Be Quiet and Accept the Compliment
Entitlement is such a funny damn thing
I was nine when I started puberty, and from the beginning it was less a gentle blossoming into adulthood than series of car wrecks slamming into me. I had been prepared for a gradual series of far more pastel color changes. Nothing I had ever been told prepared me for the blood and the terrifying loss of control I felt.
That same summer, wearing a tank top and shorts to the grocery store, my mom noticed a high school aged stocker staring down my shirt, and told him, “She’s still in elementary school.” The funny thing is, I don’t really remember this encounter. I was nine, three tumultuous years of middle school away from realizing I didn’t even like boys, and sex was an abstract concept that had nothing to do with me.
(I have wondered, but never asked, what she would have said if I had been twelve or sixteen or if it happened now at twenty-four. Was it my youth that made it unacceptable? Would it be something to giggle about now — look at that little boy undressing you with his eyes?)
Except that suddenly it did. Sitting down and thinking about the times I’ve been harassed and trying to create some coherent narrative of them has made me realize what a fucking constant that unwanted attention has been.
By sixth grade I was wearing a C cup, and the disconnect I felt from my body was so tangible that I stared at myself in the mirror for hours trying to find some familiarity with the reflection I saw. I wore two sports bras to try and force my form into some closer imitation of what my friends still had and ended up with aching, often bruised ribs as a result.
That spring, I was sitting bent over a book in science class pretending to read as I tried not to fall asleep. It was a soporifically hot day, sweaty and close enough to the end of the year that we could all taste it.
The table of boys behind me were laughing to themselves and I was ignoring them, as I usually did. Until one of them whispered, “I bet she turns out to be a dirty slut,” and the rest of them broke out into giggles that felt like thousands of little hands pulling at my skin.
You see, my shirt had ridden up during the day, and my lower back was exposed.
The teacher heard them, told them to knock it off. Then he kneel down beside me and said, with a pitying kindness that makes my stomach turn whenever I see it echoed today, “Just remember to keep yourself covered up, hon. They shouldn’t have teased, but do you understand why they got the idea?”
In tenth grade, I stumbled my way out of the closet. I bounced back and forth between being defiant and being apologetic. A senior classmate saddled me with the nickname ‘captain carpet muncher,’ and I did laugh along with everyone else, though it really made my skin crawl.
If I was still generously curved, I was at least no longer boundlessly more developed than my classmates. But I had cut my hair short and filled my ears with piercings trying to piece together a semblance of the New York/San Francisco communities I had seen in my Western suburb. There was a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) at my high school, but it had never had an openly queer member and so I never went.
I wondered then — and I still wonder now — what the hell a roomful of straight girls had to say about gay boys for two and half hours every Wednesday during the GSA meetings. It only occurred to me later to wonder why in their conception of sexuality there weren’t any gay girls, and why the thought of something so wondrous and strange made them flinch away.
In my attempt to try and think of one defining moment from high school, I realized that harassment was a low-level constant for those entire four years.
To many, I wasn’t a person, I was The Gay Girl and that implied a right to exploration regardless of what I wanted. Classmates touched my short hair. My ass. My breasts. It felt like I was being molded and shaped by the demanding hands of people I didn’t want touching me. Male teachers watched me at the water fountain, then said my shirt was inappropriate and I needed to put on a sweater. An administrator told me my sundress — the same worn by at least two other girls — was distracting and not to be worn again.
The hardest was not being punished for anything I did. But for how others reacted to me.
The thing about college, is that by the time I landed in New York I was so used to it all that I don’t have many memories that immediately spring up as moments of harassment. I didn’t think of them that way. It was part of the regular bullshit.
Ignore that professor, he’s a perv. Just stay away from the guys from that frat, they get drunk and handsy and it’s a pain in the ass. Constant violation of personal space, boundaries, and common fucking decency to other human beings became, for us, no different than the cafeteria not having the muffin you want or the printers in the computer lab being down.
I think that we couldn’t have felt the revulsion we were damn-well entitled to, because it would have meant spending our lives with our skin trying to crawl off our bodies.
And besides, it was innocent after all. The teacher is just a flirt, the frat boys are just drunk. I remember a friend saying, “I mean, it is what it is. What are we supposed to do about it? Bitch and moan?”
Defining and naming harassment has much the same problem as defining and naming rape. Far too often — in fact, I would say most of the time — the only kind of legitimate rape that really counts is attack from a stranger wherein you make sure you’re screaming no and that you were dressed with appropriate conservatism. Wearing a short skirt is asking for it. Being drunk at a party is failing to take care of yourself. Pressure to do something you don’t want is stupidly not standing up for yourself like an adult.
After all, you can’t hold people responsible for their own actions, or expect them to have any awareness or consideration of how the person they want to fuck feels. And so it’s only under those strict conditions that we are allowed to call it rape and place only a minimal onus of responsibility on ourselves for not somehow finding a way to prevent it.
The only kind of legitimate harassment that really counts is being graphically told how much he wants to fuck you. Endless comments on how you look good enough to eat or how well a shirt shows off your cleavage are just innocent compliments. Hugs that last too long simply mean that you have a standoffish streak and need to be nicer. Standing too close is a personal preference thing. He doesn't mean anything by it.
I’m twenty-four now, and just started a new job a month ago. While shopping for clothes, I sent a picture of a top to a friend and asked her opinion. She texted back, cute but you totally know people are gonna be looking down it any time you lean forward.
And the thing is? I bet she’s right.
