The man who insisted I harmed him spent three weeks pursuing me. He tried all the usual tricks, and some that I had never heard of before. He even tried some that I would never advise. Still, in the end, it was me he insisted was the aggressor in the story.
It was easy enough for him to do this. I had just moved in to his house, surrounded by his friends, living in his neighborhood. My lease was a sublease, no written agreement. The very roof over my head was a product of his will, a fact I was painfully aware of when I indulged his flirtation.
I don’t know now what I really felt about him. Did I want him to like me? Did I like him back? He had a long-term girlfriend, a fact I respected. When I met them, together, as a pair, I remember thinking I liked her more than I liked him. I remember thinking that I wished she lived there, in that house, and not him.
I was hyperaware of his feelings for me from the beginning, in the way that sexual violence survivors are so often hyperaware of the feelings men have. I watched his body language as I asked him a question. I watched his obvious conclusion that my curvy body meant sexual availability. I remember feeling so, so scared.
The conversations I had with my therapist were about how scared I was. Back then, I didn’t know how to set boundaries. Back then, I didn’t know that if a man was hitting on me inappropriately, that was his fault, not mine. I tried to stay away from this man, but it didn’t work. When I didn’t respond to him with enough positive attention to satisfy him, his underlying hostility blossomed. I felt trapped and friendless.
The dynamics in the house shifted. He was gone for a week. I befriended another member of the household, also new, who bullied me badly. The stress churned my stomach and triggered a flare-up of my chronic illness. It sent me to the ER. Not one person in the house asked me how I was doing. That same “friend” chastised me for talking about my ER visit. Finally I stood up for myself, which she took as her excuse to move out. Others in the house blamed me for this too.
When that man returned from his trip, he seemed the only friend I had in the world. This time, when he flirted with me, I flirted back. Even when he sat outside the door listening to me with my vibrator, without getting consent. Even when he went from singing “let me be your hero” to me while cooking me dinner, to bringing his girlfriend over for the night, in two hours flat, because I wouldn’t sleep with him. Even then.
Even when he brought someone else over the very next night and I learned the hard way that he was in an open relationship. Guess he forgot to tell me. Guess it wasn’t as important as keeping control over me.
I left the house. Spent three days in Santa Cruz. Endured my meeting with their campus about getting raped as a student, getting told by their police department that my rape was consensual sex when I’d never had consensual sex in my life up to that point. Then, I went back to the house.
By then, I was a wreck.
I sent some emails. You know the kind. The ones we all write when we’re alone and drunk, but definitely shouldn’t send. The ones that go something like “I would be perfect for you, if you would just change everything about yourself for me.” Yeah. Those.
Of course I regret it. It was a stupid thing to do. By then, I was well past caring. I just wanted someone to treat me like a human being. I wanted someone to act like I existed, like I mattered.
Of course that’s not what happened. Suddenly I went from a convenient fucktoy to someone with actual thoughts and feelings, expectations and needs, I suppose. Much less fun. Much less convenient.
He told his friends that I had harmed him. In a way, I suppose I had.
A few days later, I brought over another man, a friend. I just wanted to feel better. It seemed to me that the man who was actively ignoring me didn’t have any right to have feelings about what I did with my body.
Predictably, he disagreed. I tried to speak to him about his slow-boil tantrum, wrote him a note expressing my feelings. Another “harmful act,” apparently. Hard to keep up, isn’t it?
He kicked me out of his house. Two days into the month, two days’ notice, no possibility of finding anywhere accessible to go. That is the kind of thing you can do when the privilege and power sits in your lap. It is the kind of thing you can do, and call yourself the hero of the story, when all of white supremacist society insists being white and male makes you the hero.
I suppose he convinced himself I might just throw a fit, or yell, or scream, or whatever it is he believes “crazy” people do. Traumatized women might just do anything, you know. Never mind that I did none of those things. Never mind that men have been known to be afraid of women regardless of what we actually do, regardless of whether we do anything at all. It is easy for anyone and everyone in this society of ours to fear those of us with bodies that are fat, disabled, chronically ill, in need of care. It is easy to fear trauma, to fear dissociation, to fear autism, to fear difference.
It is easy to be uncomfortable with people who are powerless, isn’t it?
By then, I was vomiting all day, every day. Safety seemed like something that belonged to other people. I did not stop vomiting for five months. I started emailing him about all the ways he had mistreated me. I became a shell of who I used to be. As a survivor of child abuse, as a survivor of previous sexual abuse and harassment, my tolerance for acts of violence such as this is low. Left with a clear insight into the power he misused to harm me, and the ways he manipulated his friends into helping him do it, I had nowhere to go with my story.
Like so many women who are abused by violent men, I found myself turning to the perpetrator of this violence for answers, perhaps even for salvation. I felt he was the only person who, like me, knew what had really happened. I felt I needed his awareness of these facts to comfort me.
That would have required he acknowledge my humanity. If I continue waiting for this, I will be waiting a very long time.
The next time I saw him, he cornered me at night, alone, with my back against my car, at a professional event he knew I would be at, to tell me to leave him alone. As one does.
I wonder at the impulse men have to hunt down women. I wonder very often at the willingness of men to terrify women, to interact only with those women who are trapped, who have nowhere to run, to claim that these interactions are consensual or responsible or dignified. When violence and terror build the conditions of an interaction, can consent be said to be established? What does consent mean in this situation?
Where was my consent in this encounter? Where were my boundaries? If the marginalized person with no socioeconomic power in the room is too terrified to speak, does it mean something is wrong? Or is this simply the condition we have all become accustomed to?
I thought for the longest time that I could make him see my humanity, or caretake him into being someone who would withdraw his acts of violence against me, or…whatever self-victimizing illusions we spin when we have been traumatized, and there is no comfort forthcoming. We try to convince the world that we deserve better. We try to convince the perpetrator of violence that we deserve better. We try.
I remember, too, the look on the face of the woman in the kitchen, wrapping her arm around him like she could keep him that way. I understand what her desperation felt like. The desperation to be heard, to be seen, marks a person. It makes us vulnerable. It makes us desperate. Sometimes, it makes us try to destroy each other. I feel sad for her. I feel sad for the person I used to be, who was so very much like her.
I am not that person anymore. I am not sorry that I have outgrown being somebody who allowed myself to be treated that way.
It has taken me far too long to recognize my own “fawn” response for the attempt to protect myself that it is. I was not prepared to encounter harassment and cruelty at such a vulnerable time in my life, and it all but destroyed me. Worse, a group of people I thought I could trust dismissed the possibility that I might have a perspective worth hearing.
In predictable fashion, they turned to the white man in the room to tell them that the marginalized woman he had hurt was crazy and worthless and he needed to be saved from her. I tried standing up for myself, and his friends all condemned me for it, because questioning their loyalty to their abusive friend was more difficult than discarding me.
I miss him sometimes. The way you miss the part of yourself that believed that people were good, and could be trusted to speak the truth. I think the most honest thing he ever did was tell me he did not have the capacity to talk to me. I do not think he ever had the capacity to talk to me, as doing so required meeting me on equal footing. Instead, he talked at me, or attempted to seduce or manipulate me, or narrated my actions to make his own look better in comparison. I would humbly suggest that those with unexamined privilege ought not attempt intimacy with marginalized people they do not yet view as human beings. I would instead suggest that for everyone’s sake, they simply stay away.
Even disabled and chronically ill people deserve that much respect. Even survivors of sexual violence, who are so often stigmatized for the violence others have done to us. Even those of us who are neurodivergent and autistic and chronically weird and “cringe.” Even those of us who dissociate and internalize the violence done against us. It is long past time the men in my community stopped calling women “crazy” after doing violence to us, and it is time other men in my community start calling them out for it.
The problem with conversations about violence between men and women is, you need to make sure you start at the beginning, and not where the most powerful person in the room wants you to.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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