You Don’t Get to Touch Me Like That
No relationship, including a familial one, gives you the right to assume I want to be touched in all the ways you might want to touch me.
Uncle Luke just picked me up. I went in for a polite hug, having not seen him for a few months, and instead of following my lead, he wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me high off the ground. It didn’t stop there, either. He began to thrash his body back and forth, me pressed into him so tightly I could barely breathe, so that my legs flailed helplessly and ridiculously beneath me.
I became uncomfortably aware that I was not wearing a bra. I fought him, struggling with all of my contemporary dancer strength to reach a toe down and make contact with the floor. But I was too high up, and he was too strong for me to escape gracefully, without making a big scene in front of the several family members that stood watching and smiling. My only option was to wait until he decided to relinquish me.
In case you were wondering, I am not a precocious toddler writing personal essays between naps and color-by-numbers. I am a twenty-two year old woman. I am an adult. I would like to explore why, beyond the obvious visceral ick factor, this incident upsets and unnerves me so much. I think it comes down to three major issues.
1. Consent, Bodily Autonomy, and Boundaries
I am, generally, very physically affectionate. With friends, partners, and family members I feel genuinely close to, I am more than okay with hugs, kisses, cuddles, and even being picked up. Because I am a fairly petite person, it is not uncommon for people to scoop me up and spin me around sometimes, or to invite me to sit on their laps.
The difference is that all of this physical contact is consensual.
People I trust tend to confirm that I am okay with whatever the contact it is. Sometimes this confirmation is verbal — can I kiss your cheek? wanna link arms while we walk? I need a hug, can you? — and sometimes it is nonverbal. But it is always clear.
There is a difference between opening your arms and offering a hug and just grabbing me. There is a difference between a hand that pats my shoulder or upper back and one that lingers on my waist.
And there is also a difference in the kind of relationship we’re talking about here.
A friend I see often, who is my own age, and with whom I share an intimate bond, choosing to playfully lift me off the ground because they are happy to see me, or because they’ve been lifting a lot at the gym and want to show their strength, dude! or just for the fun of it, is one thing.
An uncle who I see at most twice a year, who is a fifty-five year old man with whom I have nothing in common but some DNA, lifting me off the ground after receiving no indication that that is something I would want is quite another. I did not consent to this level of physical intimacy with this particular person. And it’s very uncomfortable.
Uncle Luke is a fundamentally decent person, and not a predator or a creep as far as I know, but that doesn’t change the fact that this behavior is unacceptable. Consent is important in all contexts, not only sexual and romantic ones. No relationship, including a familial one, gives you the right to assume I want to be touched in all the ways you might want to touch me.
2. Gender
Uncle Luke does not lift my brother up off the ground and dangle him helplessly in the air while the rest of our family watches. Nor does he do this to any of my male cousins, even those younger than me. He shakes their hands, or claps them on the back. This could be, perhaps, because the boys are heavier, and Uncle Luke physically cannot pick them up and throw them around like he can me.
But does that make it okay? The fact that I am a woman does not give him a right to my body. And the fact that he is an adult man changes things.
It is not a coincidence that most of my friends are women or AFAB nonbinary folks who are close to me in age. This, in general, is the demographic I feel the safest with and tend to form the strongest bonds with. Because of the world we live in — where I cannot walk down the street without being harassed and followed, where the majority of women who are murdered are murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, or family members, where my friends never go on dates with men without sharing their location with me, where 81% of American women have been sexually assaulted at least once in their life — I have a very understandable fear of adult men and their ability to physically dominate me.* I am strong for my size, but I am still no match for a grown man over six feet tall. If it came down to it, Uncle Luke could really hurt me. And his lack of awareness of this fact is disturbing. He has a daughter. He should know better.
3. Infantilization
I am the youngest of my siblings and one of the younger members of my very large extended family. It is clear that Uncle Luke still thinks of me as the baby, as a kid. A certain amount of this treatment is perfectly acceptable and to be expected in a big family; we all revert to certain roles when we are together. Calling me by a nickname, or offering to finish pieces of food on my plate for me, or not being able to believe that I’ve already graduated from university…these minorly infantilizing things, while perhaps exasperating, are harmless. Violating my physical boundaries is not.
Uncle Luke does not realize that not only am I no longer a scrawny little kid he can toss into the pool, but I am also a real, breathing, adult woman, who experiences all the complexity that comes with that. Our family does not exist in a vacuum. This, too, is a part of society. I am not just his niece, his sister’s youngest child. I am my own person. I am small, but I am grown. I am a woman, and if he would not treat a woman who is not related to him like this, if he would feel awkward touching a stranger or a neighbor or a friend’s daughter the way he touches me — why is this any different?
The fact that we are family does not give him a right to my body, and nor does it erase the societal factors at play here. The fact that he is a blood relative does not cancel out the fact that I feel uncomfortable and unsafe around him. Because he is my elder, I may owe him a level of respect, but I don’t owe him my body or my autonomy.
I know that I am not the only young woman who feels this way around certain members of her family.
Sure, it could be worse, sure, I personally have faced much worse at the hands of men, but this is yet another example of the way the patriarchy constantly erodes at my power. This is yet another instance in which I am forced to put niceness and politeness and social mores over my own comfort and safety, yet another way the world tells me my boundaries simply do not matter as much as men’s desires do.
This shit adds up over time, and I’m done being silent about it.
Perhaps the very fact that I feel the need to downplay and contextualize and explain away my discomfort, to say that Uncle Luke is a good person after all, to say that I’ve experienced worse things in my life, is yet another way that my conditioned feminine politeness and submissiveness and instinct for conflict avoidance and self-preservation comes through. Why do I even have to qualify my experiences at all?
This thing happens every time I see this man, and it makes my skin crawl, and that is bad enough. It doesn’t matter who he is to me or that the squeezing and lifting and dangling does eventually end. This thing happens every time I see this man, and it makes my skin crawl, and that is bad enough.
When I spoke to my mother about Uncle Luke, she said he is “just an awkward person.” I thought to myself: when I have daughters, my brother will not behave this way. If he does anything that makes them feel even slightly uncomfortable, I will kick him out of my house.
Girls face enough bullshit from the outside world, and I will fight tooth and nail for my daughters’ safety. I will teach them that they don’t owe their bodies to anyone, that their comfort matters more than their manners, that their words are important, and that no one, including family, has the right to make them feel violated.
A few hours after Uncle Luke picked me up, the family was gathered on the porch, finishing dinner and sipping beer. My cousin had let her new puppy out from his crate to be with us, and he was happily sniffing around, wagging his tail and nipping playfully at ankles (he is teething).
Uncle Luke grabbed the puppy by the scruff of his neck and forced his head down into the floor. He held him there while the puppy whined and barked and kicked in protest. I thought: that is not your dog. This is not your place. The rest of the family looked on, uncomfortable but silent. Uncle Luke did not stop. He crouched on the floor and kept both his large hands on the puppy’s small, fluffy, helpless body, forcing him to stay down, to submit. Uncle Luke kept repeating “You’re not being hurt. You’re not being hurt.”
The puppy whined louder than ever, squealing pitifully and trying to wriggle himself free. Uncle Luke chanted “You’re not being hurt. You’re not being hurt. You’re not being hurt.”
What do I do when a man in my own family makes me feel just as viscerally unsafe as a stranger following me back to my apartment in Bed-Stuy at 2am? What do I do in the face of a culture designed to keep me feeling helpless and embarrassed and trapped? Fighting back in the moment is not always a safe or practical option.
But maybe writing this essay is the first step. Maybe this is my way of raising my voice and saying as clearly as I can:
I am being hurt. I am being hurt. I am being hurt.
