BLOG
Of course, me too
I have been writing this piece since the Me Too Movement started and Donald Trump took office. In the wake of the terror that has been brought down on our Capitol and the culmination of the terror that we have been living through, and as we sit on the precipice of a new dawn, now feels like the time. It is not the whole story, but it is what I can share now.
Date Rape is too strong. But what is the word, what do you call that thing, the emotion, the thing that is what happens when you know you don’t want it to. When you say you don’t want it to. And it happens anyway.
Somehow you get in too deep, and you acquiesce. That thing.
There is a word for ennui and other in between things. What is the word for that thing.Would a word help? A term? An acknowledgement that there is this awful thing that is real, that is far too familiar to far too many. This space between rape and consent.
Before that thing, there were the other things. Those other things did not exist in grey areas. They were not my choice. I was not complicit. I did not acquiesce or consent. I was too young to have a choice or a voice. And no one had one for me. No one. Even when I asked them to.
The earliest that I remember involved a ‘family friend’ who was ‘babysitting’ me. He unnerved me. His house and everything in it, unnerved me. It was packed with relics of old life. The living people in the house seemed not alive. I was only about table height, and found it difficult to navigate from room to room amidst the clutter. Dark, dank, dusty, shades drawn. A couple of ghostly elder women sat in chairs watching programs that seemed as distant and ghostly as they did. Only he seemed to come and go. Everything, time itself, felt heavy. Hours passed. I felt buried alive. I would count to 1000. Stop. Start again. Pace. Pace and count. Over and over, until my father picked me up. Until he rescued me. It felt like waiting for rescue.
Sometimes, I don’t know when or why, but sometimes, the man would drive me. I was too small for my feet to bend over the seat. It is a vague memory but the moment is clear. He didn’t speak much to me, but on this one drive he reached over and put his hands between my legs. He squeezed a few times and asked me if it felt good. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. I didn’t feel anything, except some pressure, and shame. Discomfort on every level, though I didn’t understand why. He said that if I liked it, I should be sure not to tell anybody. I didn’t like it. But I didn’t tell.
When I was much older, in my teen years, my father, step-mother and step-sister were discussing a different inappropriate action. Apparently, my father had somehow cupped my stepsister’s breasts, during a family swim at the Y. She was older than me by 3 years. There was a big discussion. A big disagreement about whether it had been intentional or accidental. It was a very big and long and important conversation. In the midst of that conversation, I spoke up about the time that I too, was inappropriately touched. I was clear in my mind that a wrong thing had happened, but I had never told anyone. The fact that he was a beloved friend of my step-families had left an awkward residue for years that I didn’t know what to do with.This seemed my opportunity to clear the air. I don’t know what result I expected. I know that I was looking for relief or resolution of some sort. I know it bothered me to be around him. He was too affectionate to other young girls in the family, and well received for that affection. It was repulsive to me. I thought that speaking up might help that situation, even if it couldn’t help me.
The lack of response from my father and step-mother was astounding. If anything, it seemed to get a laugh. A sort of ‘what did I expect of that guy, that was his nature’ reaction, and then nothing. As if it never happened.
That is my earliest sexual memory. That awful grab of my genitals as a young girl by a creepy ‘family friend,’ who I was continually exposed to over my life. A web of shamefulness and lack of choice around person hood and sexuality was born. I couldn’t navigate freely through it.
I was a no parents at home kid. This is part of the larger saga of my life, being the child of a severely mentally ill mother, and a not so equipped to be a family person father, who tried to raise me. He provided home and basics. For the rest it seems, I was on my own.
Home was isolating and depressing, but time at home alone was preferable to any experience I seemed to have out in the world. Even though that alone time was excruciating in a different way.
One of those out in the world times, before I was the bare minimum age to be left alone, took place across the street. I went there for before and after school care. It was the home of a proper German family. Everyone in my neighborhood was proper except for us. She was the orderly woman of the house. Not very affectionate, but occasionally playful with the other kids. One time she was sort of silly-tickling kids as they brought their dishes to the sink. I was incredibly awkward in these kinds of situations. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get tickled, in fact I wanted some attention. But aware of the game at play, I put my dishes in the other side of the the sink, in order to outwit the tickle line. I thought I was being playful too. It backfired. I was yelled at instead, for putting my dishes on the wrong side of the sink. I never felt welcome or liked by her. I felt a sort of disdain emanating from her in my direction. Her son was also disdainful towards me. The leader of the boysof his domain, and a few years older than me. He used to apply a variety of small tortures to me whenever no adult was present, which was most of the time. One of those tortures was to flick wet shoelaces at me, for no apparent reason. Another was to get the boys to gather around me and threaten to undo my shirt. To cope, I would try to be invisible. I would either find a place to hide or, if I could get out of the house unseen, I would stand at the gate that separated the front and back yard, and stare across the street at my house, watching for my father’s car. I would count. Pace and count. While waiting for my father to rescue me back to the safety and isolation of my own home. Torture to be alone, but much preferred to the torture of others.
At the time those boys were trying to undo my shirt, I didn’t yet have breasts or anything else to reveal. But when my breasts did come in, I got them early and they came in large. It seems acruel torture that being so isolated, awkward, and ill equipped to deal with the tortures of the world, that I should be the one to have large breasts early. And yet, there they were. A fresh new layer to my already excruciating existence. I recall sitting around my house with a pillow covering my chest at all times. My father thought that I was mentally ill. Out in the world, over time, I learned to hide them.
In addition to large breasts, I was regarded as unattractive. I somehow learned to groom myself into an attractive person over time. But as a child, I was uniformly treated as ugly. Almost as repulsive. That sense of disdain that I seemed to evoke in people was always present. I once saw an adult from my block later in life. It was such a strange moment when she was told who I was, that I had once been that little girl from across the street. She was flabbergasted. She kept saying over and over, mouth agape, that she just didn’t think that I could be attractive. She kept repeating herself and shaking her head, until her embarrassed daughter finally got her to stop. Such are the compliments of my life. Much like the time my father said that I could’ve been a stripper. Very similar. It was like one day he decided that I had finally turned out palatable. And that was the compliment he could muster.
In general, as a young person, I seemed to either be invisible, or a target for disdain, ridicule, or mild sexual harassment. When the breasts came in, everything got worse. It was breasts forward. Merely having breasts seemed to be some sort of calling card to the world. It read ‘open for business.’ One of the most public moments of humiliation took place in Freshman Algebra. The teacher was my favorite. She made Algebra easy to understand. I loved her so much. My recollection of this moment comes back to me with more sadness each time. She was my favorite.
A popular boy, who seemed to have earned that popularity solely on his ability to be a humorous jerk, was in the assigned seat next to me. I was awkward around boys in general. I had no idea how to be, except that I also wanted some kind of attention. But not a public kind. If there was a kind of invisible innocuous attention available, that was the sort I was looking for.
The desks were set up in three rows of 2, running from the front to the back of the classroom. We were in the front row. I began to hear a murmur of snickers swelling from behind. My hackles went up. The teacher was writing on the board, back to the room. By the time I realized what was happening, it had already happened. The popular boy had very slowly and dramatically done a reach around, culminating in a full on breast grab in front of the entire class. My teacher turned around to face the class at exactly the moment it happened. Time stopped. I was horrified. The room was a brief, but sharp cacophony of laughter. Then as quickly as it had stopped, time started again. Nothing happened. Everybody had laughed. Everybody had noticed. But even the teacher, the person who sets the expectation of behavior, turned around and continued the lesson.
There was another formative school moment. I was young, kindergarten or first grade, in an after school program that I actually liked, I remember I used to write and direct plays with the even younger kids in the program. It was one of the most joyous memories of my young life, being creative, and not hating my surroundings. It was rare.
However, one day I went to the bathroom. Down the hall. Alone or with a similarly ill-equipped to handle any real threat, buddy, to the public bathroom. I was in a stall and on the toilet. The toilet was large. I was holding myself on the seat, to keep from sinking into the toilet. I was startled when a man came in and looked over my bathroom stall. I looked around, checking to see if I was in the wrong place. Feeling confused, I apologized. First, he didn’t move. Then, he moved briefly to another stall and came back. I didn’t understand. I began to realize this must be on purpose. I was now confused and scared. I didn’t move. I was getting more afraid and unsure what to do. Just as I was starting to panic, he left. I was so scared that instead of opening the door, I peeked out under the stall and crawled under it, to be sure that he was gone. As I did this I noticed an unfamiliar white goo on the floor. I had no Idea what had happened. I awkwardly explained what had happened to my female after school teacher. In hindsight, it seems there would have been more attention paid to a skinned knee, than to this sexually aggressive act that I had just been the victim of. I remember feeling awkward and shameful, and wanting the staff to tell my father for me. They did.
And nothing.
The nothingness took hold. I became the nothingness. The murky web of shamefulness and lack of choice developed into detachment and dissociation. As I matured, layers of sexual greyness calcified in the web. Nothing was ever clear. But the pain and confusion was fixed.
One time in college, when I should have known better, when we all should have known better, A group of intimate friends were hanging out. One of my friends had a way of letting the dishes go, until they were more of a science fiction reality than a kitchen full of dirty dishes. When this would happen, he could usually con some unsuspecting cutie to do his dishes for him. Some vapid cutie with a glimmer in her eye of one day going on a date with him. He was very charming. This was a day like that. I was not a roommate but I was always there. My becoming best female friend lived there with her 3 awesome male roommates.
This is an everything and nothing story at the same time.
There we were hanging out. I believe he tried yelling at me to do the dishes for him and every one was sort of just sitting around to see what was going to happen. It was probably a Sunday with everyone avoiding their homework.
Not getting the result he wanted, somehow it turned. He went in the kitchen and returned with a large bowl of pasta salad. The kind that must have been brought back from a community event. It was that big. He loomed it over my head and said that if I didn’t unbutton my shirt he was going to dump the salad on my head. ‘Unbutton your shirt or I am dumping the salad on your head!’ It went on a while. We were a room full of would be liberal feminists coming of age. Even the men. Especially the men. And yet there we were. And I still knew nothing of how to defend myself in a moment like that. Even with all of my experience. Especially with all of my experience. I remember thinking that it was awful, but laughing with the room. I remember thinking that I was in a room full of smart funny people who like me, and that if they think this is ok, then it must be ok.
Of Course, ME TOO.