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What a wonder. Can you imagine? We don’t expect such things of girls, from girls, for girls.
It was Bartleby’s defense, of Bartleby the Scrivener: I’d simply decline to participate in the world.
I did not understand that wealth was shifty and could be shy.
Benediction could appear out of nowhere at school. It was less common than cruelty, I thought, but every bit as mysterious, and all the sweeter for this.
She was the friend who reached for a piece of hair that had fallen into your eyes. She noticed when you were coming down with a cold.
What was this force that led men to break down like this?
Of course, her story was not that simple, because the criminal justice system is set up, at least in theory, to assume innocence until guilt is proven.
I did not want to write it because it should not matter, but of course it does, because a girl who is attacked will so often assume the fault lies with her. There is no escaping a primal culpability.
In other words: it’s open season on her. In other words: to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.
Besides immorality, the salient feature of entitlement, I think, is the total failure of imagination.
I don’t think there exists a better way to untangle a girl’s admiration for a boy than to try to coach him through calculus.
I wished I had a more ordinary name, like Liz or Jen, so it wouldn’t feel so personal, almost private, when he said it out loud.
But what he was doing didn’t feel quite like flirting anyway. It felt like he’d issued me something that he might try to take back later.
In bearing witness, we’re trying to correct a theft of power via a story. But power and stories, while deeply interconnected, are not the same things. One is rock, the other is water. Over time, long periods of time, water always wins. What I want to know, even now, is: how?
It’s a curious thing how children are wired to ask for help when hurt or frightened—Ouch! Help me!—but shame turns this inside out: I can survive this as long as nobody else ever knows. As though secrecy itself performed some cauterizing function, which, of course, when it comes to the matter of self-delusion, it does. I couldn’t talk about what had happened without having to let myself think about what had happened. The secret served me.
“I don’t think women are actually meant to be with men,” she’d say, her breath glinting in the cold. “You don’t?” “I think maybe the best we can hope for is to be companionable without ever being truly reciprocal.”
What I wanted, of course, not that I understood this then, was to make a connection with my mother so she could take from me the horrible pain I was in.
‘Be always drunken.…With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.’”
I didn’t need help defining despair. I needed help feeling like a living girl.
I understood from this one of the rules of war: what happened to girls like me did not matter, did not even register.
It breaks my heart to write that—I was looking for the rules, as though my situation were a chess position I needed only to study long enough.
I too found self-destruction more interesting than bad luck.
The trick was to never know how close you were, because relief was the killer of drive.
“Sure. You’re devastated. They stole your self-respect and ruined your sense of boundaries. It’s natural to take some time to get those things back.”
I would always be the one left gasping, wondering how on earth to reply. What should I say? Yes, but it wasn’t my fault?
They’d say, You wanted this. Even if you didn’t think you did, even if you didn’t say so, you wanted it.
My parents, meanwhile—creatures of their own time and culture—would have preferred a drug dealer to a whore. A junkie can be rehabilitated, after all.
I was quite self-destructive in those years and had been for some time, though this could be hard to see. (A PhD program is an excellent place to mask self-hatred.)
I learned that while the fallen woman may keep her unloved door plain and her drapes drawn, her circle small and her fire low—if she’s wise, I suppose, she will—the path to her back stoop will be well-traveled. I guarantee it.
It was astonishing how these things reconstellated themselves, the microcycles of high school life—here the seedling assholes all in a row, coming up to take the place of the guys who had graduated just the year before. Already they knew to mock me.
With what clarity, what empathy, could I explain to the drunk girlfriend that this was not what equality looked like?
I did not yet understand how the school’s silencing of me had been, in its way, the greater crisis.
I was close, then, to meeting the people who would help me begin to live, but I did not know it yet.
When the boys did what they did to me, they denied the third person on that bed. I had no humanity. The impact of this violation only sharpened with time. My careful distinctions of injury and responsibility—the difference I imagined between what they did and rape, between terrible things you should put behind you and truly hellish things no one would expect you to bear—allowed me, for many years, to restore that third person in the room in my mind. I could pretend that having been permitted to keep my jeans on while being choked by cocks was something like agency, that it meant that at least
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How powerful they had made me, these men, in denying the truth.
First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.
