Person, Woman, Man, Camera, Pig
Once when I was twenty-five I was walk-running down the hallway of a high-rise building in New York City at 3 AM with my dog and as much of my stuff as I could grab shoved into my bag and slung over my shoulder, my dog’s collar in my hand with his tags digging into my fingers so they wouldn’t jingle and wake up the guy I’d been dating for a year, the guy I’d left sleeping in his bed after I had sex with him and felt nothing except my own desire to not die, after I stared at the ceiling long enough to listen to his breathing even out and deepen, and then stared an hour after that to be very sure, after I slipped out of the bed and stealth-crawled to my dog, slipping his collar off with shaking hands and willing him to understand what we were about to do — he did — after I made it all the way to the front of the house before this guy woke up and called out to me and I called back, hoping it sounded like I was in the bathroom and not about to slip out the front door, after I got to the elevator bank and pressed the button twenty, thirty, forty times in a row as if it would make the elevator ascend more quickly, after I heard his front door open and my own blood rushing through my ears as he bellowed down the hall, “Ally! What the fuck are you doing? Get back here!” after I yelled back, “Leave me alone!” and my dog pressed his back up against my legs, putting himself between me and whatever was about to happen, after a woman opened her door, a kind older woman who talked to me one day because she liked my dog and he liked her, after she looked at me and understood what was happening, and he said, “What the fuck are you looking at?” and she said, “I’m calling the police,” and I nodded before she slammed and bolted her door, after the elevator doors finally opened and I got in and knew he wouldn’t get in, too, because he was just in his underwear and even at 3 AM he was still a doctor and wouldn’t want anyone in the lobby to see him that way, after all the months of planning for this one moment, all the things of mine I’d been taking with me every time I left, all the conversations I’d had with girlfriends, all the times I’d cried in the bathroom, over coffee, at work…I watched as this man, twenty years my senior, looked at me with wild, enraged, incredulous eyes as the doors slid shut…and the last thing he said to me was,
“Oh yeah? Well fuck you. You’re just a replaceable hole.”
Quiet. Quiet, piggy.
Once when I was sixteen, the head of the history department at my high school called me into his office. I’d never had him for class, he only taught seniors and I couldn’t imagine why he wanted to speak to me. He smoked a pipe and had a beard and wore a tweed jacket with patches on the elbow like he ran the history department at Harvard University and not some little private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Kids were scared of him because that’s how he liked it.
I had a crush on a young teacher in his department, a new teacher at our school. Not someone I took class with, but we happened to take the same public bus across town so we’d gotten to know each other. As far as I could tell, the feelings were very mutual.
Then there was the man whose history class I was in — he was married and thirty-five, maybe older, and I’d thought he was a trusted adult. A “not dangerous man” versus a dangerous one, because even at sixteen I knew you had to be careful. I was in the process of accelerating all my classes so I could skip my senior year of high school and go directly to college, and stop going back and forth from my mom’s house to my dad’s house and start my actual life.
I thought my actual life might include maybe possibly marrying the young, newly-hired history teacher who was only twenty-four, so really not that much older than I was. I was sixteen with my heart on my sleeve and stars in my eyes so that was my life plan at the time.
The head of the history department didn’t really “call” me into his office, he barked my name into the crowded landing of kids making their way from one classroom to another, like I was in trouble. I was not a kid who got in trouble. I told my friends I’d catch up with them and made my way to his door. That’s when I discovered his office must have been a long, narrow closet at some point that had been converted. I had to press up against him to get past him, and he made no effort to make it easy on me. Once I was inside I was trapped, a thing we both understood, and only one of us enjoyed.
His office was filled with pipe smoke. He smoked the same tobacco as my dad. It was sweet and oppressive. He gestured for me to sit. I wanted to flee. Once I sat down, he looked at me as he sucked on his pipe. He took his time, leaning back in his chair and squinting. He looked at me the way men do when they are imagining you without clothes. He waited until I was a deep enough shade of crimson to feel satisfied that I was uncomfortable. “Do you know why you’re here?” he asked me.
I fucking hated men like this and I still do. If only he knew what was going on in my head, that self-satisfied smile would have gone scrambling from his sorry, sweaty face. Imagine thinking you’re somebody because you’re a grown man making high school kids anxious. Every high school kid is anxious, it’s part of the gig. I told him I had no idea. I said it quietly, I was trained to be a good girl and swallow my seething rage. I was exceptionally skilled at it and had the migraines and body dysmorphia to prove it.
“You’re wreaking havoc in my history department,” he said. I stared at him. I would have filled the space with words if I could have thought of a thing to say. “You’re making things difficult for my new hire. It’s his first year. I know you have a crush on him.” He looked victorious, the way my mother did sometimes when she’d go in for the kill. I had a rush of feelings. How could he know that I had a crush unless my crosstown-bus-future-husband had said something? And why would he do that when he was certainly not innocent? I had not professed any feelings he had not professed himself.
He’s the one who told me he stayed home when there was a chicken pox outbreak because he hadn’t had chicken pox as a kid, and getting it later in life could make you sterile. He figured we might want kids one day. I sure as shit hadn’t said that to him. I was embarrassed and angry and confused to be confronted by his boss this way, but I didn’t want him to get in trouble. It’s not like anything physical had happened. We’d just talked about starting a life together. I was just skipping a year of high school so we could start that life sooner.
It didn’t occur to me that a grown man should not say things to a girl that would alter the course of her life and inspire her to leave her family and friends a year early, to head to college on her own. Even if she was just heading thirty blocks uptown.
I said I’d be more aware of myself and that I understood. I was hoping I’d be excused, but no. Then he started talking about my actual teacher, the thirty-five-year-old married guy. I’d been going to him for help because I wanted to take the American History AP exam as one of my standardized tests for college, which meant I had to learn the second year of American History on my own. I’d have to take the test a year early. He’d offered to help.
Then one day in the library after school, at a time when we should have been talking about democracy, he told me if we’d met in college he felt sure we would have dated. Of course, we never could have met in college, because when he was eighteen I was one. That was the end of me going to him for help with anything.
He ran the Model U.N. though, which meant he chaperoned the out-of-town trips. I was in the Model U.N. and the last trip had been painful. He’d followed me around like a puppy. It wasn’t subtle. I tried to keep my distance, but friends of mine noticed and asked what was up. I shrugged, tried to blow it off. I didn’t want him to lose his job over it. He called my mother’s house one day not long after and I answered, I was home alone. He said he couldn’t stop thinking about me, and I told him never to call me again and hung up. I was shaking.
Then he sent a love letter to the house. It was lucky I’d gotten the mail that day, or maybe it would have been better if my mother had opened it. I tore that letter into tiny pieces and threw it away.
The next day I found him after school. I waited until everyone had cleared out, and then I walked over to his desk and let him have it. I said there were no circumstances when I would ever be interested in him and I wanted him to leave me the fuck alone. I said if my mother had opened that letter she would have called the principal, he would have gotten fired, and what, exactly, would he tell his wife, then? I said if he didn’t get his shit together he’d lose his job and his wife, over a sixteen-year-old who had gone to him for help with a test.
Then I spun around and walked out the door, but I need you to understand I was having a whole nervous system response. I was not a confrontational kid. I was feeling a mix of rage, contempt, horror, betrayal, and also concern for this guy who had no clue who my mother was, or what kind of hell would rain down upon him if she found out the way he’d been behaving. In retrospect, I wish I had brought her his letter on a silver tray.
Now his asshole boss was sitting here telling me I was wreaking havoc in his department — me, the kid, not them, the men — treating me like I was the one with something to feel ashamed about. For the life of me I could not come up with a single thing, unless it was existing as a girl in the world.
Quiet. Quiet, piggy.
I’d had men telling me I was an “old soul” my whole life. My dad was the first one. Maybe it made him feel better about laying all of his very large and grownup problems with fidelity at my tiny feet. Telling little girls they have “an old soul” or seem, “so mature for their age” is a thing men say to make it okay — and kind of your fault — when they treat you in a way no kid should be treated.
Quiet. Quiet, piggy.
When I was fourteen I started checking coats at the restaurant my mother managed during the day. The night manager was twenty-seven, she considered him a friend. Every woman there had a crush on him, he was good looking and had a lot of charisma, so I was very flattered when he started hanging around the coat check. I was just a kid with braces, I couldn’t believe he was talking to me and saying I was beautiful.
I was even more shocked the first time he kissed me. Of course I kept it a secret, I knew he could get fired. He made me swear not to tell anyone, and he kept kissing me, every chance he got, for months. He became a huge part of my world. It’s hard to write this next part because it’s so despicable. After a while he told me he wanted me to have sex with someone else because he did not want the responsibility of taking my virginity — then we could be together.
I could not begin to get my head around something so horrific, the thought of it made me cry. I was nowhere near ready to have sex with him, let alone anyone else. He would back off right away and say it was fine, he was happy to keep kissing me forever.
Then he got a job managing a hotel in the Caribbean and he left New York City in a matter of days. I was bereft, he had made me feel special. His leaving was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was just too little to know that then.
I could be writing worse things than this. I could be writing about the physical things that happened, times I was grabbed, the one time I was overpowered — that kind of violence. The way a man looks when you’re saying no and he doesn’t care and you are a kid.
I know exactly what that looks like, and what it feels like after, when you tell people and they believe him and not you. People who should never, ever doubt you. I could write for days about it, but I won’t because it costs too much and people who support men like that don’t deserve my effort. People who despise men like that don’t require it.
It doesn’t matter, anyway, because it’s all the same thing and if you aren’t getting that yet, you’re probably too close to it. You’ve been breathing it in so long the poison feels like oxygen. You’ve built up a tolerance, but it’s still making you sick.
It’s the men in South Carolina trying to convict women of murder if they decide they don’t want their rapist’s baby.
It’s why judges talk about sociopathic young men’s “potential and promise” and let them take a plea deal, while the girl or young woman or older woman in the courtroom is expected to make sense of that, as if her potential or promise don’t matter, don’t even exist.
It’s why women don’t report domestic violence to the police, because when push comes to shove, and it always does, the law will side with the man, every time.
It’s the way I can do the exact same job as my brother at the exact same company, and get paid 83 cents for every dollar he makes because of what’s in my underpants, which makes no sense at all.
It’s why guys feel emboldened to say and do disgusting crap in public, and no one speaks up except maybe other women, and only if they happen to be there.
It’s why the president of the United States gets infuriated at a journalist for doing her job well — nothing more, nothing less — and points his stubby finger in her face in front of a gaggle of other journalists and says,
They’re all the same guy. We’re just replaceable holes to them.
You want to know something, though? The guy who called me a replaceable hole sent me a friend request on Facebook years later. I blocked him. Then he proceeded to send friend requests on every other platform, and follow my public profiles. I blocked him everywhere. Not so replaceable, I guess, and not just a hole.
But fuck no, we aren’t going to be friends.
I don’t like men who abuse women and girls. I’ve had more than enough of them. I am a woman, I was a girl, I have a daughter. Why would I ever like a man who hurts girls and women, or doesn’t respect them? Why would I ever vote for one, or support one? Why would anybody?
We can talk all day long about all kinds of things, but you can tell a lot about a person by the things they say and the company they keep. It doesn’t take fifteen years and countless lunches, dinners and parties to know your close friend is a pedophile who hurts young girls, and his girlfriend is, too. If you continue to socialize, you’re okay with that. If you get the girlfriend a cushy deal that makes no sense after she’s been convicted of heinous crimes and should spend her days behind bars where she can’t hurt any more children…
…in my book, that makes you the pig.