“Just shut up and step up. Do the RIGHT thing”. Sen. Mazie Hirono, compassion warrior and perennial badass has this message for men this week. And I couldn’t agree with her more.
My eyes and throat burned when I heard this statement. Tears welled up. They still are, to be honest. The simple power and truth of these words felt simultaneously like a gut punch and a hug. Uplifting and supportive, but also an unexpected blunt force.
Because while I wish someone had said this for me, I am also so grateful that someone has said it at all. I have been so angry. Rageful really. And so hurt, so afraid, so betrayed, so ashamed and anxious and countless other emotions for so long. I have spent most of my life wondering why people who said they loved me did not stand up for me when I needed them most. And I know I am not alone in this.
If you know 100 women, I can nearly guarantee that you know at least 98 women who have been sexually harassed, assaulted, battered and/or raped. And while I am aware that these crimes are perpetrated against men too, I am not interested in entertaining prevarication meant to invalidate my point and the point of all female victims. I don’t disregard the suffering of male victims, I am simply talking here about what happens to women. What overwhelmingly, disproportionately, globally and systematically is done to women BY MEN. Which means it’s men who have to change it. We cannot fight for ourselves with half the force that men can fight for us, so allow me to lay out my part of the case for why they should.
The social infrastructure in which girls and women grow, learn, and live our lives comes with the unwritten but ironclad RULE that we will suffer these things in silence. That we will not “make a scene”, will not “overreact”, will not “try to ruin his life” when we are victimized. And this starts for so many of us at a much younger age than anyone realizes. Women don’t realize it because we don’t even talk about it to each other most of the time. Each of us walks with our shame, our pain, our own individual rage every day, and too often we even direct that against each other, because pain always wins. It always finds a way out and it is always destructive if you don’t allow it to heal in honest and healthy ways. And men don’t realize it because the good ones don’t do these things and truly have no framework for the scale of what I’m talking about, and the bad ones know damn well what they are getting away with and aren’t about to upset their own apple cart.
So let’s all come together and look at this honestly for a minute. Let’s shut up, step up, and do the right thing. And let’s show men what they need to do to help us. Because I still believe the good ones outnumber the bad ones, and I still believe in the power of solidarity. I have been victimized, let down, betrayed, and hurt, but I still believe that better is possible through honesty and openness. So I’m going to break a silence I have held for way too long here and try to lay this out with as much forthright honesty as I can, because I know with more certainty than I know anything else in my life that my experiences are not unique, they are the absolute norm.
I know that when we say #YesAllWomen, we mean that yes, ALL women have been told to take it, to sit down, to quiet down, to let boys be boys. That someone touching us in an inappropriate way “isn’t a big deal”. That harassing us is okay because “he didn’t mean anything by it”. And yes, ALL women know what it means to think in response, “well, what about me?” ...quietly, in the back of our mind as we process that his action and the need for it not to have a consequence is somehow more important than the impact it had on us. Yes, ALL women know that these allowances we are told and forced to make come at the price of our dignity and self worth. That we will always feel a little bit unclean, a little bit dirty, and a little bit betrayed. That we will develop anxieties, fears, phobias, issues with our sexuality, lifelong consequences of being actively taught that we are “less than”. Yes, ALL women know what I am talking about. And it’s past time we shared it openly with each other and with men. Because they need to know if they are going to help us, and I believe that we have no choice but to trust them to do that once they know what really happens and what is needed.
All women know what I felt like when I was nine years old. When I was sent to visit family many states away and I was so excited to fly on a plane by myself, and I even got bumped up to first class, and the flight attendant spoiled me and walked me to my connecting flight and how over-the-moon I was about all of the fun things I was going to do and see. And all women know the feeling I experienced when that came crashing down as a male relative locked the basement door and turned off the lights and said it was time to play “hide and seek” in the dark. All women know the crawling wave of powerless dread and denial and “this can’t be happening” that swept over me like heat as his hands slid down my pants. All women know what it feels like to be exposed to sexuality before you have a mental and emotional framework to process it, and the guilt and shame that in that instant take up permanent residence in your head and will never, ever leave. How literally everything is different from that moment forward, even if you bury it and build walls around it and try never to think about it again. I locked myself in my little guest bedroom when it was over and didn’t want to come out for two days, until an uncle who had no idea what had happened came to visit and made me laugh and I decided to eat again. But it wasn’t over. Before I got to go home, I was made to go one-on-one to a waterpark with the perpetrator, so he could sit me in front of him on waterslides and press his erect penis against my backside. It’s possible he’s reading this. If so, I hope he knows one thing: I remember what you did. I was nine.
I think all women know what I felt like a few years later when I was eleven and twelve and was often the only girl present at church youth group, so a group of slightly older boys would always ask for games of flashlight tag in hopes of being able to get me alone a try to sneak a grab of my butt or an unwilling kiss. All women probably understand the confusion and fear I felt not knowing how to handle this and somehow being sure it was both my fault and that I was probably supposed to enjoy it. My powerlessness as it escalated over that year to the group of them actively isolating and carrying me around while they stuck their hands up my shirt and down my pants and cheered each other on is probably familiar to most, if not all women. As is the inevitable beginning of what would become a decades-long pattern of self-destructive choices, where I shunned the nice, quiet, shy boy who would try to help, would want me to come with him instead of going with this group after evening youth service. It’s possible he’s reading this, and if so, I hope he understands how sorry I am, both for him and for myself. But he was different, they were ‘normal’ to me by then. And I wanted to be liked. I wanted to go along to get along. It’s equally possible that the men who were the boys who did this are reading this. Know that I’m not here to name names and I’m not interested in any kind of retribution. What you did was also a product of a social system that doesn’t protect women, and that needs to change. You can still choose to be honest and to change.
Going along to get along was what I did when I worked at the local video store when I was fourteen and the owner asked me to start putting away the rental tickets in the XXX room at the back of the store. It was what I did when I realized he had a camera in his cigar-choked office where he would watch me do it. And it was what I did when he asked if I saw anything I liked while I was in there. I wasn’t the only girl of my age who worked there, others experienced this right alongside me, and they went along to get along too. It’s possible they are reading this, and if so, I hope they know that I hurt for them too, and I think about them often and pray that they are ok.
Going along to get along wasn’t even what I was doing anymore by the time I lost my virginity at fifteen. I was acting out sexually by then, the start of many, many years of deliberately debasing myself emotionally and sexually in a totally misguided and damaging-beyond-description quest to find a place where I would be safe. Someone who would love me enough that I would feel safe enough to even think about these things, someone who would wash away the slime of the shame and the guilt, would be able to calm the rage, could stand steadfast in the face of my worst and love me anyway. I didn’t find that, of course. Nobody can do those things for us, no other person can heal those wounds. We have to be our own saviors. Pull off our own scabs and let the corruption out, until the fresh, healing blood starts to flow, and then put on our own tourniquets, fold our own bandages. I hurt and misused quite a few men and damaged myself in ways I wouldn’t even recognize for many years during that time. It’s possible that people I hurt during this time are reading this. If so, I hope they know how truly sorry I am.
Understand that through all of this I NEVER SAID ANYTHING. I didn’t tell anyone. And nobody ever asked, either. So I really don’t want to hear any of this “why didn’t she say anything for thirty years if it was so traumatic” bullshit from talk show hosts like Tucker Carlson. Whoever she is, I can assure you that she didn’t say anything for any number of damn good reasons, and that primary among them was that THIS IS NORMAL. This is just life for women in society. It has always been so. If our pain is inconvenient to a man, we will be told, encouraged, shamed, even passively steered by the lack of action by onlookers into repressing it. We will learn through social context, through the very fact that observers and others who passively “know” don’t stop it, that this is what is expected of us. That these things just happen. I have listened to countless women share their stories and I can assure you that there is almost no circumstance under which women will be believed, in which their pain will be relieved and healed through a collaborative effort of others shutting up, stepping up, and doing the right thing. If you were, let’s just say, locked into a bedroom at a party at age 15 by two older boys who tried to rape you, and you were lucky enough to get away, had you screamed for help when you got out of that bedroom, you would have been very likely to face a chant of “slut, slut, slut” and have to run away in hot-faced shame, rather than to face a horrified group of witnesses ready to stand steadfastly in your defense. And if you don’t say anything for thirty years until the pain builds to a breaking point, you will be vilified across the national press as an attention-seeking liar.
Because I can assure you of something else as well: pain keeps being pain. It keeps right on hurting, and it festers like a wound. One thing I have learned is that it will always come out. Always. If you don’t look at what’s hurting you honestly and allow it to heal naturally, it can well up like an abscess, and abscesses come to a head before they burst.
My pain certainly bled all over my marriage, which I am not going to dissect here out of deep respect for my ex-husband, and it came to a head in the year following my divorce when I once again selected a partner who wasn’t good for me in any way. But he brought something new-to-me to the table, and within a few months I had my first experience with domestic battery. I refused to take a trip to meet his family at the holidays, because my own mother was battling the cancer that would ultimately claim her life, and his response was to wrap his hands around my throat and throw me across the room, into a wall. He held me in that room for quite some time, repeatedly shoving and throwing me into furniture and walls. I had bruises for weeks, spent night after night gingerly soaking in epsom salts and feeling the imprints of his violence on my body.
And do you know what I did, after these years of damage and unhealed pain? I let him back into my life two months later. I “gave him another chance”. And it took him six months, but he put his hands on me again. This time he shoved me into a wall, watched me sit there stunned and struggle to get up, snatched my phone and threw it away from me as soon as I did stand, saying “you’re NOT gonna call the police about this”, and when I fled to the bathroom to get away from him, he followed me and slammed the door open into me, opening a gash across my cheekbone.
And do you know what I did this time? I stayed for two more weeks, until his next outburst, when he kicked Lilly. When I saw him hurt my dog, THAT was my breaking point. That was when the abscess burst, when I left and stayed gone, and started on the path to therapy, healing, recovery work, and the grace I have now.
It's possible that the weak man who did this is reading this too. Because to my point about society systematically failing to protect women, we still have 16 mutual Facebook friends. That’s right, 16 people who call themselves my friends know damn well what he did, and not only did they not speak out, they couldn’t even be bothered to disassociate from him on social media. Society. Does. Not. Protect. Women.
So if you’re reading this, you coward, you know who you are. And please also know that I am only sorry I didn't have you arrested, because I know that you did it to another woman after me, and I am ashamed that she suffered in part because I did not speak out. I know you did it to her too because one of the men who makes me firmly believe that better is possible called me and told me what you did, and what he in turn did to try to make things right for that woman. Know that my respect for him is as boundless as my contempt for you.
So do we see it now? This system that we have in which women are damned if we do and doubly damned if we don’t, where we teach little girls that it is normal to be victimized, where everyone knows but nobody says, where we just don’t talk about it…made me value myself less than a dog. Lilly’s pain and injury was important enough for me to intervene and take action to save her. But I wouldn’t, couldn’t make the same value judgment about myself. Ever. Through all of this, I never once valued myself enough to stand up and say no. And this isn’t because I am a uniquely damaged or broken person. It’s not because I grew up with addiction and dysfunction. It’s not because exceptionally bad things happened to me – they didn’t. Normal bad things happened to me. Things that I know for a fact have happened to every woman I know happened to me. That’s all.
The life of a normal American woman happened to me, and I am putting on paper how far I had to fall before I even tried to pick myself up because I am so goddamn sick and tired of hearing people blame and vilify women for daring to state that they are victims. Of hearing men on television denigrate women for taking any and every stance on issues of sexual assault and violence against them. Of hearing that #metoo has “gone too far” – it hasn’t gone NEARLY far enough. Of trying to wrap my brain around the fact that we elected a president who is very credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by nineteen women and that nearly all of my family voted for him. Nearly half of our society listened to this man describe his actions against women, watched nineteen women stand up and tell their truths, and actively chose to not just ignore and dismiss it as “locker room talk”, but attack, blame, and vilify all of these women, while electing their rapist and abuser president of our country.
Do we see it now? The deck is stacked, it always has been. There is no way for a woman to pull a winning card. The standards are different. They always have been. And Senator Hirono is right: men need to shut up and listen until they fully understand the problem, then step up and do the right thing. We can only fix this systemic problem that encompasses ALL of our society if we do it together. It’s too big for women to fix alone, we need the active cooperation of men. Not to just march with us and say they believe us, but to actively get their hands dirty and start standing for us.
We teach our little girls that their daddy, their brother, their uncles, the men in their lives will protect them. That these are the men they should look to for safety and safekeeping. We teach them that it is a man’s job to keep them safe, but what framework do we give them for understanding that it will also be men who hurt them? Who is safe to go to? If you tell your little girl that you will keep her safe, but then you turn around and elect a man to the highest office in our land who brags about the fact that women won’t resist him if he sexually assaults them, what are you teaching your daughter?
I know what you’re teaching her, because I have been that little girl, and I am also the woman I am today. My father, who promised to keep me safe, voted for and still defends this man. Not only that, but he supports and makes statements like “she’s ruining his life” when he hears stories of assault allegations. And I shouldn’t be surprised by this. Because I have told him no fewer than four times as an adult woman what happened to me when I was nine years old. And maybe if I had told him when I was nine his reaction would have been different, or maybe that’s just what he tells himself to justify what he told his little girl when she shared this with him twenty years later, which was “I don’t want to know that”. Four disclosures, four dismissals. So what you’re teaching her if your actions don’t match your words is just more of the same. You’re teaching her that her pain is inconvenient to you, and that rather than examining the cognitive dissonance of your stated principles not matching your impulses, you will disregard her in order to preserve your emotional comfort. You’re teaching her that you would much rather maintain the illusion that you would protect your little girl and not examine what that means in the context of your political actions, or your concept of a family member. And this is not news to her. She has always known that it’s men who are supposed to keep her safe, but it’s also men who will hurt her. And hopefully, if she has managed to navigate her life in a way that led her down healing paths, she has learned to be her own fierce protector.
It took me twenty eight years to disclose the things I’m writing about here to a romantic partner. And twenty nine to make this public disclosure. It’s past time. Because we can’t fix this until we all get on the same page about what’s really going on. So if I can help turn on some lights, help us all to see that the problem is so much bigger, so much more deeply ingrained, so much uglier and nastier and utterly pervasive than we realize, then you are welcome to my truth. It doesn’t cost me a thing to give it, but holding it back costs us all so very much more than we know. I am not ashamed of where I have been, who I have been, or who I am now. I am a very long way from perfect, but I have a damn good therapist and a man in my life who is not afraid to look at his own behavior, acknowledge his mistakes, and commit to do better. Neither he nor I run from painful truths, so together we will make sure that this corrosive worldview is not allowed to take root in the lives of his daughters.
So men. Can you commit to shut up, stand up, and do the right thing? To listen to women, believe them, stand next to them, and raise your voice? To no longer accept, dismiss, or defend “locker room talk” or “youthful indiscretions”? To not just sit and listen to your coworker talk about the new girl in HR’s ass, but to stop that conversation and ask him to speak with respect? To not walk by the catcalling asshole on the street, but turn and ask him if he feels good about harassing a woman in broad daylight with no repercussions? To raise your voice against the Roy Moores and Donald Trumps running for public office? To never, ever, ever ask your daughter or granddaughter to accept being touched in a way that makes her uncomfortable, or dismiss it as “boys will be boys”? To see the bruise under your coworker’s eye and ask whether she is ok, with genuine concern and intent to actively help? To really internalize the prevalence of this and start looking at the things that happen around you through a new lens, through the lens of ‘what must that woman be holistically experiencing’? Because if you can do that, we can change it. I still believe we can, despite all evidence to the contrary, I believe it. But we have to do it together.
This essay is my effort at ripping the scab off of this festering, stinking abscess at the heart of our society. The tourniquet and the bandages are too big for me. I need your help. And this time I hope I get it.