For many years, I thought my experiences of sexual assault were normal. But now, thanks to Donald Trump, I can finally admit that they’re #notokay.
A lot of statements that Donald Trump has made over the past several months have made me furious. But none, I think, more than his dismissal of the statements he made on that video (the one that by now we’ve all seen and discussed ad infinitum) as “locker room talk.” The moment the words left his mouth, I wanted to scream.
I’m going to get really personal in this one in ways that aren’t easy for me, so let’s start in a place we can all recognize: the college frat. At Harvard (at the time I was there, at least), we didn’t really have fraternities and sororities; our campus social life revolved instead around institutions called “final clubs.” They resembled the Greek system in nearly every way, save for the fact that they were only open to men. And the fact that a relatively small group of men held the reins of their university’s nightlife had exactly the results you’d expect: they admitted girls to their clubs (or dismissed them) as they saw fit, rejected non-member male students entirely, and essentially behaved however they wanted to, secure in the knowledge that they were protected by decades – even centuries – of tradition (not to mention some extremely deep pockets).
My boyfriend was in one of the clubs, the A.D., so I was a de facto invitee and spent nearly every weekend perched on expensive leather couches, drinking Solo cups filled with whatever someone handed me. I can’t tell you how many women I saw get turned away from the door because the guys didn’t think they were attractive enough (a fact that they let them know, loudly).
Of course it didn’t stop there, though. One night, one of my boyfriend’s friends beckoned me over to a window, and I followed him out onto a fire escape. A bunch of the club members were gathered there, along with a couple of women, and everyone was looking through the window into a room – the “Bacon Room” – where a freshman girl kneeled in front of another club member. She was faced away from the window, performing oral sex on him while he smiled at his audience. He gave us a thumbs up, and everybody laughed.
Later that year, two acquaintances of mine were raped in that same final club. There were whispers that they were found huddling in a bathroom with blood on them, but I don’t know the actual facts because nobody ever talked much about it; all I know is that there was some kind of “review” held by the school, and the boys involved disappeared for a bit, and then they came back and life went on. A lot of people on campus thought the girls had probably made the whole thing up. The reasons why two women might want to falsify a rape were never really discussed.
All this (and much more, of course) happened during the four years I spent at Harvard, and I never said a thing. This now seems indefensible to me…but I can’t explain my silence other than by the fact that everyone around me was silent, too, and to speak out didn’t just seem uncomfortable; it seemed pointless.
And of course I knew that it was pointless; I knew this from firsthand experience. Because I’ve also been that girl: the one who’s the subject of the “locker room talk” (you know, the kind of “talk” that isn’t actually just “talk” at all). I’ve alluded to this before – most notably in this post – but I’ve never talked about the specifics of my experiences because they’re embarrassing and make me feel ashamed, and also because they feel so minor in comparison to the traumas that other women – other friends of mine – have endured.
But you know what I think now? I think that Donald Trump believes that holding men accountable for this type of “normal” behavior is tantamount to prosecuting a teenager for scribbling his name on a bathroom stall. I think that he thinks it’s “no big deal,” just an example of boys getting up to mischief. I know a lot of other people think that, too. But I don’t just “think” they’re wrong; I know it. I know that these situations aren’t about “boys getting up to mischief” at all, and I don’t want to skip around the specifics anymore.
The specifics matter. Because they’re everywhere, and over time they add up to an avalanche, and they are not our fault.
I still have trouble believing that statement, you know – that “it’s not our (my) fault”; the “you asked for it” mentality has been drummed into me that deeply. But I also know that it is true. And if Donald Trump has taught us nothing else, he’s taught us this: the louder we talk, the more we are heard.
So here we go.
A sixty-something photographer who was taking shots of me scuba diving grabbed me by the shoulders, took his regulator out of his mouth, and kissed me. I was 40 feet underwater, and could have died had I panicked and bolted for the surface, but I didn’t. I was 13 years old.
A boy I vaguely knew saw me at a party and told me my boyfriend was waiting for me in a room down the hall, then followed me into the (empty) room, closed the door behind him, and padlocked it. I ran past him and pulled on the padlock, and it opened because he hadn’t turned the dial. I was 14.
A 28-year-old man I’d worked with on a shoot told me to meet him at a movie theater to pick up some negatives. He’d “forgotten the negatives,” but we went to a movie and he grabbed me in the dark, whispering in my ear about my “pussy.” I was 15.
A friend of a friend whom I’d been flirting with at a party climbed on top of me while I slept on my friend’s living room couch. I’m not sure what happened, exactly, but I know I was half-asleep and I know I was frightened and I know I said “no,” and even now, nine years later, I’m still wondering.
Just to summarize that: I was casually assaulted by friends, co-workers, and mentors before I celebrated my sixteenth birthday. And afterwards. Every woman has a list of her own; together we could write an encyclopedia with 3.5 billion volumes. The prevalence of these experiences is so overwhelming and so insidious that it’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve started to realize that this gross – and dangerous – misogyny is sanctioned not just by a handful of sociopaths, but by smart people. By kind people. By liberals. By religious people. By future leaders, and by those leading us right now. There is a giant iceberg under the surface of our society, and pretending it’s not there is no longer an option.
And so when Donald Trump talks about “locker room banter,” what he is actually talking about is the kind of pervasive sentiment that permits frat boys to trick their colleagues into performing public blow jobs, that lets grown men think it’s appropriate to grab at a young girl’s genitals, that allows a man to rape a woman behind a trash bin and have his father (and a judge) dismiss it as a mere “20 minutes of action.” It’s the kind of culture that lets harassment and abuse and assault be an unavoidable – even expected – part of the lives of uncountable numbers of women, and that leaves them feeling like they should stay silent in its wake.
It’s rape culture.
And now the potential leader of the free world has stated that not only does he support this rape culture, he actively participates in it. And is he sorry? Oh no; he’s just telling it like it is.
The worst part? He is telling it like it is. This is how it is in our world. Men grab our vaginas, they kiss us without asking, and they take what they want because they can and because no one will call them out on it when they do. And in doing so they demean not only us, but also, as Michelle Obama said yesterday, the vast numbers of decent, principled men who not only “support” strong women; they perceive them as valued peers, and as human beings.
To “grab a woman by the pussy” is not normal; it is the abuse of a cultural expectation of silence. And it’s also just abuse.
So here’s what I’m asking you to do: Tell your stories, whether you tell them here, or to your friends and family, or to yourself. Say them out loud, over and over and louder and louder, with the knowledge that they are not your shame to bear. And please, if you feel comfortable, tweet them using the hashtag #notokay (read more about this movement here). Because they’re not. And I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of shouting men telling me – us – what’s real and what isn’t, dismissing our tales of assault as small and insignificant and unique to us, when the truth is that they’re a tsunami – and one that we have the power to push back out to sea.
These people do not tell our story; we do. So let’s tell it really fucking loudly.
