I Am Not Special & Neither Are They

The first time I ever got catcalled I was 15. It was outside a concert, by a man at least twice my age. I don't remember what he said, just the ice cold fear that swam over my body when I realized how he was looking at me. When I was in eighth grade, I read Tina Fey's memoir Bossypants. In it, she dedicates a chapter to how when women are asked when they first felt like grown women, they hearken back to their first incident of public sexual harassment. That night in February 2013, despite the fear that overcame me, for the first time in my life, I felt like a woman. Not like an adult with any autonomy or agency, but like a woman, with a woman's body, a woman's body that men would claim and comment on from that day forward.

These days, I get catcalled at least once or twice a week. Sometimes, it's benign ("hey, beautiful, give me a smile"), sometimes, it's invasive ("nice ass"), sometimes it's direct ("give me a blowjob" - once that was actually screamed at me from a car), sometimes it's just bizarre ("Girl, I wanna take you to South Florida" - yeah, that one actually happened too).

When the harassment started, I was two weeks shy of eighteen, and no boy had ever even looked at me. I was so anxious around them, so inexperienced, so insecure. I was a kid. A prime target.

He lived on my floor. I thought he was the cutest boy in the hall, but I was surrounded by cute boys in the music school, so I rarely thought of him. I heard he hooked up with another girl on our floor. He didn't seem like an option.

The first weekend of the year, two weeks after we moved in, he got stoned out of his mind at a party a bunch of us went to. On the encouragement of a fellow partygoer, he began to aggressively hit on me. We were standing in a circle of all our floor-mates, plus a few strangers, and all I could do was giggle nervously as he leaned into me, as he made comments about my body, the body I still didn't feel like I owned. I had never felt so...physical. So defined by the body that carried the code-red thoughts I was having. After a few minutes of discomfort, I literally ran away. I recognized the symptoms of the panic attacks I started having the previous year--my throat closing, the sound of my heartbeat in my ears like a kick drum, the cold sweats. After hiding on the other side of the backyard for a while, I ran into some of my other friends and slowly reintegrated into the landscape of the party.

The next night, the boy came into my dorm room with a bunch of other people (we were kind of the social room, much to my chagrin). He stayed after everybody else left so he could apologize to me.
"I didn't want to make you uncomfortable," he said.
"I was just really, really high," he said.
"But I do think you're beautiful," he said.
I choked out giggly replies, anything to get him to leave. I remember thanking him. I remember smiling because finally, at long last, a cute boy thought I was beautiful.

It wasn't over. For the next three weeks, he came into my dorm room almost every day with a flimsy excuse. He sat next to me in dining halls. He liked all my Instagram posts, including the hundreds of photos I'd posted before we'd ever met. I remember watching in amazement as my notifications updated, surprised at his boldness. He would untie and retie my shoes, tug at my clothes, play with my hair. I never asked him to stop, just froze and waited for the touch to be over. Sometimes, I think (I hope), I ducked from his hands, only for them to find their way back to me. More than once, he would make me eat or drink whatever he was eating or drinking. I would say no, and he would beg, and beg, and beg, to the point of making the other people at the table uncomfortable, and I would just giggle like an idiot and submit, eating or drinking whatever it was. During one of his many visits to my dorm, he put food directly into my mouth while I was still asking him to stop.

The symbolism was not lost on me. Every weekend, he asked me to go to parties at his frat house, and I would decline. If he didn't listen when I turned down his offer of potato chips, what would happen when something else was on the line?

So how did it ultimately stop? I tried everything. He was the king of doublespeak. He would tell me and my roommates that he "really liked me" and "just wanted to get to know me better." But he would tell his roommates and the other guys on our floor that he was just after me because I was "playing hard to get." A couple times, his roommates told him to back off, and he would reply, "no, trust me, she wants it." I cringe as I write those words.

The only thing that got him to let it go was when he stumbled on some of my tweets. I had written a thread about him, without naming him publicly:

I don't know what came over me, this digital boldness that I so clearly lacked in real life. But while we were eating in the dining hall one evening, he located the tweets and read them out loud. I tried to laugh them off as a "general feminist rant," but I could see his face fall. He knew they were about him.

And all at once, the advances stopped.

My roommates were relieved, partly for my benefit, mostly because they were probably just tired of hearing me talk about it all the time. The girls on my floor gave me daps for my #feminism. The guys on my floor told me to apologize. (??!?!) Yes, they said that our friendly antagonist was upset because "I'd hurt his feelings" and that I should say I was sorry. I recognized even then that apologizing would be absolutely insane, so I didn't. And I don't think we ever spoke again.

Last year I invited a boy up to my apartment. We'd talked all night at a party, a Halloween party where I'd spent most of the night with my shirt half-unbuttoned. I thought maybe he just wanted to keep talking. He didn't.

"Is this gonna happen, or...?" he asked.

"Um," was all I could say.

"I mean...it's 3 a.m.," he said. "And you're wearing...that."

I blamed myself. You did a shot, he could see your bra, you touched his arm like a video vixen, you invited him up to your apartment, what did you think was gonna happen? The panic rose again, the cold sweat, the heartbeat rhythm section, the tightening spiral of my throat.

"We could go to the bed," he said (ew). "Or...I could leave."

"You should leave," I said.

And he did.

He told me he'd text me.

He didn't.

I tell these long-winded stories to express solidarity with all the women harassed and assaulted by Harvey Weinstein and other serial predators like him. But maybe even more importantly, I want to reach out to girls harassed and assaulted by trusted authority figures, by friends, by family. The guys in these story are not special or unique. They are devastatingly average college guys who did a devastatingly average thing. People, but men especially, are so quick to say that rapists and other sexual predators are shocking or rare. But they're just not. I am lucky that nothing serious happened to me. These guys thought I was too much work and gave up. Had they been more determined, our stories might have had different endings.

If you have ever been harassed or assaulted, you are not alone. We believe you. No matter where your story falls on the spectrum, it's not your fault, and it's not okay. I didn't owe that guy an apology. If you spoke out or fought back, you don't owe them an apology either.

If we allow harassment--if we condone the behavior of people who don't listen when we say no--we allow assault. Rape culture is built on the backs of the stories that don't merit expulsion from the Academy, the slippery slope of "it was just a joke" and "why are you being so sensitive" and "it could have been worse." That's why I'm writing this. Because I didn't get assaulted. Because I have stared the monster in the face. Because I felt its breath on my face. Because I didn't know what it looked like, walked by it on the street, said thank you when it flashed its teeth, let it get close, struggled to get away even when I didn't.

You are not alone. It's not okay. It's not your fault. We believe you.

#MeToo

False Alarm Symphony of Classical Conditioning

It's around 12:30pm on the first Monday in October and I'm sitting front-row in the psych lab I seriously considered skipping, and after a weekend of staying out too late both nights, I am taking a sorely needed day of vocal rest--not even the 9-hour sleep I got last night is going to save me--and I'm checking my email, I've got one from The New Yorker, because I am liberal swine, and they've hand-delivered me a series of articles on the Las Vegas shooting from last night, plus a handful of others on gun violence and terrorism the Trumpian response thereto, and I'm half-reading those while I half-pay attention to a lecture on classical conditioning that began with a Simpsonian preamble in which Lisa pits Bart against a hamster in an Olympic relay of conditioned tasks, and I scribble down phrases like unconditioned stimulus and conditioned response, and my TA puts us into groups and I frantically sign-language that I am without speech for the day, which my partner doesn't mind, she'll talk for both of us, and eventually the class has settled into that din of group work and I can turn my attention back to the thinkpiece on Jason Aldean and his grief-stricken fans when someone behind me says active shooter, and I think to myself well yes, of course they're still talking about it, I'm still reading about it, it hasn't even been a day, until one of them says but my roommate is there, at which point I realize my TA has left the room, and other people are also murmuring active shooter and when my TA reenters it's to say that I'm sure you guys have heard by now, but there's an active shooter on campus, we need to lockdown, let's move the desks, does anyone have a belt, stay away from the glass pane in the door, and soon the lights are off and we're all crammed into one side of the room, phones buzzing like tuning instruments, like the first movement of the symphony, the frantic messages from loved ones trying to squeeze out through the speakers before we can even pick up the phone.

In my lifetime, I have seen more mass shootings than many countries have in their entire history. Columbine happened when I was a baby, Virginia Tech when I was in elementary school, a whole slew of others in my adolescence and college years--Sandy Hook, Aurora, Charleston, San Bernardino, the Pulse nightclub, so many others I'm forgetting, and last night in Las Vegas, the nth time a terrorist massacre has been labeled "the deadliest mass shooting in US history" like a horrifying Guinness record where the evil keeps outdoing itself, over and over and over again.

I live in Los Angeles, and I was born and raised here. Our emergency training, outside of fire drills, always included earthquake preparedness, you know, growing up on the San Andreas fault and all. I don't fear them because I know what to do when they start. Feel the quake, get under the desk or the table, move away from glass or anything that could fall. I don't remember when lockdown drills started. I guess they were always there. In middle school, one of the security guards would enter a classroom in the guise of a shooter and we were meant to practice our teachings--belt the door, if we could, before he entered, and if he managed to get in, distract him, throw desks, throw chairs, jump on his back if need be, do not be a sitting duck, do not be a target, do not go quietly into that good night. A shooter never came for me, so the fear remained. I have a feeling that if (or, more grimly, when) he does, it will remain then, too.

And I do mean he. White men have carried out more mass shootings than any other demographic in the United States. The argument has been bandied about by my liberal peers for years, but it bears repeating, that brown skin and Islam do not a terrorist make, that if we want to start calling it what it is, we need to stop assuming its name will always be Osama or Omar, we need to name it Adam and Dylann and Eric and James.

I love that we knew what to do in that room while we waited for the all clear--and it did come, for the record: this story ends with a false alarm so serene it was less siren and more soft ska--but I hated that we knew what to do. I hated that we moved into position and belted the door shut like choreography, I hated that my family kept calling to check on me, I hated that less than 24 hours from a tragedy we were staring down the barrel of another one, even when my gut told me that it was a false alarm, I hated that I had to wait until I knew for sure, I hate this conditioning and I want to wash it out, I want to wash the blood off the flag, I want to wash the gun lobby down the drain, I want to Australia these shootings out of the future because I know there's no way to erase the past.

When LAPD tweets that there is no danger, that we can all go home, my TA tells us to forget about the lab, that we'll figure something out. On the walk out of the building, every conversation I overhear is a phone call to a grandmother or nervous chatter about what could have been. This, too, is part of the conditioning: the aftermath of the real or imagined violence. Imagined: sighs of relief. Email blast/Facebook post/tweet that it's all alright. Real: the rote message from politicians I could probably recite from memory about thoughts and prayers. Funerals for the deceased and healthcare bills for the injured bankrupting the "lucky."

I have not been the victim of gun violence. No one close to me has been, either. That statistic should not be an outlier. The voice behind these marks and dashes is a coastal elite who reads The New Yorker for fun. Colorado and Nevada went blue in 2016. But South Carolina went red. So did Florida. With a single Google search, I found a website literally called massshootingtracker.org. Is this the new normal? Just another in a long line of conditioned responses?

Break the habit. Make Pavlov roll over in his grave.

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find/