Funny Story (Not Really)
So funny story. I hear people tell me that I’m excessively paranoid a lot of the time–mostly guys, but the reason I’m making this post is because of a conversation I recently had with a woman who’s been friends with my dad a long time. I love my dad a lot and he’s mostly pretty on top of his shit (he’s also going to therapy to get more on top of his shit, so PROPS for that, Dad), and this woman (we’ll call her Janie) is nice enough. She has a daughter who’s just starting high school and a son who’ll be in college next year. I was talking with her about my college experience and she asked if I went to parties and stuff. I don’t. At all. I told her as much and she asked me why, and I said because I’m busy, because I’m an introvert, because of any of a number of reasons, and I finished the list by admitting that I don’t trust a lot of the guys on my campus.
She asked why.
I hemmed and hawwed and said ‘uh’ a lot, and then I told her that my campus of four hundred people had five sexual assault cases last semester alone. My freshman year there were at least two people outright expelled for it.
Janie, mother of a teenaged boy about to go into college and a teenaged girl just going into high school and already growing up into a stunner, wrote it off by saying “well, most of them must have been misconceptions; you know, it’s easy to miscommunicate when romance is involved; I’m sure there were a lot of overreactions and morning-after regrets.” I stared at her for a moment and went “Actually, one of the reports last semester was mine, and I know two of the other people who filed them. It’s usually pretty obvious when someone’s trying to force the point.” I gave her a summary of what happened to me (look, it’s a long story, some dude came over to watch a movie with my roommate and me and the day ended with him pinning me to the floor while I jammed my thumb into his throat and my roommate helped pull him off) and she kept at it, talking about how I had probably just given him mixed signals, how people probably didn’t listen when I told them not to touch me because I go from zero to sixty real quick (if I say ‘stop touching me’ and you don’t, my next statement will be ‘stop touching me or I’ll break your finger,’ and I expect people to thereafter stop touching me).
And all I could think was “My god, you’re raising a daughter, I’m so scared for her right now.”
I’ve become aware of late that I’m a statistical outlier, whether it’s from poor luck or because I attract a certain kind of trouble or because I act a certain way. Most girls don’t have five (six depending on how you reckon it) assaults committed against them by their eighteenth birthday. I hope to God that Janie’s daughter is as lucky as Janie evidently has been, that she’ll never know how terrifying it is to know that the person holding your down is twice your size, or that if you scream for help no one will believe you (fun fact, no one except my parents believed me four times out of five). I hope that she never asks herself “do I grab my roommate’s switchblade and go outside and check on that freshman sitting outside in the dark, or do I go get an RD because that’s a very tall young man.” I hope she lives a safe enough life that she never finds herself sitting there in the aftermath of violence, whether it’s just an unwelcome hand groping her thigh or something much worse, and wonders to herself who the hell will believe me.
But most of all, I hope that, in the event she’s ever in the position I’ve been in, or worse, her mother doesn’t fucking tell her she’s overreacting and making shit up.
JESUS SHIT, WOMAN.
