Moving Violations

I don’t know where to begin. I keep picking different parts of the timeline, and each one of them changes the path in front of us. Believe me when I tell you, I’d like to begin on a path with sunshine, wildflowers and a great dog - that is a path I found, eventually - but I can’t start this story there. I know what I want to say, so maybe that’s the place to start - I’m exhausted by men. Not all men blah-de-blah. Someone should write a song. 

I have a photographic memory - I don’t think I’ve mentioned that - so when I write about things I can see them. This is both advantageous and not, depending on what I’m writing about. I could start in a dark, narrow stairwell when I was thirteen, wearing a lavender-and-deep-purple herringbone down jacket I thought was cool, but was not at all cool. I was on my way to ballet, hair in a bun, braces on my teeth when a man grabbed me from behind, put his hand over my mouth so hard it hurt, and whispered right in my ear, don’t move, okay?  But it’s so depressing, scary and wrong, I really don’t want to begin there.

I could start on a public bus when I was ten, with a balding man in a trench coat looking at me like we were sharing a secret, or Central Park when I was eight with a man who was laughing wildly as he looked at me, pants down, or the elevator of the building where I grew up when I was twelve with a guy who looked like a million other guys you see every day - there were men with their dicks out staring at me and scaring me in all these places, and I could give you all kinds of details I wish I didn’t remember and couldn’t see.

I could start when I was sixteen, having the head of the History Department of my high school call me into his oppressive office full of pipe smoke to blame me for the shitty and predatory behavior of two grown men who worked for him, one of whom sent love letters to my house though he was at least thirty-five, married, and being paid to teach me about the Reconstruction Era and not his stupid fantasies. When I tell you there are a lot of places I could start this story, I hope you know how fucking sad that is. 

I think though, I should probably start with my dad. I’m pretty sure most of us form our first ideas about men from the men we know first, whomever they may be. Depending on the cards we’re dealt, we’re either disappointed or surprised after that, by the men we meet when we head out into the world. That’s all of us. Maybe your dad was a violent man, and meeting a man who is gentle and kind is a revelation. Maybe your dad was a great guy, and meeting a supercilious asshole will be your first education into that breed of man. You get the idea. At a certain point - usually around puberty - we start to realize our parents aren’t godlike creatures, they’re just people, and they might be really ill-equipped to raise small human beings. 

So let’s cut to any year after I turned thirteen, when it’s the week before Father’s Day. Picture me in front of the card section at the drugstore, picking up card after card, trying and failing to find something that fits. If only they had Father’s Day cards with pictures of gorgeous, twenty-something women, thin but with big boobs and long hair, it would have been easy.

Dear Dad,

I picked this card just for you because I know what you like. Thank you for teaching me how to objectify, lie to, and disappoint women. I’ll be in therapy a long time trying to figure out how to trust men. You’re the best!

Photo by lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash

Instead, I’d stand there reading messages about men who were “always there” for their daughters, who taught them to believe in themselves, who knew they’d always have someone solid to count on or come home to when things got hard. Or I’d be looking at cards about men who had easy chairs, beers and selective hearing haha, or men who liked to fish and drink beer with their buddies. Some cards would have cartoons of affable looking men mowing the lawn, their t-shirt riding up over their mid-life dad belly. 

Which brings me to my half sister, Carrie, because I wouldn’t have known about the lawn-mowing horror without her. She was my dad’s daughter from his first marriage, before he had an affair with my mom - and left his family to marry her - and eventually have me. I know it’s complicated and you might have to read that sentence more than once. My dad was married four times, so it’s not you, it’s him. My mom was three years older than Carrie, so that must have been fun for his first wife, but let’s not get distracted. I never really knew Carrie. I saw pictures and thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world. Blonde, blue-eyed, stunning.

Carrie. I was a little happy to meet her.

I made up stories about my “big sister” and imagined a time we’d have adventures together. She’d decide a baby sister would be fun, and she’d do my nails or take me to a movie and teach me the things sisters teach you. But I only met her twice, once when I was six and once when I was eleven. Then I didn’t talk to her until my dad was ninety-three, and clearly on the decline. I thought Carrie and I should talk after I went to visit my dad over the summer in 2019. I figured if we didn’t, the next time we’d see each other would be at his funeral, and I’m never one for awkward situations if they can be avoided. Carrie’s mom had passed away years prior. It turned out she had never wanted Carrie to have a relationship with me, the product of the affair that ended her marriage and blew up her family, and who could blame her?

Carrie and I started talking every few weeks, and that is how I came to find out that my mother was not my father’s first affair, (or as Dave Grohl would say, theirs wasn’t the first relationship that happened “outside his marriage” as if these are things that can happen when you aren’t looking), and that our dad used to mow the lawn in white speedos. He was the talk of the neighborhood in Buffalo, NY where Carrie grew up until my dad blew their family apart, and she and her mom and little brother moved to Georgia. If my dad ever visited them, he did it when I was with my mom, because of course he ended up cheating on her, too, so that marriage didn’t last, either. But before all that, before my dad met my mom and before I existed, he mowed the lawn in white speedos even after Carrie begged him to put on regular shorts so her friends wouldn’t see, and so the other wives in the neighborhood wouldn’t giggle and whisper. But he wouldn’t.

Anyway, the point is, even the Father’s Day cards with lawn-mowing dads didn't work. And the other point is, my dad was not a great guide when it came to my introduction into the world of men, because he treated me like a tiny therapist and took me on dates with him and went home and lied to my stepmom about where we’d been. He told me we needed to keep it a secret so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. He cried in my arms and said these women were so jealous and possessive and he just needed to be free, and I believed him and felt sorry for him. I wrapped my little arms around him as best I could, and patted his back when he cried even though it scared me. I mean, I was four, five, six, whatever. It didn’t stop until I was thirteen and that’s when I realized my dad was the problem. 

By then I’d seen a lot of dicks as referenced above, and I didn’t include every occurrence because, well, word-count, and I have other things I need to get to, like Rebecca Cheptegei. See, the thing is, if I included everything, we’d be here for days, but I hope I’m making it clear these were not one-offs. This was a constant thing. Men on the street, men on public transportation, male teachers at my school, male friends of my parents hitting on me when I was a kid, men I eventually dated who were horrible to me in different ways, sometimes violently, and one guy who took my virginity even though I begged him not to, tried to fight him off, but couldn’t. I was sixteen, he was twenty-four. I blamed myself for a long time. That’s what you do when you grow up in a culture where the first questions people ask after a girl or woman is raped are what was she wearing? How much did she drink? Did she say no? Fuck this, really.

This is why I can no longer hide my disdain when a man - a man who used to take my yoga class all the time - tells me that the guy running for president again is just making a joke when he retweets the picture of Hillary Clinton and Vice President Kamala Harris with the disgusting quip about blowjobs underneath it. Please note how he begins as if he’s going to make a list, and gets no further than 1.

This is why I’m appalled but shouldn’t be, I guess, when a different guy - someone I considered a friend - tells me this very week he thinks women would feel more empowered if they found reasons to be grateful for the patriarchy. He really thought he was onto something with that, I think he expected me to be impressed. Look at you, flipping the script! If I’m grateful for this system of oppression then I can stop thinking of myself as a victim, that’s your genius take, huh? But my dude, no. You won’t be reading this, obviously, but just in case, let me help you with this on the most basic level - do not tell women how to feel about a system you have benefited from your entire life, because you are truly clueless on this topic and it shows. I say it here, because when I tried to talk to you about why your suggestion is so deeply problematic you lost all interest in the conversation, looked at your watch, and sighed audibly. It’s so annoying when women don’t just listen, isn’t it?

So like, the bar is low. Your expectations of being safe anywhere are nil. You don’t walk on the street alone at night because you’re asking for it. You don’t run in desolate areas because no one can hear you scream, and they might not come even if they did. You don’t leave your drink unattended. So you’re used to this as a way of life, a way of being, the way things are. Which is why it takes a lot for something to shock you when it comes to male violence. I don’t know how to write this because it’s too awful. Rebecca Cheptegei was thirty-three. She was Ugandan. She was an Olympian, she was just at the Paris Olympics running her heart out. She was a daughter, she was a sister, she was a mother, she was a teammate, she was a human being with dreams and aspirations, discipline and dedication, and a ton of grit. She has two daughters, they are 9 and 11, did you know that part? I wish I didn’t. This is where I lose it. Her ex-boyfriend was fighting her over land she bought, land where she built her home near the grounds where she trained. He snuck into her house while she was at church with her two little girls. When they got back, he doused her in petrol and set her on fire, and when one of her daughters tried to save her mother - now engulfed in flames - he kicked her. I don’t know how these little girls are ever okay again. The rage I feel is hard to describe.

You would think to yourself, surely this is the most horrific thing I’ll hear for a long time. There’s no way there could be more than one totally unthinkable story about a man doing something so deranged and depraved to a woman he cared about at some point - in the same news cycle. And I’m sorry to say, you’d be wrong, because Dominique Pelicot walks this earth. A man who drugged his wife and raped her repeatedly while filming himself for over a decade, but also invited seventy-two other men to do the same. Other people have written about this. I cannot write about it for long because even now I feel my stomach clenching. It makes me sick to my stomach, literally. And as soulless and evil as anyone would have to be to do that to their own spouse, the thing that did me in were the seventy-two other men - because this is where I start to panic.  

For a very long time I’ve told myself I had the experiences that I did as I was growing up because I was born and raised in New York City, and whenever you pack seven million people into twenty-two square miles of space, the odds go up that things are going to happen. Also, I was a latchkey kid with divorced parents taking public transportation and moving around the city on my own from the time I was eight. But now I don’t know what to think or what to say, because it’s not just New York City, it’s everywhere men exist, and it’s not okay. It’s not okay to exist this way and accept it, and part of the problem is the water is just not right, and we’re all swimming in it. It flows through a little village in France, it flows in Uganda, it’s in Afghanistan, where women are now not supposed to leave their homes unless it’s urgent, may not raise their voices in public or at home, and may not sing. 

I don’t know if I can get across to you what a violation it is to watch white men make laws in this country about what a woman or girl can and cannot do with her own body. And there are plenty of women ready to sign over their freedom, too. The violations come so fast and furiously, you can’t keep up. I was at a doctor’s office with my son the other day, and watched as two white dudes in their sixties followed a female technician around the front office, telling her how young she looked, asking if she’d started working there at twelve. She laughed in that way we all laugh when what we want to say is go fuck yourself. Stop talking about my appearance. Stop harassing me at work, when there’s nowhere I can go, and nothing I can say because I need my job to feed my family. But I have to be grateful I get to exist, right? I have to smile so you don’t kill me or fire me or sigh at me and look at your watch. Get a clue. We’re not safe in your world and we’re sick of your shit, and if you’re one of the good ones, then help us dismantle a system that’s making us all sick. Talk to your male friends about the rape case in France and ask what they make of it. Talk to your daughters, mothers, sisters, wives - and listen like you care. And then vote. 

If you want to meet me in real time to talk about what it’s like for girls and women to exist in a world where men are regularly violent toward them (Not all men, blah-de-blah), I’ll be here 9/13/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. And as a note, I want to say when you exist in a world like this, you really do appreciate the men who are equally appalled. And you need the community of women who get it. So grateful for you all, truly. Thank you for spending some time with me.