Today in the car on the way to work, as I do most Thursdays, I listened to the new Harmontown podcast. I’m a big fan of Harmon and his crew. Today, as has been the norm since the election of Donald Trump, Harmon spent a great deal of time being upset about social issues.
He mentioned this tweet from Terry Crews. In it, Crews tells his story of sexual abuse.
I have always had a very strange relationship with sexual harassment and sexual assault, as I grew up in a place that was behind the times and tried to sweep it under the rug. The few men I knew growing up (for obvious reasons I won’t share here) grew defensive whenever the subject came up, and because of my complex feelings on the topic, I often try NOT to speak about it because I don’t think some of the things that I have to say are taken as what I mean them to be taken as. More than once a female colleague has accused me of being part of “rape culture.” And having such a thing foisted at me hurts.
So this is just to say that I often feel bad to even be a man knowing what some men do to women. I make stands whenever I can, but as a large man who is usually assumed to be white, women often look at me with accusatory glances if I talk about my own experiences.
I want to share four memories from a 350+ pound, over six foot guy with a goatee in America.
When I was six-years-old, I went to the first grade at a smaller than my high school elementary in the heart of white Indiana. The kid who sat next to me, who was a little terror of a profanity spouting no-goodnick, used to draw pictures of naked women with huge breasts and furry genitals and then toss them on my desk for approval. Bear in mind he, too, was six, so his art wasn’t exactly photo realistic, but I knew what he was doing. I used to ask him to stop, and I refused to show the glee he showed to see these images. So he’d jab his pencil into my leg and break the lead off inside my skin. This went on for months before my mom saw one of the wounds with the lead still inside and wouldn’t take any story I tried as a solution, and I told her the truth.
I think I was being sexually harassed.
In high school, I was modest. I’m still pretty modest, honestly. I didn’t want to walk around with my genitals showing in the locker room after gym class. I was mocked for this the entire four years by various guys, some of which would at times do things like tapping their penises off my forehead while I sat to change my clothes. The gym teacher saw some of this happen and just let it go.
When I was an undergraduate at IU, I spent an inordinate amount of time helping people who were in trouble, and one of the most at-risk scenes on our campus was the small but proudly out LGBT community. I stuck up for them any time I saw something happening. I don’t share that like I’m asking anyone to be proud of me for it or anything– I’m just contextualizing. I hung out with their student group frequently. One night, while I was running the desk at the writing center, a guy came in and asked me out. I was flattered, but I told him I wasn’t gay. Because… I’m not. Never even had an inclination to be, though at many times in my life when I was lonely I could have found a supportive male partner while I was striking out with women. What was weird is that instead of just laughing off the misunderstanding, this guy insisted that I was trying to brush him off, and he proceeded to walk around behind me and start rubbing my back to talk me into it. After I spun my chair to get away from him and repeated myself about six times, he finally seemed to accept it. It was uncomfortable any time I saw him after that.
Last memory for this sequence…
Six years ago, before a class, I was talking to one of my students in the hallway when one of his friend walked over. The friend started talking about the “pills” he’d scored, and how if they got their dates to take said pills, they could “really have a good time.” I asked my student his friend’s name, walked around the corner, and called the campus police. They came and took that young man away to discuss his “pills.”
My student couldn’t believe I “snitched” on his friend. We had a long talk about how wrong what they had planned to do was. The campus where I work, like pretty much every campus, has a date rape problem. I wasn’t going to just watch someone formulate a plan.
It breaks my heart that we live in a country where our President once said he just grabbed women he wanted to abuse “in the pussy.” It tears me up that I was raised by a single mother, than 80% of my best friends in life have been female, and they are constantly at odds with people who can’t control their desire to whip their dick out and employ it.
I’m not going to say “me, too,” because nothing I shared here is anything like what some (what most) women suffer, but I want the women who know me to know that not all men are so terrible. Some of us want to apologize for the others. Some of us would do anything to stop the others.
Some of us cry when we think about what this world accepts.
We need to do better.