Tuesday, December 06, 2016

My sexual assault


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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