When I was a little girl, I felt light, I felt free. I ran through the woods with my wild curly hair swinging around me and my conch shell tied to a leather strap from my neck. I blew it ceremoniously when I came across a sight that delighted me or when I encountered a dead animal that needed a witness to its passing. I choreographed dances and slid across the wood floors in my house. I scrunched my nose and smiled. I twinkled.
When did it end? I don’t remember one moment, but I remember the heaviness gathering inside me around second grade. It lived in me. It sat bulky in my body. It slowed me down and kept me from dancing. My smiles didn’t flash as quickly as they used to. My backyard became a mud pit as my dad cleared trees. I stopped running through the woods. Instead, I slogged through the mud. It was the kind of deep mud that resisted, that pulled you down. And I lost things in there. Whole boots were swallowed up. Something else–the weightless part of me–sank below the surface, too.
Was it the shame of having a body that was growing, that was changing? It was a body that made me feel like I couldn’t run into my dad’s arms anymore. Instead, he hugged me on the side or with a pat on the back, with space between us like I might break if I were touched. It felt like my body was going rotten, like a fruit that goes from underripe to overripe, with no in-between. This body, this body, this body is bad. Just touch it, and your finger pierces it; the juice runs down. Spoiled.
What the world wants from me
I could tell from about sixth grade forward that men liked my mom. I watched how they looked at her. She was beautiful, with red lips. And French. Her eyes held mysteries. I was an observant child; I saw everything. I could see that they wanted to pluck the mysteries from her.
When my mom brought me lunch at school one day, the boys I wanted to impress ogled my mom. Me? I was invisible to them. But her? Their heads turned, and their voices said things I didn’t need to hear to understand.
I was bigger than my mom. To grow bigger than the body you come from, bigger than the body that grew you, feels like a mistake. I was not supposed to take up this much space in the world. I outgrew my pot. I was bigger than the body that held me. I was not supposed to be the larger nesting doll, the one whose body could fit the mother’s inside.
I starved myself. I tried to make my body perfect, my perfect gift to the world. And the world told me that that was the gift it wanted from me, that my body was where the treasure was. The treasure was my body, but it wasn’t my body in particular–just this small female form. Except it didn’t feel like a real treasure; it felt more like the cheap plastic prize at the bottom of a Happy Meal bag. Wind me up, have your fun with me, and forget me. Lose me under the seat of the car.
When the men passing by first look at us, we think it means they see us. We feel special, beautiful. But later we realize that they don’t see us–they see themselves on top of us. They see their hands on our breasts, their lips on our neck. And if they see our sparkle, they see themselves mastering it. Their hands want to hold the prism that chooses where and when our light casts. It was never about us.
The first men who touched me
I had my first kiss when I was fourteen. He was nineteen.
The first penis I saw belonged to a 28-year-old man. I was sixteen.
The first time I had sex, I was seventeen. My boyfriend was 23. We had a fight that night, and I thought this might be a nice way to erase it, to distract him from his anger. He was mad at what was in my head, what was in my heart, but my body…there’s that Happy Meal treasure, a small distraction for a few minutes.
At the time I didn’t think my experiences with these older men were wrong. I was mature for my age, often called an “old soul”. And I was a rebellious teenager who was in pain. But those men…what were they doing touching the body of a high-school girl? I remember when I was 23–two years out of college–thinking, “I could never be interested in dating a high school student. That’s some messed-up shit.” I realized I had been taken advantage of, how my inexperience in relationships and their adult authority made for a dangerous dynamic.
A brief history of my fear
Like any girl, I’ve had a long series of unremarkable encounters with men that made me afraid. They didn’t traumatize me, but they did affect how I moved through the world. They did affect my idea of what was normal and what to expect. They did train me to stay silent and take it, look the other way, keep walking, and smile ever so slightly to placate men who could be dangerous if I resisted.
I was a seventh grader at Barnes and Noble browsing the young adult fiction. I picked up a book and started to read a few pages while standing. I must have been really engrossed in it because at one point, I looked down and noticed that there was a grown man lying on the ground looking up my skirt. I walked away. I told no one.
I waited in a Greyhound station in North Carolina when a man who sat in the row behind me started making sucking noises in my direction. He licked his lips and muttered things under his breath in another language. This lasted for many minutes. Then when I got on the bus, the man next to me took out his phone and zoomed in on the denimed ass of a young woman standing outside of a convenience store. He snapped a photo. More than one actually. I knew that sleeping was not an option for me on this bus ride.
Recently I was shopping at the grocery store with my baby strapped on my body. A man came up to me and said, “I like your husband’s shoes.” I stared at him wondering what he was talking about because my husband wasn’t with me that day. “Excuse me?” I said, trying to figure out how he might know my husband. “That guy who’s with you,” he said. “I like his shoes. Did he get them out of state?” I didn’t know if he was genuinely confused, but this is what it’s like to be a woman. You’re on your guard. You don’t admit you’re alone. “Oh yeah, he did. Thank you,” I said with a smile, worrying that if he knew I was alone, he would follow me to my car and attack me while I put my baby in his carseat.
A woman walks through the world with the feeling that her body is not hers. It is there for others. It could be claimed by a man in any parking lot, on any walk home at night, in a public restroom, in her workplace, in her own bed. A stranger could claim her body. A date she just met, her boss, an uncle or father, a boyfriend or husband. It could even be the nice guy, the one who opens the door for you and asks you questions about yourself over alfredo. Where are we safe? Where are we safe? Where is our body our own?
The worst of men
In his book How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon, a black American man, writes about how his grandma “responsibly [armed] herself and her community against the worst of white folks“. Being prepared to live safely in the world among “the worst of white folks” was woven through his whole existence.
I will never know the experience of being a black person in America. I will never know, and I am not making a comparison to my experience as a white woman. As I was writing this piece, though, the phrase “the worst of men” kept surfacing. The worst of men. I kept hearing it in my head.
I have walked through the world safeguarding myself against the worst of men every single day. We see signs of the worst of men in too many men. The worst of men find and violate too many of us. Whenever a man stares too long or licks his lips in our direction or walks behind us on our way out of the drug store, we wonder, if only for a moment: Is it you? Is it you? Are you the worst of men? How far will you go?
We stay vigilant looking for the predator–the worst of men–when every day the toxic air we breathe slowly kills us. We don’t need to be assaulted by the worst of men in order for us to feel the effects of the poison all around us.
We learn the rules to keep ourselves safe and to not encourage unwanted attention from male strangers. Confident eye contact but not for too long. Neutral face. If you find yourself smiling, do not make it real or too big; it should be brief and stiff before you shift your eyes away quickly.
Do you know what happens when you walk through your life every day playing by these rules? You compromise your humanity. You learn to avert your eyes when you could be seeing another human in front of you. You compromise your humanity when you can’t sustain eye contact with a person without feeling like they may take it as you wanting to have sex with them. And you compromise the humanity of the man, too. Our alarm flashes and blares, “Alert, Alert! The worst of men! The worst of men! Right here! Right here in front of you! On guard!” The men compromise our humanity in their objectification of us, and we return with a dismissal of their humanity. Because it’s hard to appreciate someone as human when you don’t feel safe with them.
The man who claimed my body
My first long-term boyfriend was a shy guy, quiet, kept to himself. He treated his little dog as tenderly as one could. He helped care for his niece and nephew. He played classical guitar, his fingers caressing the strings and finding the chords gently. He drew funny, sweet little pictures for me and vulnerably shared his painful history.
He also made jokes about wanting to “bang” my friends. He also showed me pictures of naked women he thought were hot. He also talked about “titty fucking” and “bukkake” and other humiliating acts on women. If I talked about a male friend of mine, he would sometimes quip, “Do you want to fuck him?” He laughed, but his eyes wanted to know the truth.
It can be very confusing when the tenderness and gentleness of a man exists alongside the crude and dehumanizing. It’s easy to say, “Well…that ugly part is not the real him. That part is just off-color humor. I don’t like it, but that’s not who he is.” The worst of men can exist alongside niceness, alongside protection and loyalty, alongside what we call love.
He was educated by porn, and it was my first sexual relationship. He was 23, and I was 17. He convinced me to do things he had seen in films, and he told me it was normal. I didn’t feel comfortable doing them, but I didn’t want to be prudish. I thought this was what sex was. I thought I was being initiated into a world outside of my comfort zone, and I needed to assimilate, the same way I had sculpted my body to meet society’s standards.
I was a smart girl by anyone’s standards and a straight-A student. I was perceptive. But I was also a teenager who was desperate for love, desperate to be seen, looking for direction anywhere other than what I had known. I also wanted him to know that I cared about him, and this seemed to be how he wanted me to show it. I had read in women’s magazines that this is what people do in relationships: they indulge each other’s fantasies. It sounded playful; it sounded loving. I didn’t even know what my fantasies were, though. And his…they were pretty specific.
Later I got more resistant to his ideas. Sometimes he wore me down for weeks on things I didn’t want to do in bed. He brought it up over and over, needling me until I would give in out of mental and emotional exhaustion from holding him off. I would do it just to get him to shut up about it.
The first time I tried to break up with him, I told him the truth: I had feelings for another guy. I wanted to date other people. That night he punched a hole in the wall, grabbed me by the arm, pinned me down on the bed with his entire body. I was scared. I don’t remember much else about that night. Only that it ended with us having sex with him on top of me while I was crying.
Other times I tried to break up with him, he held me hostage. One time he drove me around and wouldn’t let me out of the car. He threw my phone under his seat. He drove me around for hours saying he was going to kill himself. I started to worry he might kill me, too.
The worst of men is too many of you. You find too many of us.
The day I stood up for myself
He raped me one night when I came home after having one beer with my aunt. You see, he didn’t want me drinking. He didn’t want this girl going wild. And that’s how he saw me: Wild. Temptress. Something to be controlled. Something to be guarded. Something that belonged to him. And he made me feel wild, too, because I felt out of control in my life with him. I did things I didn’t want to do. He had control. For years I had followed his “no drinking” rule because of his sad story about how his brother was an alcoholic and beat up his dad who was dying from cancer. It was a sad story, and he used it, along with my love, to manipulate me, to control me.
I was finished belonging to him. I was finished believing what he said about me. I was finished defending the part of him that was good. I was finished looking past the worst.
That night, I had one beer. I decided I deserved to make my own decisions about what went in my body. He disagreed. So he made another decision for me about what went in my body.
You stay silent, you get hurt. You stand your ground, you get hurt.
After I escaped the relationship, I didn’t go anywhere alone for months. Because he went to the places where he knew I liked to go. He waited for me. He stalked me. One time he stood behind my car so I couldn’t leave. I gave campus security a picture of him so they wouldn’t let him on-campus.
My friend told me that one time she was in the campus security office, and there she saw a wall full of men’s faces. The picture of my ex-boyfriend was there, along with the face of a friend’s boyfriend from freshman year. A wall full of men harassing women we knew. A wall full of men harming women on this liberal arts campus with 1100 students.
I didn’t report the rape. I didn’t file a restraining order. I was worried it would embolden him, that he might do something worse than he had ever done to me. I also still pitifully loved him; I wanted to protect him, to give him the possibility to change.
He’s gone on to hurt and take advantage of at least one other woman. For years I felt like I needed to keep tabs on him. I felt like I needed to know if he was dating anyone else because I felt responsible. I’m not proud of my choice to not report him, but I forgive myself–surviving was all the strength I had in me.
The standard for men
We watched a presidential campaign in which a candidate bragged about his penis size on stage. We heard him say he’ll “grab [a woman] by the pussy” and that “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do it, you can do anything.” We heard him allow a radio host to call his daughter a “piece of ass”. He has said about women, “You have to treat ‘em like shit.” We watched him turn Hillary into a “nasty woman”. Nasty nasty nasty. “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” he tweeted.
People were not shocked enough by this behavior to not vote for him. It did not make them feel uncomfortable enough to not make him president. He is the standard for what is acceptable. We saw that day just how much our country respects women…and the answer we heard was, “We don’t”. We revealed just how much we will tolerate from a man, just how much we will look past. We revealed that sexual assault is not a deal-breaker. It’s not a deal-breaker in locker rooms or in board rooms or in the Oval Office. This isn’t news, but to hear the message so loud and clear was alarming and made me feel very unsafe.
“You can say these things, do these things, and still become president of the United States.” That’s what we told our boys. What we told our girls was: “These things can be said about you and done to you, and the person who did them to you can still rise to one of the most powerful leadership positions in the world.” How many girls in the aftermath of assault have wondered, “Is it even worth the risk and pain of speaking up? Is it worth it if people don’t even care?”
The worst of men is too many of you. You find too many of us. A wall of men. The worst of men lives in so many men that I was left wondering: Is it somewhere in them all? Is it just dormant in the ones who “know better”, who make choices to not abuse? What if I do the thing that could activate it?
Of course I thought it might be my fault, that I could activate the worst in a man. Society wants to make it about what women wear, the messages we send, and the unsafe situations we don’t guard ourselves from. As if it can’t happen anywhere and everywhere. As if it can’t happen in the parking lot at the grocery store. As if it can’t happen in friendships and romances that we think are safe. As if it can’t happen when we are children who don’t even know names for our body parts. As if it can’t happen when we are in business attire in our workplace.
Even with God I wasn’t safe. Recently I have tried to stop imagining God as male. I have stopped saying “Him”. Because God was limited to me and dangerous as long as I imagined a man’s presence. I wrote, “God, I can’t see you without a white man’s face breathing in front of mine and no matter how friendly the smile and loving the eyes, I think, ‘Too close. Too close. Back up.'”
How men altered my choices
My ex-boyfriend who assaulted and stalked me has affected so many big and small decisions of mine. Like where I live (Will I live in the same city as him?), what I do on a Saturday night (Might I see him at this event?), which restaurants I go to (He liked this one–will he be there?), what music I listen to (Am I willing to stir up those memories?). He’s affected professional decisions of mine, like whether or not to have a public blog and how to publicize it (Is it dangerous? Will he find me?). He has taken up mental and heart space. While my husband is reading books like Wild Sheep Chase, I am reading books like The Sexual Healing Journey.
How much time and life energy do women spend processing and healing from what men have done to them? How does it affect the decisions they make about their career, about intimate relationships, about where they go and when they go and what they wear?
There was my body shame as I rotted rather than blossomed into womanhood. The small, unremarkable aggressions that affected how I move through the world. The traumatic sexual assault and emotional abuse I endured. They are all connected. They are pieces of the same puzzle. It is a puzzle that we need to stop handing to girls and making them put together. When we look at the completed picture on the box, the image we see tells us: Stay small. Stay quiet. Make yourself pretty. Be agreeable. Accommodate everyone but yourself. Keep smiling.
What our bodies hold
What does a woman’s body hold? What memories does it try to forget?
On the worst days, my body means pain. My body means forgetting what I’ve let others do it. My body means forgetting what was forced on it. My body means compromises. My body means others’ standards. My body means men’s laws.
For years I wouldn’t let my husband watch me when I was undressing. The male gaze on my body stirred up too many negative emotions, even when I knew I was with someone safe.
When my husband hugs me tight, my automatic response is to wriggle away. Escape. It’s body memory. Instinct of the prey. I breathe and try to remind myself, “You are safe. You can rest here.”
When we are being intimate, I continually have to center myself in this moment. I have to use all my senses to keep myself present, to keep my mind from retrieving memories activated in my body.
This is what my body holds. It’s not even the half of what it holds. Ask a woman, and her body more than likely holds the pain of men that shouted at her, hissed at her, felt her up, and ejaculated into her, too. We can stop protecting them. We can stop keeping their secrets. We can stop hiding. It doesn’t have to be our shame when it should be theirs.
Finding new responses
I still live in the same small city as the man who abused me. One night six years after I left him, I was having a drink with friends at the place where he worked. It was a big place, and I didn’t think he would see me. I was tired of being afraid of running into him. On his break, he walked by me numerous times and sat in a place where he could stare at me. He held up his phone and was very obviously filming me while laughing. I didn’t tell anyone at the table with me what was happening. I froze.
“Did you consider reporting him to the manager where your ex-boyfriend worked?” my therapist asked me when I told her the story a couple years later.
“Well…no. It never even occurred to me,” I said. Because he still had so much power over me. When I saw him, I became helpless again. I became prey. I stayed still. I stayed silent. Waiting for it to pass.
When I talked to my therapist, I realized that I had choices. I could respond differently than how he had conditioned me to respond to him. I could tell someone what he was doing. I could ask for help. I could report him. He could face consequences for his actions.
I made a choice. I will not live as prey. I will not let him scare me. I will not let him hold me back. The power he used over me is nothing compared to the strength of who I’ve become. The best in me has grown so much bigger than the worst in him.
Listen to women. Believe them. Don’t look away out of discomfort. Their stories have been around you all along. Start paying attention. As I heard a monk say in a sermon this week, “If you’re not squirming in your seat, you’re not paying attention.” Let yourself squirm. Don’t stand up and walk away from it until you’ve learned from it. Then you sure as hell better rise ready for action. Because every single one of us deserves better.
Speachles ! So gifted…..