There are two problems with the title.
It implies that there was only one. That's not true.
This one isn't even the worst, really, though that gets us into the other
problem.
I have a hard time calling it a sexual assault. I
have given many excuses for that: it wasn't really that bad, it was just
teasing that got out of hand, it could have been much worse. If you don't think
it should be considered a sexual assault, pretty much any reason you have for
it is one I have thought of and justified.
But it doesn't work. If it happened to someone else,
I would not minimize it. Happening to me, it had a huge impact. It changed the
way I saw myself and the world and how I interacted with the world in ways that
are still issues.
I was in junior high and leaving school. It was
after school had gotten out, so there was less supervision. Steve came up to me
and ripped my shirt open. I assume the next stop would have been my breasts,
because they were always the preferred destination. He did not get any farther,
because I at least had good reflexes and kneed him right away. He laughed, but
he also stopped. I snapped my shirt back up and kept going.
Usually that story focuses more on the harassment
that had been happening at lunch. Jason asked me to go with him, and I ignored
it, then Matt started repeating the question and wouldn't stop, following me to
my next class. Steve was just egging them on at that point. The other two were
there when Steve came for my shirt.
I have always focused on the verbal part because
that was where the big lesson came from - if a guy is acting like he likes me,
it's a joke. But there was another lesson with it, with that second part. It
taught me that a guy doesn't have to like you to want to get under your shirt.
It meant that the joke could be dangerous.
I think to fully deal with this, I need to refer to
three conversations, and one event, so we'll be doing this tomorrow, Monday,
and Tuesday as well.
The one conversation was short anyway, and it was
that Jason didn't remember any of this. That was after a Facebook friend
request decades later. He felt bad when I reminded him, especially because he
has a daughter now, but it was not the milestone for them that it was for me.
Dealing with the legacy of that is part of any
growth I hope to make, but there are several things that have me thinking of it
more.
A lot of my writing about the Trump campaign focused
on the racism, but there was a lot of sexism too, peaking with the release of
the Access Hollywood tape. I posted on Facebook reminding people to be
sensitive, because defending bragging about assault as something all guys do
can be kind of hard on survivors. A lot of women liked it, some of whom I knew
had personal reasons, and some of whom I found out later had those same
personal reasons. I suspect that there are still more events that I don't know
about.
There was also this blog post about how depression
is not always strictly chemical:
I have carried some of those stories with me for a
long time, but it was only putting them together that I saw the common thread:
the women had all been sexually abused when young. There is an unspecified
number in one group, but it's a lot.
Also there were two questions asked on Twitter by
two different people, asking women about their assaults. Because they were
phrased differently, they brought different things to mind. That is why I had
to realize there was more than one, but it was also where I saw that they both
quickly got hundreds of responses. Do you sometimes doubt those statistics
about how many women get assaulted, and how many get raped? I wish they were
inflated.
So the title is important. This happened and it mattered.
I am acknowledging that and I am letting myself be angry about that. And I know
I blogged recently about how anger isn't helpful as a long term strategy, which
is still true, but it can still be important to feel and know that something is
unjust. No matter who else believes in my value, I need to, and this really
hurt me.
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