Sexual assault is excused as normal and forgivable. It’s not. Ask the women who’ve experienced it.
I have a story. So many women do. Mine took place when I was 6 or 7 years old, I think. I wasn’t raped. People seem to always want to parse the details, so I’ll be clear about that. Two older boys, sons of friends of my parents, coerced me into letting them touch my genitals with theirs. They said they would give me money if I let them. When I balked, they called me chicken.
What’s disturbing is that it happened, and then I forgot it happened until I was 23 years old and remembered. I was living in New York at the time, lying on my bed, and the memory came into my mind, unbidden. I wish it had stayed away, because now I remember it all the time and don’t want to.
Some people will dismiss my story with one word: “Kids.” Others will say that I wasn’t violently assaulted, so no harm was done. And still others will question the reliability of a memory that left me for about 17 years and then came back and settled in, leaving a permanent scar on my peace of mind.
There are so many other stories, though. A girl I knew — I need to keep it vague — was raped by her boyfriend. She was 16, I think, and I was 15. She told me afterward that she told him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop. She said, “Theresa, it felt like he was raping me.” And here’s my failing. I didn’t know what to say. I thought strangers in dark alleys raped women, not men whom women actually knew.
Then there was my friend in college, who called out a guy in our dorm who was drunk and being loud. He responded by calling her a bitch and spraying her in the face with a fire extinguisher. She called the campus police and I watched as over the following few days the entire dorm turned against her. People said he was a good guy; he just got ugly when he drank.
And when I later argued that my friend’s assailant should be removed as a peer counselor since he had an obvious tendency toward violence, the student director of the program said nothing while studiously cleaning his fingernails.
Then there was the winter night when, as I rode my bike home from the hospital after a 12-hour nursing shift, a man standing by the curb exposed himself to me. It was dark out and cold, making the experience surreal. I wondered if it really happened, but I knew it did.
This is the world that women live in. A world where some men think it is O.K. to humiliate women, threaten women, assault women. A world where apologists for these men blame the women themselves for any sexual harms that befall them, and where the behavior of such men is even excused as normal. Except it isn’t normal.
How in the world would two boys, around 10 years old, get the idea to ensnare an even younger girl into a forced mock-up of prostitution? Who, when a woman says to stop during sex, instead hears “go?” What kind of person uses a fire extinguisher to silence another human being? Why would a man, on a cold winter’s night, display his penis to a tired nurse just wanting to get home?
The world will parse our different experiences into categories: Was it harassment or assault? Was the perpetrator in his teens? Was it a long time ago? Did she report it right away? None of this changes the impact of what happened to us — or what it says about the men involved.
And now I come to Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court hopeful. Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist, has accused him of attempting to rape her when they were teenagers. He has also been accused by a Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, of forcing his penis into her face when they were in college and both very drunk. He has denied both allegations. Some of Kavanaugh’s defenders deflect these accusations by insisting that he is a decent man.
But that is my point — decent men do not behave this way.
In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar turns the public against Brutus, leader of the cabal that murdered Caesar, by repeating “Brutus is an honorable man.” Antony juxtaposes that phrase with muted praise of Caesar, until the meaning of the phrase slowly changes from descriptive to ironic, revealing in the end that Brutus, and the murder of Caesar, were both dishonorable.
If, despite Ms. Blasey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed, I hope someone in the Senate will use the word “decency” similarly, in a way that makes plain what he or she believes a man can do to a woman without damaging his reputation: “Brett Kavanaugh may have held down a 15-year-old girl and made her fear she was going to die, but Brett Kavanaugh is a decent man. Brett Kavanaugh may have humiliated a woman by forcing his penis into her face, but Brett Kavanaugh is a decent man.”
Because “the evil that men do lives after them,” and I have twin daughters. I don’t want them to have any stories. I don’t want them to have any stories like these at all.
• Theresa Brown, a hospice nurse, is the author of “The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives.”
New York Times
