In 2001, when I was about 14 years old, my male friends invented a game that went like this: one of themâand it was always the same oneâwould sneak behind me, slap meâand it was always meâon the ass and run away as I sputtered, angry and humiliated.
It was a game that everyone but me seemed to love. I was a girl who mostly hung around boys because I hadnât yet learned that female friendships, though infinitely more confusing, were also infinitely more rewarding. I was the self-professed type who loudly preferred spending time with men over spending time with women because they were less dramatic and complicated. And so I surrounded myself with boys who found it funny to grab my body when I least expected it, and were spurred by my discomfort to push me further and more painfully.
The game ended the night that Tom*, the one who always grabbed me, did it to me again while we were walking up a flight of stairs. Familiarly, everyone laughed and I tried to join them, desperate to appear easygoing and in on the joke despite being the literal and figurative butt of it. But suddenly, the effort of it allâthe smiling, nervous chuckling, and eye rolls that I had allowed myself over the past several monthsâsickened me. It felt like I was choking on my own vomit of anger and humiliation. To save myself, Iâd have to spew my own bile. And so I turned and punched Tom directly in the groin.
The satisfaction of the moment blazed and died quickly. He collapsed to the ground, gripping himself, hissing, âYou are a fucking bitch. You are a fucking bitch,â over and over again. I laughed an awkward bark of a laugh, but no one joined in this time. No one said anything at all until minutes later when we were walkingâthem in a pack, and me trailing behindâto our local video store. Michael, my best male friend, hung back to keep me company.
âI get that youâre mad and donât like it when Tom grabs you like that,â he said and I exhaled a sigh of gratitude. âBut what you did...â I sucked my breath in again, â...You just donât do that to a guy. Ever.â
Itâs a small relief that I didnât feel ashamed of myself. Instead I felt disappointed in Michael, in Tom, in every other boy that now, on our walk, avoided me because I had crossed a line and hit back.
This memory was lost to me for years and only recently returned, though Iâm not sure why. Iâve been called a bitch countless times since then (an occupational hazard when youâre a woman writer, a life hazard when youâre kind of a bitch), and the wordâthough compact and sharp as a fingernailâhas mostly stopped hurting me. Iâve developed calluses from a life spent surrounded by men, both the ones who say they are good and the ones I know are bad, and theyâre too thick now for a word so small to cut through. But in the past couple weeks, the recollection of Tomâs hatred of me, Michaelâs reprimand, and the indifference of everyone else has brutishly shoved its way back into my head, a strong reminder of the first time I realized, to borrow the words of artist Jenny Holzer, whose âTruismâ series(which Iâve been thinking of often these days) picks away at the concepts of gender, intimacy, violence, and power with beautiful sentences so stark and simple that they become profoundââmen donât protect you anymore.â
The truth, though, is that while itâs been ingrained in me to chase their acceptance and approval and be âin on the joke,â I was raised from birth to fear men, to never trust or expect them to protect me. Thirty years of being suffocated by their desires, whims, and power has only proven the fear as founded. In the years that followed the last time Tom grabbed me (and he never did it again after I punched himânor did he ever forgive me), I would see good liberal boys, the ones who had feminist mothers and organized progressive political demonstrations, go completely silent when a high school acquaintance accused one of their own of rape. At 19, I had to hide behind a truck as a man followed me as I walked my dog, filming me out his car window for blocks. This summer, a bearded man at a pool party kept asking my friend and I to do drugs with him, insisting it was safe because we were âunrapeable.â Later that night, after rejecting multiple drinks that he seemed to pull out of nowhere, my friend and I joked that the man was too dumb to even commit sexual assault properly. Because what can a woman do, if she wants to avoid an entire lifetime of terror and bitterness, besides laugh in the face of what seeks to use her.
And it is funny: The memory of Tom writhing on the floor like a giant baby, the way my high school friends and I laughed at the man who masturbated at us from his SUV as we waited for the bus. But that is my good fortune. The scars other women carry are too disfiguring to laugh at, so traumatic that they scar you, too. You canât smile when a girl gets a bullet in the head for trying to go to school. There is no comedy in a person getting gang-raped on a bus. Itâs hard to laugh as women are forced to eulogize their aborted or miscarried fetal tissue, though it is a very special kind of sick joke.
What we as women are forced to carryâbecause weâre vulnerable and because we are strongâgoes beyond the natural disorder of things. Our suffering is not natural; itâs calculated and insidiousâthe passing of a bill, the protests of a college football team, thesuccess of an actor, and verdict of a judge.
Or, more glaringly, a man whoâs bragged about sexually assaulting women being elected to the highest office in the U.S.ânot in spite of his vicious misogyny, but partly because of it.
Since the election of Donald Trump, I have felt like a clairvoyant who, instead of seeing ghosts, sees the specter of male destruction everywhere I look: in the money I spend, in the industry I work, even in the minds of other womenâthe ones too foolish to realize that men donât protect them anymore or, somehow more offensive to me, the ones whoâve cynically embraced the concept of female empowerment as a brand or an excuse for selfishness, effectively wringing the term of its power and significance.
For the first time, I donât know how to move past my boiling anger or laugh it away. Also for the first time, I have no desire to. Preferable, I now think, is to stop laughing
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