mother. The fact that her body has not been found, the gruesome details of the way her assailant disposed of items stained with her blood, the tragic loss for her five children and widowed elderly mother, have combined to make the story sad, horrifying, and riveting. For fellow suburban mothers, there has been a sense of identification with the victim and a creepy feeling of threat — after all, she was attacked in her own garage after dropping her kids off at school.

The thing is, the suburban woman in this case wasn’t stalked or killed by a stranger, but by her estranged husband. She had already fled with the children from the house they shared when she knew he would be away, because she had reason to fear him. As is so often the case, the man to be feared was not a stranger following her in the grocery store, but the man she had married, the father of her children. On the same day he was charged with her murder, the daily paper also carried the story of another local man accused of killing not only his wife but their children, too. A few days later, the same newspaper informed us that a Connecticut man convicted 30 years ago of murdering his wife and putting her frozen body through a wood chipper to hide the evidence is being released from prison.

With these stories so much in the news, Connecticut suburban women may well be feeling a bit on edge. If we focus on these real stories and what they mean, however, the effect should be for us to become more energized and more activated. We should be supporting area women’s shelters. We should be making sure that protective orders are being awarded and enforced. We should make sure doctors are trained to ask about intimate partner violence. We should notice when a friend’s new partner or spouse seems to be controlling her access to money or cutting off her contact with friends and family.

The take-home lesson of the real stories is the opposite of that from the urban legend. The urban legend tells women to fear public spaces and strangers and to retreat to a supposedly safer realm of privacy and protection. The real stories tell us something very different: that for women, public spaces can be safer than private ones, but that abusers and their political enablers don’t want us to realize that — especially when we use those public spaces to organize and fight back.

In this election year, when we know the internet is being weaponized (see the rest of that Atlantic article by Coppins), it is particularly important to notice how a particular story is working on your emotions and to think who might benefit from getting you to feel that way. Hmm, that story makes me feel scared to be out in the world by myself as a woman. Hmm, that other story makes me feel angry at a different group within the Democratic coalition. Who benefits if I am fearful and decide to stay home? Who benefits if I’m annoyed with the corporate types in the party? We need to go ahead and call out urban legends, even if it makes us seem like scolds, and we need to keep re-directing back to the big goal when we come across narratives intended to divide and conquer us.