I was invisible.
You’re probably assuming that I went apeshit on them, roasted them, did something fearless and insane. Nope. The second they started talking over me, I froze. The barista was so confused that he froze, too. As lame as it was, I’m kind of glad I didn’t react because if I had, things would have gotten very Jerry Springer very quickly. Instead, I offered a permissive nod to the barista, giving him the go-ahead to serve them before me. He looked disappointed. At least twice a week I fantasize about handling that situation differently.
Like every woman I know, I’ve been made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe by aggressive men at one point or another, but this was the first time since my childhood that I felt literally unseen. These men didn’t harass me, they just ignored me completely. I realized that day that it’s very hard to defend yourself against someone who doesn’t know you exist.
If you’re asking yourself, “Jesus, how much attention does this bitch need?” let me reassure you, I just asked myself the same question. However, although this seems relatively benign compared to the sexism that makes news headlines, the reason I think this story is worth sharing is because the mentality of dismissing a woman’s existence at a coffee shop could be the same mentality that in drunken moments could turn into a mentality that justifies worse behavior like violence. Not to bring a super fun winter activity into a conversation about sexual assault, but tolerating a small behavior can enable it to snowball into a bigger one.
So now that you know how much guilt I have complaining about this stuff, I feel like now I can dig into the even yuckier things that have happened to me.
Over the last five or so years as I’ve gained some much needed mental clarity, I’ve become able to wrap my head around a few specific cases of physical abuse and sexual harassment I’ve experienced. To me, sexual harassment is like what our moms used to say about gum: “It takes eight years to digest.”
One experience was so bizarre that my reaction was to delete it from my memory for about seven years. When I was about twenty-three, I was jogging at night near my apartment in West Hollywood. I had my headphones on, my Discman pumping my go-to jogging soundtrack Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 43. Despite my penchant for scary situations in my twenties, I tried to jog on safe, well-lit streets at night. In my neighborhood this meant running on a street called La Cienega, which is littered with trendy bars, clubs, and sushi places. I mean, what could possibly go wrong when there’s edamame topped with sea salt in the vicinity?
There I was, jogging along, jamming to probably Usher, and out of nowhere a homeless man lunged at me and grabbed my vagina. Hard. This was of course before the concept of vagina grabbing was trendy; before Donald Trump put it in the zeitgeist. And since I used to run in loose Adidas shorts sans underwear, this was a legit vagina grab, not an over-two-layers-of-clothing type deal like we did in the back of Nissan Altimas in the nineties.
Thankfully I didn’t get paralyzed by my freeze response the way I did in the coffee shop. I did the opposite. I just kept running—literally and figuratively. I don’t know if anyone saw the incident or said anything, because my ability to see and hear went offline for about ten minutes. All I heard was a piercing white noise, like a faraway scream. Maybe it was me screaming, I don’t know. A burst of adrenaline propelled me home like a spazzy Forrest Gump. I ran probably the fastest I’d ever run, yet my muscles weren’t burning and my lungs weren’t gasping for air. The irony was not lost on me that I raced past the infamous strip club the Seventh Veil, a grim purple building decorated with silhouettes of naked women. At least the women in there were getting paid for what I just suffered through for free.
Looking back, I realize the name of the strip club felt right on the nose, given I responded to the event with such a strong veil of denial. When I told the story to people the next day, I made jokes and laughed about it but nobody else thought it was funny. A couple of people even offered to take me to the doctor, which made me realize what happened wasn’t as harmless as my psychological defenses were telling me it was.
That said, being violated by a complete stranger—as gross as it was—was a lot less traumatizing for me than being violated by someone I knew and trusted. When I was in college, I had a boyfriend force himself on me after we broke up. I know, LOL.
Back then I had no idea how to end a relationship, so I sort of just acted like an asshole until the guy I was dating eventually ended it himself. This was foolproof and foolish. After I spent weeks applying this method on one particularly stubborn boyfriend, he finally acquiesced after a three-hour melodramatic argument over my very obviously shady texting habits. He stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door. Success! I remember exhaling with relief that it was finally over, grateful that I was never going to see him again. Finally I could act like an asshole without someone constantly forcing me to lie about my behavior! (Just in case you’re getting my mental health timeline confused, this was when I was twenty, way before I learned how to just tell people the truth.)
Within five minutes he stormed back into my apartment, coming at me with an erratic gait and a demonic fury in his eyes, like something had possessed him, or like he had just done an eight ball of cocaine. His energy was terrifying because it was at once aggressive and apologetic, like he knew he was about to do something terrible. I felt myself trying to scream, but my throat closed up. He forced me into the bedroom and onto the bed. I don’t know if my thrashing was making him hit me by accident or if he was actually hitting me. Whatever it was, I was getting hit in the face a lot. It all got very blurry. He said a couple of things that I’m still too grossed-out to share, but I remember eventually surrendering, thinking it would be much easier to just make the situation consensual so I didn’t have to live with being raped. He had been my boyfriend for a year, so what was the difference? I could just rationalize that it was breakup sex, makeup sex, whatever sex might justify something otherwise too terrible. I could feel my brain needing to spin the situation into something I would be able to live with.
Then some primal force inside me way more powerful than my conscious brain said, “Oh, fuck this shit.” I don’t know how, but out of nowhere I grabbed him by the face, and mind you I had very long acrylic nails at the time, and said quite calmly, “If you don’t get off me I swear to God I will actually kill you.” I specifically remember saying “actually.” I must have been pretty convincing because he did back off enough for me to squirm out. I put a coat on and ran twelve blocks to a train station.
I took the train home to D.C. to my mom’s apartment. I didn’t tell her what happened because I didn’t want to upset her. My codependence told me that it would be too stressful for her codependence.
Maybe the real point here is that as I write this, I’m starting to feel like an ungrateful brat, a spoiled asshole who doesn’t even know what being victimized is or what real sexual assault feels like. I’m obsessing over you guys thinking, “This girl is white, she has an alarm system, that guy didn’t kill her, she was able to escape . . . How dare this delusional snob complain about anything?” And perhaps that’s where the crux of all this lies: That whenever I’m treated in a degrading way, all I can think is that other women have it so much worse than I do, so my experience doesn’t matter. This is probably true by the way, but it’s also a rationalization that just protects the people who acted in an inappropriate manner. What I’m thinking is: If we don’t share our less severe experiences, we enable a mentality that could snowball into something that is way more severe.
For a long time I pretended that these experiences didn’t happen. But to discount them altogether would be implying that they don’t matter or that other women’s seemingly small wounds aren’t worth attention either. Everyone’s wounds count, no matter how seemingly infinitesimal. For me, these small offenses were like little cracks in a wall that bother you, but not enough to get the wall completely replastered. “Oh, they’re barely visib
le,” you think to yourself. But over time, little cracks become bigger cracks. Then all of a sudden the only thing that can make you feel better is, well, crack.
I feel lucky to have a job that allows me to talk about this kind of stuff publicly because after a show people feel safe to share their stories with me, which can be healing for both of us. I get to meet incredible, fascinating people all over the world. I also sometimes meet stupid morons. I would have to say the city with the highest concentration of stupid morons is probably Las Vegas. The reason I feel I can say this is that most of the people I meet in Vegas aren’t from there and don’t even live there. If you are a native, I’ve never met one of you, probably because you’re too afraid to leave your home and run into one of the aforementioned stupid morons.
Vegas is simultaneously the best and worst place to perform stand-up. I mean, Belgium was pretty weird. When I performed in Antwerp, the whole crowd laughed in unison, which you’d think my anal-retentive perfectionist brain would love because of the predictable order, but it was actually super eerie given that us comedy folk are used to chaotic crowds and erratic laughter. Stand-up is like a mutual verbal assault: I yell at you guys, you yell back at me, but we love each other anyway.
Vegas can be a very useful place to perform because there is a big cross section of people in the audience, so if the material works, it probably works in like thirty states and a couple of random countries. Vegas also always makes me step up my game as a performer because I know good and well that I’m competing against beautiful naked women covered in glitter and feathers with zero cellulite right next door, dancing their tits off. I often can’t even be bothered to wear a bra onstage, much less dance my tits off. So if people come see me in Vegas, I know I have to bring it, given the other yummy options available. Especially if you got confused and thought seeing “Cummings” on a marquee meant you were going to an erotic massage house, in which case my show will be very disappointing.
Vegas shows are always a blast save for the occasional audience members who puke on themselves. One time a woman in the second row was getting wasted and out of nowhere she puked in her hand, but that did not let this stop her from living her best life. Instead of leaving to clean herself off or avoid ridicule from strangers, she gently placed the puke on the floor next to her as delicately as you’d put your drink by your feet at a movie theater. She was hands down the coolest hot mess I’ve ever seen.
I’d say that at least every other show in Vegas there’s a kid in the audience whose poker-addicted parent left for me to babysit. It usually takes me a couple of minutes to notice these kids, and I always manage to see them after I’ve talked graphically about anatomy they shouldn’t learn about for at least ten more years. When I ask what they’re doing there, they usually tell me their parents dropped them off because they had to “run an errand.” Look, I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent or a gambling addict—well, not literal gambling; I’m more of an emotional gambling addict—but I can’t begin to understand how hard it is to manage an obsession with craps while simultaneously trying to raise a kid, even though the first couple years of parenting is mostly dealing with literal craps.
I won’t leave my dogs tied to a pole while I go into Starbucks, much less leave a child alone with a comedian for an hour. I’m just saying, if you’re a poker-addicted parent, I’m not sure watching me talk about my humiliating sexual experiences is going to do less damage to a child than letting him watch you gamble away his college tuition.
I had one particularly rough night in Vegas. And let me preface this story with something about me: I don’t do great with groups of big men. I love men dearly and have made many of them the center of my universe. That said, there’s nothing scarier to me than a group of men who go to the gym a lot, wear tight shirts, and are out enjoying a “boy’s night” fueled by vodka, Red Bull, and cologne from Walgreens.
One night after a show, I had carefully done my evening anti-insomnia ritual: stretched, meditated, put the yummy-smelling oil on my face that triggers my Pavlovian reaction to know it’s time for bed. I creatively covered all the tiny blue and red lights on various electronics in the room because any suggestion of light keeps my brain awake. I didn’t check my phone because going on Instagram before bed is like throwing a Molotov cocktail at my self-esteem, and I’ll end up spending the whole night trying to figure out what parties I wasn’t invited to. Finally at a point in my life where I was able to make sane choices before bed, I read some of a book and lay down. All signs pointed to a deep, juicy slumber and I was very much looking forward to not being a raging, exhausted bitch the next day. I closed my eyes, and after a couple breaths, felt a warm blooming in the pit of my stomach.
Our bodies have this amazing ability to react to something before we can even see or hear it. I’m sure this hypersensitivity served my ancestors very well when they were sleeping under rocks amongst lions and bears sans weapons, but there were no dangerous animals around my hotel room. What I was hearing wasn’t the roar of a lion. It was the music of a Pitbull, and unfortunately it was Pitbull the human, not the dog.
FIREBALL! Do-do-do-dooo-doo-doop!
I peeked out my door to see what kind of hoedown I was up against and lo and behold, it was seven very muscly guys in those permanently ironed shirts, the ones that always look sort of wet for no reason. They paired their iridescent shirts with those jeans that have the stitching down the side as if to say, “I like to listen to house music, but I also want to look like a cross between a farmer and the guy from Creed.” I don’t know why they all decided to wear matching pants. Maybe there was a sale on them: “Buy six, get one free if you come with your CrossFit buddies?” Whatever was happening, it was a deeply tribal situation. When more than three people are in one place, wearing the same clothes, my reptilian brain deduces “It’s me against them.” And it was.
These monsters weren’t even in their room. At one A.M. they were partying in the hallway with their door open, which I found shockingly rude, even for how low my bar is for people’s manners in Las Vegas. They stood around a room-service table full of flavored vodkas, yelling and sort of punching each other between texting and taking pictures of themselves. As I walked toward them I saw that they all had that luminous helmet hair that can only be sculpted with the perfect mix of pomade, gel, and delusion.
Why not just turn the other way, Whitney? Why not just stay in your lane and let people have fun, you uptight meanie? Well, the only thing I want less than to confront seven agro psychos is to get no sleep, because then I become the agro psycho.
Since I spend so much time in hotels, I’ve mastered the art of telling people to shut up in a polite way that kind of makes shutting up their idea. For example: “Hey, just curious how long y’all are planning on being up?” subtly shames them into being quiet. When that doesn’t go well, I ask something more vague and rhetorical like “Hey, guys, are you serious right now?” If you ask that question sincerely enough, it becomes a Rorschach test and people project their own anger and baggage about other stuff from their past. You become their disapproving high school coach, their drunk father, their ex-wife, whoever. And I don’t care what or who you project onto me as long as it makes you stop blasting techno.
In this case I had a feeling that my sneaky reverse psychology mind games weren’t going to work on this crew, but I walked up to them anyway, hoping to have a reasonable exchange. I promise you I had all the best intentions, but once I got within five feet of these dudes, they started to look me up and down in such a lecherous way that I couldn’t possibly operate from a place of respect. The ogling probably just made me insecure and defensive, since I was in the least flattering pair of harem pajama pants I own, but instead of my usual gentle reverse psychology, I was slightly more direct.
“Hey, guys, it’s one A.M. Do you mind taking the party into your room?”
“Why don’t you mind your own fuckin’ business?” the s
hortest one of the bunch quipped back.
I’m not going to lie; I did not react well to this. In fact, I straight-up snapped. My head lunged forward and I said some incarnation of “What do you know about business, given you’re clearly unemployed?” The “oh shit!” reaction from the guys confirmed that I was somehow right that this guy didn’t have a job, which didn’t even make sense to me since he had a lot of money for steroids and lilac shirts. I’m pretty sure I said it because it was an old roast joke I had in my back pocket about The Situation from the Jersey Shore that was dying to finally get some airtime.
Now, look. Most of the time I’m pretty humble and willing to be wrong. This was not one of those times. I believe that when you get into an altercation with a stranger, you find out who you really are, because your brain has no point of reference about who this person is. It’s like being face-to-face with a wild animal, which I have also had happen. One time I woke up and saw two coyotes in my yard. I know a lot about coyotes because they’re rampant around L.A. and many of my friends have lost small dogs or their cats to them. Trust me, the first couple times I saw them, my instinct was to feed them, try and take them in, domesticate, and “rescue” them. But in fact it turns out they’re sociopathic vampires masquerading as adorable dogs but who are nothing like dogs. They don’t have empathy and they haven’t evolved to read human faces the way dogs have. Learning to accept the limitations and motives of a coyote versus those of a dog helped a lot in learning to accept the same in the guys I dated. I often have to say to myself, “This guy is a just a coyote. He’s always going to be a coyote. Stop expecting him to behave like a dog.” And yes, most people call men dogs as a derogatory term. Not me. If I call someone a dog, it’s the highest compliment I can give and basically means that person gets to live in my house forever and eat way more expensive food than I do as long as I can constantly take photos of you while you sleep.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 9