Finding My Voice

It’s time to add my voice to the growing chorus of brave women who have shared their painful stories of past assaults, some, if not all, at great cost to themselves. It’s time to bear witness to my own experiences of being demeaned, grabbed, assaulted, insulted, and disbelieved.

Although there might have been other similar experiences earlier in my life, the first one I remember is when I was about nine years old. I was walking home from church by myself when I saw a man seated in his car. He addressed me and tried to convince me to get in the car with him. Luckily something told me this wasn’t OK, so I politely declined and then fearfully ran home as fast as I could. I told my parents what had happened, and they called the police. The police took my story, complimented me on coming forward, and left. Later I found out that the man in the car was a common fixture in our little New Jersey town, and that many of the kids in school had had similar scary encounters with him. It was almost a town joke—oh yeah, that scary pervert. Ha ha. While my parents and the police officers had validated me in their ways, the town reaction to this pedophile taught me that this wasn’t something to be taken too seriously, no matter how scary it was to me.

When I was around eleven, we were living in New York, and I remember experiencing catcalls as I walked around the neighborhood. I was just beginning to grow breasts, and somehow the catcalls were associated with that in my mind. It made me self-conscious and a bit fearful, but even at that age, I was beginning to understand that that was “just the way things were.” I remember at that same age being in the park and some young boys were chasing my friends and me. When they caught us, they rubbed up against us. We had the sense to run away. Again, it was scary, but there was a sense that it was just “boys being boys.”

I remember the time when the building super grabbed me, pulled me onto his lap in the elevator, and tried to touch my breasts. I was about twelve. I never reported him—I didn’t want to get him into trouble!—but I was so intent on avoiding him that I started walking up the nine floors to our apartment whenever he was operating the elevator.

When I was in seventh grade, I stopped hanging out with a boy when he wanted to go farther on the “petting” scale than I was willing. He then told his buddies that I had VD and that was why he wasn’t hanging out with me anymore. Another lesson learned: There’s a price to be paid for denying a boy what he wants.

By the time I was in my late teens, I had experienced enough of being felt up on the subway, having men expose themselves to me in public places, and having them remark on my body. I had had to deal with rumors at school about how “easy” I was, resulting in more than a few unwanted “date” requests. I seldom ever said anything to anyone about this behavior, except maybe to a few of my close female friends, who certainly could commiserate from their own experiences. You see, I was ashamed that these things had happened to me. I felt somehow in the core of my being that I was “asking for it.”  I figure it was the way I dressed, so I started slouching and wearing oversized sweaters. I thought it was just boys acting on their hormones. It was just the way it was. I didn’t speak up. I didn’t complain. I internalized it instead.

When I was eighteen, I was raped. I had been partying at a house with friends. I’d had too much too drink, so I went upstairs to sleep it off. I woke up to being raped by one of the men who I had been drinking with earlier, while some of his friends watched. Sure, I was drunk. Sure, I was passed out. But make no mistake about it, it was rape. No one asked me. There was no consent. Did I report it? No. Why? Because I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had “put myself in the position to be raped.” Yes, that’s exactly how my eighteen-year-old female brain processed what had happened. How stupid was I too get so drunk? How stupid was I to leave the crowd of the party and go off by myself? How stupid was I to be friendly with guys who were going to “take advantage of me” as soon as they had a chance? What would have happened if I had reported them to the police? It was 1968. I knew that I would have been judged as the guilty one. If it had gone to court, my “sexual history” would have been presented and I would have been torn apart. It couldn’t be rape if I wasn’t a virgin. I just buried the trauma of the experience somewhere deep in my soul, where the truly deep pain lives.

The saddest outcome of that horrible night is that it stole from me my trust in people. Up until then, I had still managed to hold on to a belief in the basic goodness of people. I believed that if you put love and faith out into the world, people would respond in kind. I wasn’t raped as punishment for something bad I’d done to someone; I was raped as a result of trusting that people would treat me with respect as a fellow human being, not jump on me if I let my guard down. I became more cautious in my dealings with the world, especially with men.

I continued to keep silent when, in my late teens and twenties, I encountered men who felt entitled to make lewd remarks about my body, grab me as I walked by, or push up against me on a crowded bus. There was the time I applied for a job as a waiter and the manager interviewing me asked me to stand up and turn around so he could check out my body. I’m a strong person and not usually afraid to speak up, but somehow for the first few decades of my life, I didn’t feel I could tell these men to stop.

Over the years, I learned to protect myself and even to stand up to people’s boorish, assaultive behavior. But that kind of misses the point, doesn’t it? It isn’t my responsibility to stop people from assaulting me. That’s a part of the status quo that can no longer be accepted. Donald Trump thinks it’s because he’s a “star” that he can get away with assaulting women. It’s really because he’s a powerful bully, and people have been afraid to confront him, let alone report him. And what has happened to the women who have bravely come forward? He says he never met them. He says it never happened. He belittles their physical attraction. No wonder they didn’t come forward sooner.

Harvey Weinstein, and others of his ilk, have wielded their power to silence their accusers. But it’s not just their power that keeps women from speaking up. It’s society’s complicity. For every predator, every man who assaults a woman, there’s a throng of people ready to dismiss the act, ready to disbelieve the accuser, ready to find fault with the victim.

But there has been a sea change. Thousands of women are coming forward with their stories. As more and more women speak out, those of us who have felt shame, who have felt silenced, have begun to find the courage to add our voices to the cry of “Me too.” We may have once suffered alone, but we are now finding our collective strength. We will be silent no more.