The Personal Is The Political

I started this blog because I personally find writing a cathartic and energizing exercise – a constructive way to examine and work through my past to help improve my present and my future. There are behaviors I learned as a child that I consider damaging, and although I no longer blame my parents for my actions and inactions, I still want to explore these behaviors and see which ones continue to be helpful, versus those that have served their purpose and need to be abandoned or adjusted to help me move toward that vision of success I am beginning to formulate and work toward.
I am also very passionate about politics and what most people would categorize as traditional liberal/left causes. In fact, the issue I hold nearest and dearest to my heart and care about most passionately is the grandmamma of all “liberal” issues: reproductive rights. While I believe my writing will eventually take me in the direction of reproductive rights advocacy, I did not intend to “go political” at this time. But as my foremothers taught me, the personal is the political, and as I learn to listen to my gut, I feel I have to write this post now.
 While we may not agree on candidates or issues, I think we can all agree that this has been the most contentious presidential race in recent history. It is certainly the most contentious race in my lifetime. Even if debates during Lincoln’s time or Nixon’s time were similarly contentious, because I didn’t live through those times, even if I read about them, I can’t feel the emotions of the constituents driving that division. I can understand them intellectually, but I can only speculate on the passions felt by both sides.

But boy do I feel the emotions now, and this particular week was a doozy. I am, of course, referring to the recording of Donald Trump bragging to Billy Bush about moving on a married woman “like a bitch”, and his ability as a famous person to kiss women, “…do anything…” and “…grab them by the pussy.” I have no desire at all to talk about this from any political perspective whatsoever. Trump supporters continue to stand by their man, and nothing I say will convince them otherwise, just as nothing they say will stop me from voting for Hillary.
I want to talk about it within the context of my life: within the context of how I have been taught, from the day I was born, to today and likely to the day I die, that my body is not truly my own - that while I must constantly defend it from being violated, I cannot be trusted to care for it the way I wish, nor can I be trusted with the power of my own sexuality. So when people say “they are just words” I beg to differ.

The following are 5 memories I have from my childhood:

1. When I was in first grade (around 7 years old), there was an older boy who would come to the playground from time to time and gather some of us girls together to tell us jokes and stories. I remember he had blond hair, and think his name was Michael, but I’m not sure. He would have us take turns sitting on his lap as he told us the stories and jokes. While I don’t remember any of the jokes or stories, I do recall that some of his jokes were “naughty.” I remember this because I went home one night and nervously told my mom one of the jokes. She immediately asked me who had told me the joke, and I told her my friend Michael had. She asked me who Michael was, and I explained he was the older boy who came to hang out with us on the playground. She told me never to talk to Michael again, and that she was going to go to the school the next day to talk to the teachers about Michael. I remember getting very upset and crying. I liked Michael – he made me feel special and told funny stories. I knew the other girls liked him too, and was worried they would hate me if I made Michael go away. Needless to say, my mother went to the school, and I never saw Michael again.
 
2.  In third grade (age 9), I was on the playground when a male student decided it would be fun to chase and kiss girls. He had been doing it for a few days – picking a girl at random, chasing her, catching her, and kissing her. One day, I became his target, and there was no way I was going to become a victim of this “kissing bandit”, as he liked to call himself. So, as he began to chase me, I began screaming, “No, no no, I don’t WANT you to kiss me!” I eventually ran to the recess monitors and told them that the boy was chasing me and trying to kiss me, and that I didn’t want him to do it. They just smiled at one another, and then back at me, and told me he was just “horsing around.” “But he’s trying to KISS me!” I repeated, thinking perhaps they had not heard me. They just giggled and dismissed me. I saw that he was running toward me again, so knowing they weren’t going to stop it, I took flight again. I was able to elude him by zigging and zagging, but he was much taller than me, and he eventually gained ground. At one point, he came up behind me and tried to grab my shirt to stop me from running away, but he ended up stepping on the back of my right shoe, causing it to come off, and him to trip over it. As he fell to the ground, I doubled-back to pick up my shoe and kept running, but he got up; gained on me again, and eventually grabbed me and stopped me from running. As I screamed and kicked and squirmed, he managed to grab my face and twist it and place a wet, sloppy kiss on my cheek to the left of my mouth. Finally getting his victory spoils, he let me go, which is when I started beating him with my shoe and screaming, “I! TOLD! YOU! NOT! TO! KISS! ME!!!!” with each exclamation point representing a hit from my shoe. It was at that moment, that the recess monitors sprung into action; grabbed me by the arm, and started screaming at me. “We do NOT hit fellow students, young lady!” “But he chased me, grabbed me and KISSED me!” I screamed back. “That is NOT our concern! Young ladies do not hit their fellow students!” And they dragged me off the playground and made me sit out the rest of the recess against the wall of the school until it was time to go back inside for class.
 
3. In fifth grade (ages 10-11), I became the “teacher’s pet” – literally. Whenever my teacher wanted to reference something in one of our text books, he would casually walk over to my desk, and turn the pages of my book, while lightly running his pinky and ring finger across my breasts. If I tried to slink down in my seat to avoid his hand, he yelled at me in front of the class to sit up straight. I was horrified, but tried to act like nothing was happening because I didn’t want anyone else to notice.
 
4. In the summer leading up to sixth grade (age 12), while in a bathing suit in my backyard, a male relative, while looking me in the eye, said loudly to my mother, “Looks like somebody is developing hair under her arms and little breasts! Our little Jennifer isn’t so little any more, is she?”
 
5. In sixth grade (age 12), while playing basketball in the street with my friend near her house, some high school boys, who were drunk, decided they were going to join our game. The apparent leader of the group took a swig of his beer, put it down on the curb, and slurred, “I wanna play some basketball!" I immediately felt uncomfortable and scared, but took inventory of the fact that my friend’s mother wasn’t home, and there were no cars in the driveways of the immediately surrounding houses, so outside seemed safer than inside. I didn’t want to run away, because that would leave my friend alone with these guys, so I decided the best strategy would be to play a tough game of basketball. I somehow felt that if I didn’t give in to the fear I was feeling, they might eventually go away. As I played, I remember running hard and throwing an elbow toward the group leader to grab a rebound shot, and him saying, “Oh, I like this one… she’s feisty!” while leering at me. Soon thereafter, one of the other guys said, "Come on man, let's go… let’s leave them alone." After a mild protest from “the leader”, they eventually all walked off.
 
In only one of these six stories was I actually touched inappropriately (story 3). In story 2, I was taught that “boys will be boys”, and even if I didn’t like their behavior, I had no right to fight back. In story 4, I was taught to feel shame and embarrassment of my body. In story 5, I was intimidated; shown I was not in control of the situation I was in, so I better be on my guard or something bad was going to happen to me.  The lesson from story 1, that sometimes people make you feel special and comfortable so they can eventually take advantage of you was one learned in retrospect; not at the time.
 
These seemingly innocuous stories are hardly the complete catalog of things that have happened to me in my life. There were inappropriate comments from other male teachers – one particularly large teacher who pinned me against the wall when I was alone in the hallway, told me he felt sick, but then said, “love sick;”moved in to kiss me, and laughed menacingly as I ducked under his arm and ran away. I’ve had my breasts and my ass grabbed at concerts and when walking down the street. I’ve had a guy thrust his hard dick between my ass cheeks on a crowded subway every time the subway car lurched or turned. I’ve had men “move on [me] like a bitch”; relentlessly hitting on me in bars and clubs, sometimes physically not allowing me to move from a space even as I told them whatever I could to get them to go away. We all learn as women that “No thank you; I’m not interested” doesn’t work, so we say “I have a boyfriend” or “I have a girlfriend” or “I’m married” or “I have a kid”… anything to make them leave us alone. I’ve had to have security escort me to my car because I was being stalked and threatened by a drunk guy in a club who wouldn’t take no for an answer. 
 
These are just some of the things that have happened to me in my life, and these events do not exist in a vacuum. While I can sit and list and catalog every time I have been felt up or made to feel unsafe and uncomfortable, this doesn’t even take into account every female character that has been raped, beaten and/or murdered on the soap operas I may have watched, or in the books I’ve read, or the history I’ve learned or the news I’ve watched or the episodes of Law and Order or ER or CSI or whatever popular police show or medical drama is currently streaming. The stories that show us over and over again that it will happen to us; that we will be blamed for it; that we will relive that rape again in court; and that even if we are somehow lucky enough to prove that he did it, he will be let off with a light sentence because he’s an upstanding man or boy in the community with no priors. Hell, we don’t even have to watch TV anymore for that; we just have to read about Brock Turner on Facebook. And Brock Turner is hardly the first privileged white boy to get off with a slap on the wrist. Those stories on Law and Order don’t just come from writer’s imaginations: they are ripped straight from the headlines...decades of headlines.
 
It doesn’t take into account the stories I’ve heard from my sisters and my friends and that they heard from their mothers and their sisters and their friends.
 
It doesn’t take into account the images I have seen all my life on magazine covers and on TV that tell me I have to be thin, and pretty, and sexy and learn to “please my man”, while somehow also keeping my knees shut and saving it for my husband. That I absolutely must become a mother, because that’s what makes me a real woman, and not only must I become a mother, but I must be the best mother, and be all things to my children, but still have the energy to work out and look good for my husband.
 
And if I can’t do all of that and work at my job, and not collapse, then doesn’t that just mean that women “can’t have it all”, so shouldn’t we just shut up and go back home, as if that were even a viable economic possibility for most middle class families today anyway?
 
And when I think about all of the things that have happened to me in my life, and as I share some of them with you, you know what I think to myself? I was lucky. I was lucky because I spent most of my college years drunk and passed out and no one ever raped me, so I’m lucky; like I somehow won the “no-rape lottery” or was magically awarded a “get out of college without a sexual assault free card”. I know that other women’s stories are far worse than mine. Some of you might even be reading this and thinking, “That’s it? That’s all that happened to you?”

But the problem with that attitude is that when we minimize what happens to us, we simultaneously normalize the behavior. When I say to myself, “Sure my fifth grade teacher touched my breasts, but it’s not like he stuck his hands down my pants or penetrated me”, I have now made my fifth grade teacher touching my breasts a comparatively acceptable behavior. It should not be considered acceptable under any circumstances, but I have made it so by minimizing it.
 
And along the lines of normalizing behaviors consider this: if I have been taught as a woman that it is my fault that something happened to me because of what I drank or the situation I put myself in or for what I wore, the equal and opposite lesson being taught to boys is that your behavior doesn’t matter. That whatever you do is expected because it’s not your job to listen to or respect women and their bodies: it’s your job to get them to spread their legs. It’s their job to keep them closed, and no matter what you do; at most; you will get a slap on the wrist, so don’t worry about it.
 
So within that context, there is no doubt in my mind that when Donald Trump stood before the American public and said he did not boast about sexually assaulting women – that it was just “locker room talk,” he meant it, and he thought he was telling the truth, because if I have been raised in a world that tells me over and over again that anything that has ever happened to me is somehow my fault; the flipside of that point of view is that he has been taught it’s not his fault. When you add money and power to that mix, it becomes not just expected behavior, but his right; one of the “perks” of wealth.
 
There is yet other dynamic at work here that I haven’t even touched upon, and that is our collective misconception, as a nation, of what a sexual predator actually looks like. Even after decades of research and experience and statements from law enforcement that proves, undoubtedly, that women are most often attacked by someone they know, we love to perpetuate the image of a rapist or sexual predator as the sweaty, wild-eyed stranger lurking in the shadows trying to lure children into his van with candy or jumping out at women from behind bushes or from dark corners or parking garages. He isn’t our 5th grade teacher or our brother or father or uncle or step-father or cousin or boyfriend or husband or favorite TV personality from the ‘80’s, and he sure as hell isn’t the rich maverick running for President of the United States. This is not to say that “stranger danger” doesn’t exist or that women are never attacked by unknown predators lurking in the bushes – that absolutely does happen. But statistically speaking, the vast majority of victims already know their assailant, and we don’t like to think about that because that is terrifying.  So we don’t think about it, and we minimize our experiences, and we don’t say anything, so it keeps on happening and nothing changes.
 
I never said anything about my 5th grade teacher, and I’m sure if I had, there would be 100 or more former students who could say, “He never did that to me!”  They might even write letters on his behalf detailing how great he was to them. But does that mean I’m lying? If I found out tomorrow that my 5th grade teacher was still teaching and currently accused of sexual misconduct, would me coming forward 30 years later make my story less true?  No it would not.
 
And for all of the people who still want to say none of this matters – that we are all overreacting and that there are more important issues to deal with, I say yes: ISIS is a huge problem; the destabilization of the world needs to be addressed; the wealth gap and our economy need to be fixed, but sexual assault and the basic gender discrimination at the core of these tapes have surfaced again and again over the past several months and years and decades and are important domestic issues that also, finally need to be addressed. Part of being a public servant and especially of being President is having the ability to address and offer up solutions and strategies to combat all of these multiple issues at the same time.
 
I live and work in New York City. I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11. I am keenly aware; especially when I am in the subway, that something like that can happen again. I am a bit more diligent these days of taking stock of my surroundings, lest some nut job with a knife or sword starts stabbing and slashing at random. But I am now, and have always been, far more aware of the footsteps behind me when I’m walking down the street; and I’m aware of the cut of my dress or suit when I go to work; and I’m aware of who is in the laundry room when I’m doing laundry, and I still leave one earbud out when I’m walking alone, and I still turn my head in all directions when I’m getting groceries or walking my dogs, and I’m not looking for Isis. I can tell you that much.
 
THIS is why words matter. This is why people are up in arms over what has transpired this week. Because it isn’t just some words that surfaced from a tape in 2005: it is our lives.  It is our culture. It is every moment we have lived as a gender being paraded before us as political fodder, and we are pissed.