Reliving my own stories of disempowerment and hearing those of so many other women, I wanted to relay a story about one time with a happier ending.
When I was a freshman in college, I lived in a dorm with a handful of girls I’m still friends with today. At some point early in the year, the boys who lived on the first floor right by the entrance put up a soft-core porn poster on the outside of their door depicting a college-age girl in a demeaning pose.
Every girl who entered the dorm had to walk by that poster just to get to her own bedroom. It was degrading, threatening, disgusting. It communicated: we can do whatever we want and you just have to put up with it.
I don’t remember who had the idea but I remember that I was the one who found the replacement poster: a male stripper in a provocative pose completely naked but for a well-placed cowboy hat covering his genitalia.
Early one morning, my partner in crime and I crept down to the first floor and swapped out their naked woman with our naked man. We left a note, “We like this one better.”
By the time I woke up later that morning, our poster was down and the door was bare. Later we heard several boys discussing our coup: “Did you see it? So fucked up!”
For the rest of the year, those boys had porn posters inside their room that a passing girl might catch a glimpse of, but they never again dared put a poster outside. My friend and I had reclaimed the hall for all of us. And all it took was a friendly cowboy and some Scotch tape.
—September 25, 2018—
I could feel the rage creeping in. I remember that. I remember guys humiliating you and turning you into a sex object or the butt of some sexual joke. And it had nothing to do with you or how you were dressed or what you did. But it didn't matter because it wasn't really about you. It made you feel ashamed and powerless anyway. I used to think, if that’s "just how boys are," then I hate them all. Then I hate every single one of them.
This week, Renate Schroeder, one of the 65 women who signed the letter in support of Brett Kavanaugh found out that while she thought he was her friend in high school, he and his asshole buddies were really (falsely) bragging about sleeping with her. They even called themselves the “Renate alumni” in the yearbook and made up a poem about her being easy.
Upon finding out how Kavanaugh and his friends had really talked about her, she told the Times, it’s “horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way.”
That prompted women on Twitter to talk about the times when the boys they thought were their friends had betrayed that friendship. (See for example, this tweet and the hundreds of comments.)
When Donald Trump admitted to sexual assault on tape, his supporters brushed it off as “locker-room talk.” It wasn’t, but why is that exculpatory anyway? Why is locker-room talk no big deal? As a teenager, I didn’t need feminist theory to tell me that having boys and men talk graphically about the bodies of girls and women, call them sluts, claim them as conquests, made those girls and women feel like shit. It’s instinctive. Not knowing about it for 35 years doesn’t make it better.
Writing for Slate, Lili Loofbourow made a really powerful point about cruelty toward women as a tool for male bonding. The entire piece is worth reading in full but I wanted to highlight these excerpts:
The awful things Kavanaugh allegedly did ... appear to more easily fit into a different category—a toxic homosociality—that involves males wooing other males over the comedy of being cruel to women. In both these accounts, Kavanaugh is laughing as he does something to a woman that disturbs or traumatizes her. ...In 2016 following the release of the Access Hollywood tape, I wrote for the first time (in that nebulous space between public and private that is a Facebook post visible only to friends) about my own experiences with assault and harassment:
If these allegations are true, one of the more shocking things about them is the extent to which the woman being mistreated exists in a room where the men are performing for each other—using the woman to firm up their own bond. The Kavanaugh yearbook is littered with dumb codes that seem to speak to exactly this tendency—stuff like “boofing” and “devil’s triangle” all suggest that what mattered to Kavanaugh was displaying club membership. The question is: At whose expense? ...
That’s where even this dumb yearbook entry thing becomes instructive: Kavanaugh was caught being cruel to a girl, and instead of owning up, he doubled down. It shows how boys who are cruel together lie together. This is why their denials are more emphatic than they need to be; each relies on the strength and intensity of the others. “Judge Kavanaugh and Ms. Dolphin attended one high school event together and shared a brief kiss good night following that event,” read a statement from Kavanaugh’s lawyer (she denies the kiss—I’ll take her word over his). “They had no other such encounter. The language from Judge Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook refers to the fact that he and Ms. Dolphin attended that one high school event together and nothing else.” Yeah, right. Four of the other players depicted in the “Renate alumni” photo issued a statement claiming that the phrase was “intended to allude to innocent dates or dance partners and were generally known within the community of people involved for over 35 years.” Before laughing at the absurdity of this, it’s worth reiterating that Renate did not know. One might then reasonably ask who the phrase “the community of people involved” includes.
How does the yearbook help us understand the other allegations against Kavanaugh? Well, for one thing, Kavanaugh’s admitted virginity shows how empty these rumors about Renate were. Whatever stories they circulated about her sexual behavior weren’t actually about her; to them she was less a person than a token you claim to gain status with your bros. That tells us something valuable about how Kavanaugh was willing to treat women when other guys were around. It also offers a clear window into how male networks like Kavanaugh’s work. If you get caught, you deny, and if you can’t, you manufacture explanations that may sound ridiculous to an outside audience. But you never break. His yearbook buddies tried to shelter him because sheltering him sheltered them.
When I was a sophomore, I was sexually assaulted in the hallway of our high school by an upperclassman I didn't know who pushed me against a wall and groped my breasts. The funny thing is that I was too surprised to even react. It took my best friend saying that she would find him and hurt him to shake me out of my 'what just happened?' shock.
But that's actually not what sticks with me all these years later. When Trump supporters dismiss his comments as "locker-room banter" which "all normal men do," I don't even focus on the fact that Trump is clearly crossing the line between 'I'd tap that' to 'I have used my status to sexually assault women.'
I focus on how "locker-room banter" ('she's only a 6 but I'd hit that if it were dark') fundamentally warped who I was and how I interacted with men for years.
When I was a seventh grader and the only female trumpet player in the band class, X, Y, and Z [redacted for my privacy, not theirs; I don't feel like I owe them anything] subjected me to a daily bombardment of "locker-room banter." I stopped eating, I'd find reasons to miss school. My parents knew something was wrong but they didn't know what and I couldn't articulate it, and I couldn't defend myself. I wanted to die and I wanted those boys to die, along with the female band teacher who did nothing to stop it. I can't emphasize this enough. Six years before Columbine, I wanted to execute my classmates. They didn't touch me and they didn't threaten me but they damaged parts of my soul.
And I became convinced: every man does it. Every man is slime on the inside and you should never, ever, ever be vulnerable with one. I grew an exoskeleton that ended up impacting every romantic relationship I had for the next decade. Outside of my father, whom I never doubted, I didn't believe that there were really good men in the world, and that led me to make choices that hurt the good men I dated, maybe setting off new cycles of destruction.
And I know, we were 13-year-olds. I can both get that and still be angry.
But more importantly, can we stop dismissing "locker-room banter" as okay? Can every woman saying "my husband talks like that, it's no big deal," recognize that actually it is a big fucking deal? (Had my parents had guns in the home, it might literally have been a life-and-death deal.)
Now as the mother of both girls and boys, I think maybe I'm going to show them that clip from Superbad and talk to them about how it actually feels to be Emma Stone in that scene. Not Emma Stone's character Jules, a girl written by a man. But an actual human being who's being sexually demeaned and humiliated, whether she knows it's happening or not.
—September 23, 2018—
Memory is a funny thing. I remember with perfect clarity the boys in junior high who sexually harassed me. I remember what it felt like to burn with shame, revulsion, and powerless rage. I remember wanting them to die.
But I can’t remember much else about that class, who was in it, the name of the teacher. I never told my parents—even though I knew they would believe me and support me—but I don’t remember why I didn’t. What was my thought process? I don’t know.
A semi-regular occurrence now, as an adult, is for one or the other of my parents to bring up something that happened to me in the last 30 years and I have no recollection of it at all. “Really?” they inevitably ask. “You were so upset about it at the time, I’m surprised you don’t remember.” But that’s how memory is—or mine anyway. Frankly I’m relieved to know that I don’t still carry around with me most of the minor grievances of my life.
Nothing traumatic ever happened to me at a party and so I can only remember one party from all six years of junior high and high school. I liked a boy who no longer liked me back so I went out to my truck to listen to a Jazz game on the radio. That’s it. That’s everything I remember.
If something terrible happened to you at a party and I was there but didn’t know, if you’ve been carrying that burden your whole life but nothing notable happened to me, I don’t remember that party. I’m sorry.
I think a lot about how things might be different in the smart phone era. I take more pictures during a routine trip to the pool with my kids than I took during the entire time I lived in Nicaragua. My kids will remember so many things about their childhood that I have completely forgotten about mine simply because there’s a record. And, of course, the first time my (hypothetical, future) boss sexually harasses me, I’m going to be caught off guard, but the second time I see him, I’m walking into his office with my phone recording every minute of our encounter. This past year when a crazy person falsely accused me of crazy things, it was invaluable to be able to say here’s video of our entire interaction, judge for yourself.
For the time being, harassers and abusers and liars don’t seem to have adjusted to the technology, which is how the entire Trump administration can be both secretly recording each other and still keep lying. It’s how a pastor at Aretha Franklin‘s funeral can grope Ariana Grande on live television and think he can get away with it. But I suppose they’ll adapt soon enough in ways I can’t predict.
And our notion of memory will change. “How can you not remember that party when we took 50 selfies of our outfits beforehand?” The idea that whole swaths of your life can simply disappear will seem unfathomable.
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