Sexual Assault Awareness Month: I didn't know it was sexual assault
Trigger warning: this post talks about sexual assault and rape. It isn't graphic, but be warned if you have triggering around this kind of discussion.
I've been holding off on this post for a few weeks, what with one thing and another. It didn't seem so extreme, in light of other stories. But I feel like we need to acknowledge that the less extreme offenses are still offenses. Being silent about them adds to rape culture. Shoutout to Rosie, Sid and the gang at makemeasammich.org.
I didn't realize I was sexually assaulted for a long time. I wouldn't have called it that. I didn't call it anything, really, except for wrong and infuriating, until years later. I have been sexually assaulted besides that time; the kind that most people agree is assault - a stranger grabs my body in passing, because I'm a woman and to those people, my having a vagina means I'm available for fondling. No one disputes that as assault, although no one does anything about it, either. But this one I didn't even recognize.
It was the first few weeks of college. I was, along with all the other freshman kids in my dorm and around the school, trying to figure out how this whole living without parents and with a bunch of strangers thing worked. All of us on our floor kept our room doors open, my roommate and I included, for large swaths of that first week. People wandered by to introduce themselves, hang out maybe. It was awkward and weird for me as a shy introvert desperately trying to be an extrovert and OK and not homesick and overwhelmed. Desperately trying to reinvent myself into someone everyone would think of as wonderful, witty, and fun. I can't have been the only one who felt lost and weird and alone. I can't have been the only one who just kept quiet in the face of constant socialization, even when I would rather have just told everyone to go away.
There were several people who made me very uncomfortable from the moment I met them. Most of them turned out to be harmless, if not people I wanted to be friends with. But one guy made me feel stupid and ashamed for everything about myself just as soon as he spoke, every time he spoke. He had a smug, certain look in his eyes that measured and found everything you did as a sexual come-on, and said so. The first time he came into our room, my roommate and I exchanged a lot of looks, but did and said little to discourage him. I remember I was sitting on the floor, eating a banana. He made a lot of comments about that. (He wasn't the only one to do that, that year. To this day, I eat bananas by tearing off pieces one by one, instead of just biting it. I've gotten so I like the ripping noise and feel, but I started doing it because apparently women aren't allowed to just eat a freaking piece of fruit without being told it's all about sex.) I remember him touching my legs, which weren't shaved, but it was still warm out, so I was wearing shorts. I was embarrassed about the stubble. I was irritated and nervous that he was touching me. I don't remember when I told him enough, but I do remember I let him touch me for longer than I wanted to. Which was at all. I was trying to be a new, adventurous me. I was trying for urbane, sophisticated, raising my eyebrow at him instead of just jerking away and snarling. It didn't work. I had to eventually tell him to just stop it. I remember he acted amused and sneering, like he was just testing me. His actions sent up many red flags, but I had put up with a lot of generalized sexual harassment in high school that wasn't so dissimilar, from boys who were friends. I didn't like that guy, but I didn't make a fuss.
Sometime during the next few weeks, I was in another dorm room down the hall from mine with five or six other people, my roommate included. It was a girl's room, but not everyone in there was female. The guy, the predator, burst into the room with us and threw me down onto the closest bed, dry humped me while I struggled. He was laughing, saying "Oh baby, Oh baby, yes, yes!" in a high pitched voice. It happened so fast, I barely registered he was in the room before he threw me. I flew like I'd been thrown from a merry-go-round. Once I was on the bed, he was on top of me so fast, blocking out the light, blocking out everyone else. I yelled. I thrashed. I could not move him: I was completely stuck. I couldn't breathe because of his weight, because of the way he had me positioned. I couldn't get any leverage to knee him or move my arms the way he held me down. I could feel his movement, his laughter, his breath. I couldn't get him off of me, and my yelling "Stop it! Get off! GET OFF!" meant nothing to him. I was suddenly so angry that if I had had a weapon when he let me up, I would have used it. I am not a violent person, usually, but I felt such a wash of violence come over me like prickly heat: all nausea and sweat and fury. I wanted a knife and I wanted to stab him.
When he did let me up, I screamed, I hit him, I shrieked that he was never to touch me again, if he ever touched me again I would string him up by his balls, I would tear out his guts with a boat hook, I would flay him and leave him to be eaten by buzzards. (Yes, I did. I used to work on imaginative curses for my fiction, so I had these in my head already.) I kept hitting him and kicking him and screaming, which he at first took like "Hah, you're crazy, what? Why are you mad? It was just a joke!" Looking to the room for confirmation of the joke, of my craziness, fending me off. Eventually he backed up, fled the room, calling me names. I followed him out into the hall, shrieking like mad, yelling anything and everything I could think of. His very large, also football player friends came up to me to block me, back me up, ask me "Why are you treating my friend like that?" I told them to tell their friend if he ever came near me again I would kill him, I would feed his eyeballs to snakes, I would remove his testicles with a rusty fork. I was not quiet. I did not stop screaming. I did back up, and retreated back to my room, still yelling.
The other people in the dorm room when this all happened? Stood there. They laughed when he laughed, laughed when he held me down. Laughed when I started hitting him. They then tried to get me to calm down. I ignored them. My roommate reported to me later that everyone thought I had overreacted, that I was crazy. I told her that I didn't want to ever be near that guy again, and I didn't care what everyone else thought. I lost some potential friends for that. I can't regret it. Mostly we were just thrown together due to our being freshman and living in the same dorm, and while I was sad and felt a little isolated for a bit, I made other friends elsewhere later. But some of those people never really spoke to me again.
I learned a couple of things from this. When I get really angry, I am prone to violence. If you push me far enough, I will make a lot of noise. So much noise. I also learned that it doesn't matter how much noise I make, how upset I am: most people will ignore me or try to shut me up. The important thing to them wasn't that I was assaulted, and no one there would have called that assault. The important thing was that I was crazy. I was loud. I was untrustworthy in a gathering where someone might want to do something to me that I didn't like. So I couldn't be around those people.
Maybe that's unfair - we were all very young and unsure. And it's possible the laughter I heard was as unsure as the people - uncomfortable, trying to understand where the line is and failing. But I do think it was a failure that those people didn't try to stop him, not so I noticed. And that when I quite reasonably lost my temper and my cool, and fought back, they said I was crazy. Overreacting. To being held down and dry humped like a sex doll, as though I weren't a person at all. I have no doubt that if I had just taken it, laughed it off, most of them would have thought that I was a slut. That I was asking for it. If he had ever raped me later, and I hadn't fought him then, during that first assault, they'd think, well, she probably liked it. I cannot regret that I am not friends with most of those people.
I hope that my shrieking and hitting shocked him. I'm glad it made him retreat. It may be that he didn't want to escalate with an audience. It may be that the other football players talked him out of retaliating later. It may be that other issues stopped him from retaliating, which I know nothing about. I don't remember ever speaking to him again. I must have avoided him from then on, because I don't remember any further interaction at all. He didn't live on my floor, although he had friends living next door to me. But dorms are small places, and I heard things. I know for a fact that that guy raped at least two women later that year. I know for a fact that one of those rapes went unreported. I know for a fact that guy was a predator, looking for prey. I refused to be quiet prey.
I don't know exactly why he didn't try again, but I'm glad he didn't. I wonder if it's because I was loud, and people saw it. I wonder if I just seemed like too much work. I do feel terrible for those other women. I hope they got help. I hope they know it wasn't their fault. I admit to small, petty feelings of vindication when I heard I was right about him. I'm not particularly proud of that, but there's a part of me that just wanted to shout "I was right!" to certain people. But those rapes weren't about me, and I also admit to being so relieved I never saw him anymore. Mostly I felt awful they'd happened, and awful that it would probably happen again. I hoped he'd get caught, and stopped. It didn't occur to me that I could have reported the assault. I didn't even know it counted. Frankly, I doubt the police or campus police would have thought so, either. But I wish I'd reported it anyway.
It wasn't until the last few years that I recognized what happened as assault. Because it's not like I was injured or truly hurt, so it can't have really been assault, could it? We are told, as women, that we should just expect that men will treat us as objects, treat us as subhuman, treat us as though we don't have any agency or will. That a man can touch us, throw us around, and as long as he's laughing, that it's just how men are. (It's also just how men are when they're not laughing, but if you're lucky, you might get to call that assault.) Men just dry hump struggling women on beds. Men just touch women who don't want them to and make sexual comments about them, what they'd like to do with them. About fruit they're eating. About clothes they're wearing. Men just do that, so it's normal. Assault isn't normal, so what that was can't have been assault, right?
Wrong. That was assault. Do not accept that men do those things, because most men don't. People should not do those things. Ever. We, meaning society, have to tell people that they don't get to do those things, and they'll be stopped if they do. So that when a predator does those things, we all know that person is a predator. So that young people know assault when they see it, when it happens to them. So it doesn't happen to them. We need to change this conversation.
I've been holding off on this post for a few weeks, what with one thing and another. It didn't seem so extreme, in light of other stories. But I feel like we need to acknowledge that the less extreme offenses are still offenses. Being silent about them adds to rape culture. Shoutout to Rosie, Sid and the gang at makemeasammich.org.
I didn't realize I was sexually assaulted for a long time. I wouldn't have called it that. I didn't call it anything, really, except for wrong and infuriating, until years later. I have been sexually assaulted besides that time; the kind that most people agree is assault - a stranger grabs my body in passing, because I'm a woman and to those people, my having a vagina means I'm available for fondling. No one disputes that as assault, although no one does anything about it, either. But this one I didn't even recognize.
It was the first few weeks of college. I was, along with all the other freshman kids in my dorm and around the school, trying to figure out how this whole living without parents and with a bunch of strangers thing worked. All of us on our floor kept our room doors open, my roommate and I included, for large swaths of that first week. People wandered by to introduce themselves, hang out maybe. It was awkward and weird for me as a shy introvert desperately trying to be an extrovert and OK and not homesick and overwhelmed. Desperately trying to reinvent myself into someone everyone would think of as wonderful, witty, and fun. I can't have been the only one who felt lost and weird and alone. I can't have been the only one who just kept quiet in the face of constant socialization, even when I would rather have just told everyone to go away.
There were several people who made me very uncomfortable from the moment I met them. Most of them turned out to be harmless, if not people I wanted to be friends with. But one guy made me feel stupid and ashamed for everything about myself just as soon as he spoke, every time he spoke. He had a smug, certain look in his eyes that measured and found everything you did as a sexual come-on, and said so. The first time he came into our room, my roommate and I exchanged a lot of looks, but did and said little to discourage him. I remember I was sitting on the floor, eating a banana. He made a lot of comments about that. (He wasn't the only one to do that, that year. To this day, I eat bananas by tearing off pieces one by one, instead of just biting it. I've gotten so I like the ripping noise and feel, but I started doing it because apparently women aren't allowed to just eat a freaking piece of fruit without being told it's all about sex.) I remember him touching my legs, which weren't shaved, but it was still warm out, so I was wearing shorts. I was embarrassed about the stubble. I was irritated and nervous that he was touching me. I don't remember when I told him enough, but I do remember I let him touch me for longer than I wanted to. Which was at all. I was trying to be a new, adventurous me. I was trying for urbane, sophisticated, raising my eyebrow at him instead of just jerking away and snarling. It didn't work. I had to eventually tell him to just stop it. I remember he acted amused and sneering, like he was just testing me. His actions sent up many red flags, but I had put up with a lot of generalized sexual harassment in high school that wasn't so dissimilar, from boys who were friends. I didn't like that guy, but I didn't make a fuss.
Sometime during the next few weeks, I was in another dorm room down the hall from mine with five or six other people, my roommate included. It was a girl's room, but not everyone in there was female. The guy, the predator, burst into the room with us and threw me down onto the closest bed, dry humped me while I struggled. He was laughing, saying "Oh baby, Oh baby, yes, yes!" in a high pitched voice. It happened so fast, I barely registered he was in the room before he threw me. I flew like I'd been thrown from a merry-go-round. Once I was on the bed, he was on top of me so fast, blocking out the light, blocking out everyone else. I yelled. I thrashed. I could not move him: I was completely stuck. I couldn't breathe because of his weight, because of the way he had me positioned. I couldn't get any leverage to knee him or move my arms the way he held me down. I could feel his movement, his laughter, his breath. I couldn't get him off of me, and my yelling "Stop it! Get off! GET OFF!" meant nothing to him. I was suddenly so angry that if I had had a weapon when he let me up, I would have used it. I am not a violent person, usually, but I felt such a wash of violence come over me like prickly heat: all nausea and sweat and fury. I wanted a knife and I wanted to stab him.
When he did let me up, I screamed, I hit him, I shrieked that he was never to touch me again, if he ever touched me again I would string him up by his balls, I would tear out his guts with a boat hook, I would flay him and leave him to be eaten by buzzards. (Yes, I did. I used to work on imaginative curses for my fiction, so I had these in my head already.) I kept hitting him and kicking him and screaming, which he at first took like "Hah, you're crazy, what? Why are you mad? It was just a joke!" Looking to the room for confirmation of the joke, of my craziness, fending me off. Eventually he backed up, fled the room, calling me names. I followed him out into the hall, shrieking like mad, yelling anything and everything I could think of. His very large, also football player friends came up to me to block me, back me up, ask me "Why are you treating my friend like that?" I told them to tell their friend if he ever came near me again I would kill him, I would feed his eyeballs to snakes, I would remove his testicles with a rusty fork. I was not quiet. I did not stop screaming. I did back up, and retreated back to my room, still yelling.
The other people in the dorm room when this all happened? Stood there. They laughed when he laughed, laughed when he held me down. Laughed when I started hitting him. They then tried to get me to calm down. I ignored them. My roommate reported to me later that everyone thought I had overreacted, that I was crazy. I told her that I didn't want to ever be near that guy again, and I didn't care what everyone else thought. I lost some potential friends for that. I can't regret it. Mostly we were just thrown together due to our being freshman and living in the same dorm, and while I was sad and felt a little isolated for a bit, I made other friends elsewhere later. But some of those people never really spoke to me again.
I learned a couple of things from this. When I get really angry, I am prone to violence. If you push me far enough, I will make a lot of noise. So much noise. I also learned that it doesn't matter how much noise I make, how upset I am: most people will ignore me or try to shut me up. The important thing to them wasn't that I was assaulted, and no one there would have called that assault. The important thing was that I was crazy. I was loud. I was untrustworthy in a gathering where someone might want to do something to me that I didn't like. So I couldn't be around those people.
Maybe that's unfair - we were all very young and unsure. And it's possible the laughter I heard was as unsure as the people - uncomfortable, trying to understand where the line is and failing. But I do think it was a failure that those people didn't try to stop him, not so I noticed. And that when I quite reasonably lost my temper and my cool, and fought back, they said I was crazy. Overreacting. To being held down and dry humped like a sex doll, as though I weren't a person at all. I have no doubt that if I had just taken it, laughed it off, most of them would have thought that I was a slut. That I was asking for it. If he had ever raped me later, and I hadn't fought him then, during that first assault, they'd think, well, she probably liked it. I cannot regret that I am not friends with most of those people.
I hope that my shrieking and hitting shocked him. I'm glad it made him retreat. It may be that he didn't want to escalate with an audience. It may be that the other football players talked him out of retaliating later. It may be that other issues stopped him from retaliating, which I know nothing about. I don't remember ever speaking to him again. I must have avoided him from then on, because I don't remember any further interaction at all. He didn't live on my floor, although he had friends living next door to me. But dorms are small places, and I heard things. I know for a fact that that guy raped at least two women later that year. I know for a fact that one of those rapes went unreported. I know for a fact that guy was a predator, looking for prey. I refused to be quiet prey.
I don't know exactly why he didn't try again, but I'm glad he didn't. I wonder if it's because I was loud, and people saw it. I wonder if I just seemed like too much work. I do feel terrible for those other women. I hope they got help. I hope they know it wasn't their fault. I admit to small, petty feelings of vindication when I heard I was right about him. I'm not particularly proud of that, but there's a part of me that just wanted to shout "I was right!" to certain people. But those rapes weren't about me, and I also admit to being so relieved I never saw him anymore. Mostly I felt awful they'd happened, and awful that it would probably happen again. I hoped he'd get caught, and stopped. It didn't occur to me that I could have reported the assault. I didn't even know it counted. Frankly, I doubt the police or campus police would have thought so, either. But I wish I'd reported it anyway.
It wasn't until the last few years that I recognized what happened as assault. Because it's not like I was injured or truly hurt, so it can't have really been assault, could it? We are told, as women, that we should just expect that men will treat us as objects, treat us as subhuman, treat us as though we don't have any agency or will. That a man can touch us, throw us around, and as long as he's laughing, that it's just how men are. (It's also just how men are when they're not laughing, but if you're lucky, you might get to call that assault.) Men just dry hump struggling women on beds. Men just touch women who don't want them to and make sexual comments about them, what they'd like to do with them. About fruit they're eating. About clothes they're wearing. Men just do that, so it's normal. Assault isn't normal, so what that was can't have been assault, right?
Wrong. That was assault. Do not accept that men do those things, because most men don't. People should not do those things. Ever. We, meaning society, have to tell people that they don't get to do those things, and they'll be stopped if they do. So that when a predator does those things, we all know that person is a predator. So that young people know assault when they see it, when it happens to them. So it doesn't happen to them. We need to change this conversation.