Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

by Donna Freitas

But saying no, really saying it firmly, was out of the question for a long, long time—until his behavior grew so intolerable and so out of control and so obsessive and unyielding that I no longer cared about my future or what might happen if I offended him. Until I was so desperate and broken that I didn’t want a future anymore at all. The power dynamics between the old and the young, between a big man and a small woman, between someone famous and important in your profession and you, when you are just starting out, between someone whom everyone loves and admires and you, who are still a nobody, between someone you aspire to become and the person you are now can seem insurmountable. 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?

Why did I try so hard to protect him? Why did I work so hard to justify his behavior? Wasn’t I only prolonging my own suffering? Doesn’t my story, this effort at excusing his behavior, undermine my claims that something was wrong? Doesn’t it mark me as a liar? I know that, at least for a while, I made everyone outside of my own situation believe that all was well between me and my professor, that his behavior was entirely welcome. 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 t...

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. I wanted him to try to rape me. I know how horrible that sounds, how utterly vile. But I need to explain why. His behavior was so complex; he never stepped over a line. It was always just this side of excusable, technically. What’s a few letters? They’re not hurting anyone. What’s wrong with a professor looking out the window of his office? Absolutely nothing. How can you accuse a professor of being in the hallway and the stairwell of the building where he teaches? You can’t. What’s a pear, a few books, a few coffees in the abbey where he lives with his fellow monks? Not much to go on. What’s one article about a famous author and priest written by a similarly renowned author and priest? It’s fulfilling one’s obligations as a professor at a university. How about his calls and letters to my Catholic m...

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. But to me, naming had consequences I was not ready to confront, that I never in my life wanted to have to confront. Naming abuse, naming sexual harassment, naming something like stalking committed by a professor, my mentor, a priest, was the kind of thing that happened to someone else, not to me. It was the stuff of gossip, hushed whispers, scandalized talk. It was something you knew happened to people, but those people are never you or the people you know. If I named this thing it would stick to me, sink into me, become me. Not only would it rot me from the inside but now the rot would be visible. It would cling to me, mark me, become my scarlet letter. I would have to walk around the world wearing it, and the world would see it on me and reject me for it. I would be ruined because of it. Naming meant loss. It meant the loss of a fantasy I’d held, that I still wanted to hold, about me and my intellectual promise, my academic talents, my appeal as a young woman and aspiring PhD. Because of his interest in me—well, let’s be honest, his devotion—at first I believed it meant I was special. Exceptional. But now naming this for what it really was ...

When my friend and I decided to talk to this professor, it was a different time, back before there was such a thing as mandatory reporting at universities across the nation—and thank God for this. Mandatory reporting, a recent by-product of Title IX, requires faculty, staff, and administrators to make an official report if they hear of instances of sexual assault or harassment, even if the person who suffered the abuse doesn’t want them to report it, isn’t ready to, begs them not to. Mandatory reporting wrests the power of naming from the victim’s hands and places it in the hands of others. It yanks it, forcefully, violently from the victim and, in my opinion, threatens to victimize the person yet again.

The aftermath of sexual harassment is quiet. You learn quickly not to speak about it, not to say anything, because it makes other people uncomfortable. No one knows what to say to you, how to fix things, what might help. It makes people uneasy to know that this thing happened to you, this strange, ugly thing they don’t know how to remedy. So, to not make anyone else feel awkward, you don’t tell people, you don’t tell anyone at all. Soon, you are alone in it, you are alone with it, for years. So, the aftermath of what I went through is also lonely.

Our lives are generally tuned to consent, and it hums as we move about the world like soft radio static, a buzz underneath everything we do and all the people with whom we spend our time. This default mode of consent changes only when we get into situations of sexual intimacy (and sometimes not even then), situations of sexual and romantic relevance. Only then do we start constructing walls to block a person from reaching us, often from literally reaching us, physically, bodily. Only then does consent become an act of which we become self-aware because the rest of the time our consent is unconscious. It is “ready-to-hand,” as Heidegger might say. I loved Heidegger as an undergraduate. I loved most of all his concepts of “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand,” concepts I’ve gone back to repeatedly over the course of my intellectual life, because they seem to apply to just about everything. For Heidegger, things are generally ready-to-hand and become present-at-hand only when we are forced to notice them. Ready-to-hand things are ones we don’t have to worry about because they are performing their everyday functions without fail. For example, a door is typically ready-to-hand. We walk up to a door, we go through it without noticing what we are doing, without thinking much about the door, as though we don’t even see the door. The door becomes present-at-hand only if, when we are trying to get through it, we grasp the handle and it falls off, and we can’t use the door as expecte...