Out From Under A Rock
I’ve been living under a rock.
My parents, while exceptionally nurturing in most ways, completely omitted educating their only daughter about body safety.
The Girl Scouts, as I recall, was the source of a really fun self defense class.
That pretty much covers what I entered the world as an 18 yr old female adult knowing about protecting my body from harm.
My inflated sense of safety worked out for me, though.
And it has served as a shield from the truth as a result.
Facts:
1) In my young adult years, my girlfriends demanded that we intentionally walk home together after being out late. I reluctantly agreed, but thought them dramatic.
2) I foolishly blacked out once at a frat house in college. My punishment: I woke up - stinky and embarrassed but physically untouched - on a bean bag chair and the guys who politely bid me good morning led me to one of their dressers, atop it a tidy pile of my jewelry (which I apparently had belligerently demanded be taken off before I passed out). I thanked them for their inconvenience of having housed me for 6 hours and skipped back to my dorm.
P.S. I shared a Cross Country team with most of the boys belonging to that fraternity and they were honorable dudes, fiercely protective of the girl athletes on the team. I had no idea there would’ve been any other way to black-out-then-pass-out in a college frat house.
3) My first apartment in an urban environment was a 1 BR dwelling in the basement of a tall brick building in Cleveland, Ohio. When my girlfriends came to visit for the first time and immediately saw the bars observable from the outside of the apartment windows at street level, one said, “Sometimes I think that girl trusts God too much.” I ran after dark and often left my car doors unlocked.
4) I left for Africa in my mid 20s with an organization called the Peace Corps and there for the first time noticed men’s eyes on me. Part of our Peace Corps training us American women volunteers how to stay safe. My heightened awareness of physical vulnerability as a woman while in Africa felt foreign. At this point, I still could avoid coming to terms with my naivety of the 25 years of my American experience, since I could frame this new feeling of danger as a product of the country I was in. Thank God the US is so safe, I remember thinking.
5) Back in America, I entered into a profession dominated by women and wondered what all the fuss was about the glass ceiling. My male counterparts got paid exactly what I got paid and minded their manners just fine.
6) When Scott and I began making babies, our first several were boys. I remember friends who'd had baby girls would say, "You guys are lucky. With a boy, you only have to worry about one penis. With girls, we have to worry about a bunch of them." I remember my main reaction was a sympathetic chuckle. But my second reaction at the time was inner: "Why we gotta go and make girls all different from boys? Girls get to decide just the same as boys do about sex. It's sorta sexist to suggest otherwise, don't ya think?" I am both happy and sad about my reaction then: Happy that my experience with my body had been so positive and so sexually safe that I had the luxury of assuming girls always get to choose. I am sad about my reaction then, because it misguidedly and ironically waved an inner flag of feminism absent from knowledge i did not have then: for all women, sexual choice is not guaranteed.
7) When, a year ago, women around our globe began communicating that they, too, had survived either sexual assault or unwanted sexual attention, I was not able to say Me Too. It took multiple conversations with women I love to conclude that my story was completely unique and wildly lucky.
8) Add to all of this an inner understanding from a very young age that my body is fantastic and strong and healthy and lovely and useful and mine - that it is to be used how I want it to be used and to that end my relationship with it has always been equal parts Boss and Friend, empowered and loving, protective and appreciative, in charge and without shame.
Now that you have the facts, you can plainly see how my inflated sense of safety has been reinforced at every juncture of my life. You can also conclude how, as a result, I’ve been shielded from the truth.
Because the facts of my personal story don't add up to the truth.
Here’s the truth:
We live in a culture where my story is more fairy-tale-fantastical than on-the-ground-believable.
This makes me all at once a terrible candidate and an incredible candidate to discuss the detestable things that happen to women every day in this country. Why terrible? It is a position of no authority or first handed ness. Why incredible? Because my chips have never been down, and I’m still mad as hell.
I feel like a child, stomping through life without knowing what I don't know in relationship to conversations about sexism, feminism, women's rights, glass ceilings, sexual misconduct, sexual violence, gender stereotyping, and the like. I liken my blindness and naive downplay of these things to being white and not thinking racism is all that bad. A child-like approach.
But I sure as hell won't let the fact that I've been behaving like a kid stop me from growing up.
A mad adult has more sophisticated, tactical strategies for channeling her anger.
We don't tantrum; we act.
