Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

by Donna Freitas

As the days marched forward, the questions of how I’d gotten to this place, and whose fault it was, plagued me. Whose responsibility was it, really? Mine? His? The answer was so hard to parse out, but parse it out I did, and then I did again. I allowed the article in my house. (Consent?) I placed it on the coffee table. (Also consent. Right?) I answered the phone when he called, pleading with me. (Consent, technically. But there was no caller ID back then, so maybe not?) I made him promises that I would read. (Is there consent when there is also cringing? When he is begging?) But I also resisted touching that yellow envelope. (I did not want to consent to it.) I didn’t open it for nearly a month. (This was a silent no. But do silent nos count?) I scowled when I looked at it. (A bodily gesture of resistance. But then, it wasn’t like he was in the room and could see me scowling. Thank God.) I did my best to ignore its presence, its persistence, I didn’t move it, didn’t touch it, not at first. (Does the absence of a response imply a yes?)

it was like everything else that he did, which was also sneaky and convoluted and just indirect enough to leave me doubtful, to make me question my instincts, my judgment, my intuition, that something was deeply wrong with his behavior toward me. His movements were always just shy of obviously inappropriate, they were always potentially completely innocent; acts that could be interpreted as overtures of something romantic, yet that also could be misinterpreted as such. There was always room for doubt with him, and this was part of his talent as a stalker of me.

I am not supposed to be telling you any of this. In exchange for my graduate school eventually making the harassment from my mentor stop, and a very small sum of money, I agreed to pretend that none of what I am about to tell you ever happened. I agreed to absolve my university of all wrongdoing. I agreed to be silent forever. At the time I didn’t care what I had to do or sign.

But what they wanted was my voice. So I gave it to them. I cut out my tongue in the university’s office of human resources and offered it to the woman whose job it was to take it. I mutilated myself right there, in the middle of the day, in front of her administrative assistant. I didn’t even notice the blood.

Women’s tongues are dangerous when they let us keep them. Institutions, workplaces, companies have long known this, which is why they take them from us, why they require that we forfeit them, why they’ll pay us so much for them, these blood diamonds mined from our bodies. It’s good to see that women are breaking into these locked-away places and taking our tongues back. I am still getting used to mine again. It is thick and strange in my mouth.

How does one become graceful, exactly, when speaking about the ugliest parts of her history? The parts that stir the most shame and blame, the confessions capable of stopping a conversation in its tracks and rendering the other person speechless?

We live in a culture where the harassment and assault of women and girls take place so regularly, so commonly, so consistently, that we need to take stock of the splitting of the person that occurs during acts of trauma. Of the ways that women must learn to become good actresses and excellent liars so they can endure and live as though nothing terrible has happened to them. Of the personal and professional cost of having to live with two brains, be of two minds, of the secrets a person’s own body can keep from her for years, of the ongoing feeling that somehow she is the one who failed and the damage this does to her sense of self, of her ability to perceive what is true and what is false about who she is and who she is not. We have made consent out to be something straightforward, as straightforward as the single word no, but we are lying to ourselves and one another about this. If stopping someone’s behavior were as magical as uttering a two-letter word, then my professor’s behavior would never have gone on as long as it did. The word no meant nothing in my case. I paid dearly for this. I am still paying for it. I am not saying that all I have come to do, to achieve, to accomplish since those years in my twenties has been a lie, or even a performance. I am not saying that the confident, successful woman that I am in so many regards isn’t real. She is, I am, real. The lie would be to contend that the other woman I’ve been, that I am still, no longer exists. The lie would ...

This is something I think we know but are too afraid or are too ashamed to admit.

Consent is such a tricky, slippery thing, one that can be there one minute and gone the next, that can be murky and vague, that can be given yet given in fear or out of perceived obligation.

classics. I swooned over Ayn Rand (I was young, I got over it),

I’d chosen religious studies as my general field because it’s so interdisciplinary, the kind of PhD where I could let my questions run as wild as they always wanted to, stomping across the various humanities like a happy child through the mud.

Like several of the students, my professor was also a Catholic priest.

The class involved reading the works of important spiritual figures in history, all of whom had chosen a celibate life themselves. Now that I was studying religion, I felt out of place. How had I, a boyfriend-loving, philosophy-major atheist who had no interest in celibacy, landed myself in a course like this? In a program that required a course like this? “I came to study philosophy and spirituality,” I went on. “To try to understand the nature of the divine, of religious experience, of Meaning with a capital M.” I loved capitalizing words like Being and Connection and Purpose, and giving them extra philosophical oomph. “But I’m not sure what spirituality has to do with these celibate people.”

All of my other professors had been like him, treating me like a newly discovered daughter, albeit an academic one, so his behavior wasn’t surprising—it was the norm.

was accustomed to learning about the lives of my professors. I typically got to know them well, over time, and he was just the newest one to enter my life. I assumed I’d get to know him. I wanted to know him. I wanted to tell him things about me because I admired him, and I was excited he’d taken an interest in my academic future. I not only consented, I desired. It feels important to note this fact.

I want to be clear about this part. I dressed for myself but I also dressed for them. Even when I had a boyfriend, which I often did, I wanted to look my best, always. I wanted to be noticed and noticed often. I courted attention. I absolutely courted it, without apology. I was proud of my attention-grabbing looks and outfits and confidence, and I was happy in my sexual prowess. I was stupid with power. I would be punished for it.

This is so sad to me.

This confidence I possessed, the reason I emphasize it, is not to brag or pat myself on the back. It’s because I think that we believe, or we hope—I certainly have hoped—that raising young women to be empowered sexually, certain in the drawing and withdrawing of boundaries, exuberant in their yeses and nos, will somehow save them from the experience of assault and harassment. That it will shield against or at least soften such experiences, temper the force of tragedy, protect girls and women from the worst of what can happen. This didn’t prove to be true in my case. No amount of sexual liberation, freedom, confidence, intellectual talent, joy, or voracity would save me from going through what I did with my mentor. When it happened to me, no amount of sexual empowerment could have prevented me from becoming the silenced, anxiety-ridden, nearly destroyed young woman that I became further on in my graduate-school years. The girl who began to blame herself for everything that happened. It was in graduate school that my life split in two. One life continued to be one of total and utter sexual empowerment with the young men I hit on, dated, went out with, kissed, had sex with. I was studying feminist theory, eating it up and loving every second of it. I was thriving intellectually, and as usual, my professors loved me as much as I loved them. But as time went on, that second life emerged, utterly divorced from the first. It was a life of fear, uncertainty, of self-condemnation, ...

In the end, there wasn’t enough feminism in the world to save me from the situation in which I eventually found myself. I maintained those two conflicting identities day in and day out: the sexually empowered young feminist among my fellow students and men my age, and the utterly sexually disempowered, shattered young woman with one man far older and more powerful than me. The second identity I hid from everyone. For a long time, even from myself.

I don’t know why I told my professor so many personal things that semester. I’m not sure if I was needy for affirmation from someone I saw as a mentor, greedy for attention, or if he was sneaky and pulled these things out of me through innocuous, seemingly innocent conversation each time I visited his office. All I know is that I told him things, and plenty of them.

Maybe both.

I don’t know who is at fault here. If he believed that I was the one trying to create intimacy between us, if he thought that these stories about my family, my history, were an attempt to entice him into something else, something other than an appropriate relationship between professor and student, mentor and mentee. Did he regard me as some kind of Lolita, showing up to his office as I showed up everywhere else, in my skirts and boots and sweaters? Someone who was asking for it, asking for him, asking for something more from him? What I do know is that I regret it, that I wish I could take it all back.

But it wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me that I had never given him my address, or directions to my somewhat hidden apartment.

I assumed the best about him, presumed any nagging feeling was my own fault, that I was just imagining things, inventing the unease that came to reside inside me that spring, and never left me again. It is only when I force myself to look at everything as a whole that I realize how what he did must look to someone else, someone who is able to assess things from a safe distance, to see the whole story at once. Or when I begin to push beyond my original assumptions about his goodness and kindliness, his justifications that were always above reproach in my mind, to see the layers of planning on his part for something as simple as a visit to my house for tea, or the sending of a letter to my home address. That he would have already needed to cross the lines of propriety to find himself on my street, that he would have had to go digging into my file for personal information that was there only in case of an emergency, that he used his access as my professor and mentor to pry further and further into my life, that he used his vow of celibacy, too, his role as a Catholic priest, to mask what I now suspect were less than innocent intentions, probably from very early on.

only then do I feel stupid and naïve to not have seen what was happening more immediately. I feel like an idiot to have been so passive in the face of all he was doing, to never have allowed myself to suspect that his intentions were anything other than appropriate. Either way I look at it, I end up concluding that what happened is all my fault. Either I was too complacent for too long, and too participatory, or I am making a big deal out of nothing, and still, he was and has been innocent all along. And either way, I am always the one who loses, and he is always the one who wins the game.

I never did take another class from him. And he never forgave me for it.

But by then, my professor had taken to calling me at home. He’d called a few times at the apartment I’d shared with my roommate, and now he called at my new one as well. The shift of his calls from one place to the other was seamless. I never gave him my number. After he started calling me once I’d moved, this knowledge registered somewhere in my mind. But I buried it deep with the rest of my unease, with the related knowledge that he also had my new address and my fall schedule and I hadn’t given him those either.

I can't tell if she ignored this subconsciously or if she just let it go without a fuss because of his position.

These justifications fought to the surface of my thinking, creating a hard shell over the other, less appropriate things that roiled in my gut, keeping them out.

A war began inside of me. It was fine that he’d invited me, right? No, it was weird that he had, wasn’t it? He was a priest, so I had nothing to worry about, right? No, it was odd for a professor to invite a student to go away with him, even if he was a priest. I should be more adult about this, shouldn’t I? I was acting like a child, feeling strange about going on a retreat with someone old enough to be my father, even my grandfather. He didn’t mean anything untoward. Of course not! He was celibate! He was a respected professor! Any unease that I felt was my problem. I was the one making this invitation weird and strange and off. He was just being nice. I should be grateful and let it go at that.

Okay, so she is becoming more sentient or cognizant.

I did not consent. No way. But I kept my non-consent to myself. I was still too afraid to express my resistance openly. I was afraid I would hurt his feelings. I was also afraid that my saying no, unequivocally and without hesitation, would convey to him that I thought his invitation stemmed from ulterior motives. The possibility that he might realize I was thinking this shamed me. And I felt so ashamed.

For me to give someone a firm and enthusiastic yes or no is to presume the person I am saying yes or no to is my equal, or at least someone I feel equal to saying yes or no to, as though they are a partner, a friend, someone with whom I am on the same footing. It presumes I am in possession of some power in the situation. It presumes that the other person sees me as an equal,

To name their behavior as unacceptable, to do so explicitly and forcefully, may seem impossible. You know that to name it outright will more likely destroy you and your future than his. And that has been the pattern in our culture, hasn’t it? The woman pays the price with her future, and the man keeps his present and his future as though he did nothing wrong. That is the deal we strike when we come forward, isn’t it?

Sometimes I think it’s the celibacy issue that tripped me up most, made it seem impossible to tell anyone anything. Even as I began to worry that his behavior was something other than a benign and selfless interest in my intellect, the vow of celibacy he’d taken muted all of these concerns. This was the nineties, before news of the Catholic abuse scandal broke. No one knew, or no one was talking openly—not Catholic laypeople or regular people—about priests who were abusing children, who were assaulting people. Nobody knew the Catholic hierarchy was covering everything up, that it had an established MO for doing this. When I was in graduate school, priests were still sacred figures, untarnished role models who did only good in the community, who offered up their lives to take care of others. Priests were representatives of God, and you didn’t question this if you were Catholic. Likewise, you didn’t question them or their authority.

Someone who is not Catholic, who has never been Catholic, someone standing on the outside of the Catholic tradition, might have a difficult time understanding why it was so hard for me to get around the priest part of my professor’s identity. You may already see him for who he is and was, which is a man acting inappropriately with a young woman in his program. But I could not see this, refused to see it. It was a betrayal of everything I’d ever known, and I, like so many Catholics of the pre-scandal era, was overly prone to giving representatives of the Church the benefit of the doubt—completely. His vow of celibacy acted as a wall I could not breach, that I could never dream of scaling. It had always been the thing, the one special thing, that turned an ordinary man into a man of God; it is what defines a Catholic priest on an ontological level. It never occurred to me that a priest would break this vow.

The abuse I suffered was mental, it was emotional, it was not physical, like most of the crimes in the abuse scandal. Though, to me, it was also physical, the way he began to encroach on all the spaces surrounding my body, so much that eventually it was hard for me to walk through the world without also having to wade through his presence, submit myself to his ever-watchful eyes.

I was enraged—at him, at myself—but to speak this out loud to someone else, even to Christopher, would cause me to lose control of it, would calcify it in my body like a new bone. To remain silent about it, to never speak my fears aloud, was to permit the situation to remain a figment of my imagination. Not quite real and, therefore, possibly just a fiction that had taken root in my mind. If it lived only inside me, if I never let it out into the open, I could still retain power over it, distort it, bend it to my will, and my will was to refuse its truth.

The God who was helping my mother was hurting me, the same God I didn’t believe in—though I was discovering I did believe in this God, but only when I thought I was being punished, when I felt ashamed, when I believed I had done something bad. Then, God would show himself to me. He would swoop down from the sky above and appear before me, finger wagging, scolding, judging.

I think sometimes that this is the only God people see.

I’ve always talked with my hands, and when I talked about him my hands were exaggerated, as though I could swat at the problem like it was a fly, smashing it dead with a good-natured expression on my face, everyone’s innocence still intact, his most of all. If he lost his innocence, I would lose mine, too. Of this I was certain.

I colluded with my stalker’s behavior, as a way of preserving my own sanity. I did this because the potential cost of telling the truth was everything: my professional future, my reputation, their credibility, my general well-being. Lying to shield him was a form of self-preservation for me. There is a liminal space created between the powerful person and the person who is the target of unwanted attention, a liminal space between outright yes and outright no. That space is not a compromise—not a maybe-yes or maybe-no—but more of a hovering, a being caught and not knowing where else to go or how to move without making things much worse. So you stay put. You hold the person off as best you can without causing them to retaliate too terribly, and because you know they can retaliate if they want to, that they have the power to do this, that they could decide to ruin you for displeasing them or rejecting them too forcefully. On the outside you continue to exist as though nothing is wrong, you perpetuate everything as though it is normal. You maintain the status quo with the abuser and with everyone around the abuser. Yet inside you are at war, you are shrinking, you are wishing you could die rather than continue much longer as though everything were fine. You become exhausted with the responsibility of making a situation okay that is not at all okay.

I will never forget what it felt like to realize one day that it didn’t matter what I said or how many signals I sent, because this man simply could not see me. He’d erased the real me entirely. In place of me in reality, he substituted the me he wanted to see. He projected a Donna who didn’t exist, a young woman student who adored him and wanted all of his attention, who loved it, was desperate for it.

I was trying to right the sinking ship I was on by acting like everything was all right. I really did not believe that coming forward was a possibility, so my only option was making things look okay. That fall, after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, this became my full-time job. We doom ourselves, of course, when we do such a thing. We doom ourselves in the eyes of everyone around us. We undermine ourselves and our ability to seek justice later on. We create the materials that will be used against us, that will become the proof that yes, we consented to all of what happened.

At the heart of being harassed by a person with a great deal of power is secret-keeping. From your friends, from your family, but especially from yourself. This secret-keeping may appear to others as collusion with the behavior. But you collude with yourself by not naming what is really happening, because naming it requires you to face it and you simply cannot. It may look a lot like consent, but it isn’t. It’s the way you survive.

ABSOLUTELY

There are people who steep themselves in the stuff of their tragedy, who prefer to swim in it for a while before emerging, cleansed and whole, onto the dry sand of the shore. I am not one of them.

“Who knew that cancer was the best diet of all?” she told me, laughing.

"Gary Oldman talking about David Bowie, "the bad news is that I have cancer; the good news is I found my cheekbones."

My mother had lived in my mind as an immortal for so long, and now her mortality, its imminence, was in front of all of us and we were unable to turn away from it.

I just stood there, silently, unmoving, while it did. I did my best to keep breathing through the constant nausea, the despair, the exhaustion. I did my best not to drown. I submitted to the reality that the attention would not stop, that I could not stop it, that it was not within my power to make it stop. I accepted that I could not change this. I believed I had no options, that no one would believe me if I told them what was going on. Or that the only thing they would be willing to believe was that I was crazy to suspect this man of wrongdoing, this beloved priest-professor of a man. They would see only the innocent side of his actions, because there was always an innocent side to see. They would dismiss my feelings of desperation, of rage, of fear and disgust, as overreactions. Unless. Unless he attacked me. I began to pray that he would try.

There’s more. And this “more” provokes an even greater degree of shame in me than what I’ve already admitted. There was a part of me that wanted, needed him to step clear across the boundaries of that vow of celibacy. I needed him to do it for me. I wanted him to try to hurt me, to attack me, so I could finally believe myself.

To trust myself required me to overthrow all of the trust I’d grown up to have in the authority figures that populated my life. It required me to overthrow the trust I had in my beloved professors and the kindly priests trekking daily to my family’s house to give my mother communion. It required me to overthrow the trust I had, that we all had, in the vow of celibacy that a priest makes not only to the Catholic Church, but to God. It required me to be willing to put myself between him and that vow, between him and God, and accuse him of breaking the most holy of promises. To break through that amount of trust, a lifetime of it, a world of it, an entire church built on it, was too much. It was too heavy. I couldn’t do it on my own.

Aren’t the things we feel most ashamed of always confessions of a sort?

He was unconcerned with taking up room, whereas I had become very concerned with taking up as little room as possible.

Father this, and Father that, and Father, I can’t, I’m sorry, Father. Father was my greatest weapon. Each time I used it, I was forcing him to remember who he was, who he was to me, who he was to everyone, who he was to himself, to the Church. He was a priest, not a man.

Naming it made it real. Naming it made it undeniable, and I still wanted the right to deny it. I wanted to be able to deny it for myself, to myself. Denial is a powerful thing. It’s a powerful tool, a powerful survival mechanism.

Since the beginning of graduate school, I’d been reading about the power of naming in the feminist theory in my courses. I was talking about, learning about, reading about, and writing papers about naming as a tool of empowerment and voice and transformation for women at the very same time that I was resisting this act in my own life.