I don’t really know how to start this, but I know the message I want to send, the story I want to tell.
In a world that focusses on the big loss of power a woman experiences when she is raped or sexually molested, I want to tell of the little times it happens. The small instances where we acquiesce to keep the peace. Where we accept the small violation to avoid the major one.
I went on a date a few years ago. It went well, and we talked for hours. At some point though, my intuition told me something wasn’t right.
Maybe it was the fact he was a bit more drunk than I would have liked on a first date, coupled with a declaration of past issues with alcohol. Maybe it was the sleaziness with which he ‘checked me out’. Maybe my gut was just telling me he wasn’t the one, I don’t know.
Soon, it was time to leave. I had decided I didn’t want to kiss him good night. A simple, friendly hug would suffice. I wasn’t feeling emotionally connected to him and had no inclination to make it physical.
I did however, feel it necessary to hug him goodbye. I’m a nice person, that’s what ‘nice’ people do. So, against my screaming intuition, I hugged him.
But he didn’t let me go.
He held me so tightly there was no polite way to end the hug.
Then he said ‘I am going to kiss you now.’
His version of the story is that he said ‘I want to kiss you now’ like this makes it better.
Regardless, there was no question there. No respectful request.
Coupled with the embrace I couldn’t get out of, I felt trapped. I felt like I had no choice.
But I did make a choice. I made a choice out of fear and self-preservation. It was better to let him kiss me than to refuse and risk him becoming violent. It was better to accept the kiss, hope he would be happy with that, than be dragged off into the bushes and have something worse happen.
Better the devil you know, right?
It was the worst kiss I have ever had. Not completely because of the fact I didn’t want to do it in the first place.
Needless to say, I cried all the way home, not really sure why I was crying. It was only a kiss! It wasn’t like he even tried to feel me up, why was I crying?
I struggled with the sadness, anger and sense of violation for quite a while after.
Many women have had much worse, and continue to have much worse, so why was I behaving this way? Why was I not all right? Why was I not ok? Why was I not happy it didn’t get worse for me?
It took me almost a week to actually accept what happened and to allow myself to be angry at him. To stop blaming myself for ‘letting’ it happen in the first place.
Now, I’ve been quite vocal about our need as women to speak up and say no. I am always telling younger females that they need to remember to be vocal about their desires and wishes and not let fear stop them.
Now, I’ve done the very thing I’m telling others not to. I felt like a hypocrite, which only added to my sense of shame and guilt.
It seems that 30+ years of being told to just be polite and don’t rock the boat or cause a scene or upset anyone is harder than a few strong words and a few months of healing can overcome.
My point is this. Behind everything, two fundamental truths should be understood.
- Men need to actually ask a woman permission. It shouldn’t be implied or passed over. It should be spoken plainly, in a way that allows for a refusal, and consent received. Women need to feel safe enough to say no and men need to be strong enough to accept it. This sense of safety doesn’t come from within the woman, but the environment created by the man.
- It doesn’t matter how you got there, trauma is trauma. One of the first things I heard during first year psychology (and I am aware one year of study does not a psychologist make) was that people report similar emotional responses to trauma regardless of what happened to them. I’m not saying what happened to me is as bad as what happened to others who were raped or worse. What I’m saying is the emotional responses are the same. This has been shown in study after study. People, myself especially, need to stop grading our emotional responses to personal trauma based on the severity of perceived causes. Trauma is trauma, and we need to acknowledge it equally.
I know it’s a case of ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ and ‘one cause at a time’, however, I just don’t want us to forget the little things. The times when we have given in to keep the peace. The times when we have given in to the request of a man (or another person) to save ourselves from a worse fate. The times where we have given up our own agency and bodily autonomy to please someone else, even that weird relative you don’t want to hug but keep getting told to because ‘it’s not nice’. These all add up. These instances make it hard to trust men in general. These small things are done by the ‘good men’ because they don’t know any better.
My hope is to educate both sides, but also make it clear to the ‘good men’ out there that they also have a responsibility to make sure the women in their lives are safe and free to be themselves and to articulate their desires.
This issue runs far deeper than most people, women included, can fathom at this point.
Mystical Vegan 