Everybody (Else) Is Perfect

by Gabrielle Korn

  Avery met me on the corner, and I cried on her shoulder. She gingerly took Kimberly out of my arms (Kimberly was fine—she slept through most of this). I called Wallace, who was uptown. My chest where he scratched me was bright red and splotchy, and hot to the touch. It took the cops nearly half an hour to come, by which point the guy was long gone. They filed a report for harassment, not assault, because my skin didn’t break. They told me that in New York City you can go as far as punching someone in the face, and if the skin doesn’t break, it’s not assault, which was news to me.

  Avery waited with me in a coffee shop until Wallace came. Trying to distract me, she told me that recently some guy on the train platform called her a fag and then pushed an open container of chicken lo mein into her face, a double blow since she’s vegan. I was supposed to be proud of her for walking away and not getting into a fight, an evolved reaction from how she was in her twenties, but all I could feel was despair. As a butch woman, she’s experienced more, and worse, homophobic violence than I ever have. I felt the need to apologize to her for crumbling in the aftermath of an attack that was maybe equally as traumatic as the lo mein story she casually told me, but I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t get any words out at all, and she quickly changed the subject. She left when Wallace got there, and they exchanged worried eye contact. Wallace put her arms around me, and I buried my face in her neck. I felt disconnected from my body. I took a cab home, calling out of work for the rest of the day.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about how intimate the violence felt—how he’d picked me out of a crowd as someone worth harassing, how he’d put his hands on me, how he’d looked directly into my eyes while he tried to wrench my phone out of my hands. It felt deeply personal, even though he had been a perfect stranger. The police, two white men, had asked, “Do you have any idea why he approached you?” I said, “Maybe because I’m a woman?,” which made them laugh. I wasn’t trying to be funny. But in truth I wasn’t the only woman on the train so it wasn’t the answer. The question was repeated by other people to whom I recounted the details: Why you? I hadn’t wondered it until it was posed. For some reason the moment he’d entered the car, I’d felt an inevitability; his rage, as soon as he revealed it, seemed destined to land on me. But I didn’t have an explanation. His class-based argument, that Kimberly had a better life than him, was a bizarre comparison and likely untrue; my dog, after all, spent the first half of her life in a wire cage outside, churning out puppies and never learning to walk properly. But even as an animal lover I don’t think you can compare human poverty to animal cruelty; it’s a false equivalence, and it felt like just an excuse to go after me.

  In the year that had passed since the incident with the EKG tech, plenty of other scary things had happened; in addition to the usual daily onslaught of catcalls, one day I ignored a man who said, “Nice legs,” as I walked by him—he then proceeded to chase me down the subway platform, screaming in my face about what a “racist slut” I was. He said I was an entitled bitch, and ungrateful, and should learn how to take a compliment, and that I wasn’t all that anyway. He was eating a bagel and spitting pieces of it in my face as he ranted. I began shouting, “You need to back the fuck up,” which only made him get closer and closer to me, until finally a very tall man came and silently stood between us, making the other guy skulk off.

  Following the incident at the doctor’s office, my therapist had tried to introduce a theory that I hadn’t been ready to hear: that I had, in some way, caused the EKG tech to treat me the way he did. When she suggested this, I was confused and hurt, and I accused her of victim blaming. She quickly apologized and said that’s not what she had meant. I couldn’t conceive of any other implication. She waited to bring it up again, and when she did, she connected these incidents in a way I could finally hear—she wasn’t, she clarified, implying that I did anything inherently wrong. But, after all, they were so similar that I had no choice but to try to analyze my own role, aside from simply being a woman in public. That question came back. Why me?

  What we landed on as the common thread here and throughout my life was my staunch refusal to be objectified (her words). For better or worse, when men tried to intimidate me, I held my head higher. When they tried to stare me down, I didn’t blink. When they screamed at me, I screamed back. When they sexualized me, I acted like they were so worthless they didn’t even exist. This, in turn, enraged them. As my therapist pointed out, it’s like a mutual triggering; there’s a certain kind of man who was set off by my refusal to be objectified, and reacted with rage, which in turn triggered my own rage. It caused situations to escalate very quickly. I am lucky that nothing worse has ever happened to me based on the way I’ve told aggressive strangers to go fuck themselves rather than trying to neutralize the situation.

  I’m not sure why or how or precisely when I became like this. Maybe it was the pediatrician who leaned his crotch into my knees while he looked in my ears so that I could feel, with unforgettable clarity, the exact shape of what lay behind his zipper. Maybe it was the last boy I ever slept with, when I was eighteen, who plied me with beer and then climbed on top of me, whose terrible smelly beard rubbed my face so raw that when he stood up he said, “Wow, you look awful.” Or maybe it was the group of drunk men who surrounded me and a friend one night in college at a bodega and began caressing our arms, saying, “How much?” and laughing hysterically. Or the boy in middle school who, while we did homework in his living room, kept taking his dick out to jerk off, staring at me with a mix of rage and hunger, his mother in the next room. Or maybe it was the kid in high school who pretended to be my friend but told everyone I was a slut because I’d kissed one of his friends in my bedroom but then refused to be his girlfriend. Maybe it was the gay guy in college who wouldn’t stop grabbing my nipples or the one at a Nylon party who grabbed my ass with both his hands and then, as I yelled at him, did it again, laughing. Maybe it was the hundreds of catcalls therein. Or maybe it was the totality of these moments, piling onto my body like mud and then hardening into cement, like armor.

  But it’s armor I’ve had for as long as I can remember, a chicken-or-the-egg situation where the chicken is the way certain people have treated me and the egg is my boundaries. I had a crush on a boy in middle school but every time we interacted he would get physical, poking and prodding me, so I would start screaming. Eventually he gave up and started “going out” with one of my friends. One night over AIM I asked him why her and not me, and he said, “Because she flirts back and you just get mad.” Flirting? Was that flirting? Later, in high school, a boy was teasing me so I cursed him out and he said, “For a quiet girl you sure are a bitch.” Was that flirting? Why did flirting always feel so… invasive?

  I was told again and again that something or someone was harmless. A harmless boy. A harmless old man. Harmless flirting. But who gets to decide what counts as harm? Certainly not me, I learned. I quickly got a reputation as someone who couldn’t take a joke, which stayed with me through adulthood. When my sisters and I were out at a bar in our early twenties, a bartender squirted me with a water gun, drenching my shirt, and one of my sisters and I got into an argument because it made me want to leave without paying and she said that would be stealing. I didn’t care if it was stealing. I just needed to get out of there.

  Would it surprise you to learn, at this point, that I have also struggled for my entire life with being painfully shy? I blush when I’m nervous. I’m terrible in group settings—sometimes it’s like I forget to talk because I become so focused on observing other people. So this thing that happened to me in the presence of aggressive men—this transformation from shy to furious—surprised other people as much as it did me. When you’re a shy little girl, you’re adorable. When you’re a shy adult woman, you’re a bitch. Women I dated used to be confused and frustrated by how forthcoming and warm I’d be one-on-one only to freeze up around their friends. Very few people understood that it was shyness, not coldness.

  Af
ter what happened with the guy on the subway, I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I’d be starting to drift off and then I’d imagine a worst-case scenario. He could have pushed me down the stairs or onto the subway tracks. His scratch could have actually ripped open my skin, not just my shirt. I could have dropped Kimberly in the midst of the scuffle and she could have run into traffic. He could have taken my phone, leaving me with no way to get help. I could have run into him again. None of that actually happened, but these nightmarish scenes would flash through my mind in the night and suddenly I’d be wide awake, heart pounding, mouth dry. It took me months to feel okay on the subway alone.

  I’m no idealist; I also know there is misogyny without men. Once on a date to a party, a friend of the woman I was with pushed me against the wall and licked my whole neck, telling me I should ditch her friend and come home with her instead. I had to push her off me and when I told my date about it, she was pissed that her friend had violated some sort of butch bro code, but not that she’d violated me. Another masculine-of-center woman I briefly dated told me that my catcalling problem was because “you’re hot, babe,” and that I should take the compliment. And yet another butch woman I dated swore up and down that queer femmes were more sexually aggressive than anyone else based on the liberties they’d taken so frequently with her body. I’ve known lesbians to only lust after straight women because of the idea of a conquest. And conversely I’ve had straight women push themselves onto me without regard for my consent, assuming that all lesbians are attracted to all women all the time. I once went on a date with a nonbinary dyke who, mid–first make out, suddenly bit my neck so hard they ripped part of a mole off with their teeth, but I was so high I didn’t feel it, just sensed something was off and made an excuse to leave. When I got home, I found my white T-shirt covered in blood, the beauty mark that sits near my collarbone partially dangling. Did they do it on purpose? And if not, why didn’t they say anything about making me bleed? It was devastating to realize that the queer world was not without violence.

  Similarly, I always wanted women’s media to be a place where we were safe, but historically it hasn’t been that at all. The problem wasn’t just that men controlled most of women’s media, though that was a huge part of it. The more insidious issue was that women had so internalized the policing of our bodies that, given a space just for us, writers and editors fat-shamed and slut-shamed and generally made women feel broken in order to sell pages. And even in the late aughts, when people were starting to grow woke, I remember a particularly breathless article in Seventeen with the headline “My Boyfriend Turned Out to Be a Girl!,” which reinforced the point that women’s media was not a safe place for queer people, in case anyone was still wondering.

  Right when I started working at Nylon, in 2014, the first-ever national study on street harassment was published. It revealed something any woman could have told you: that most women have experienced street harassment, that LGBTQ people are the group most likely to be harassed, and that it has a long-term negative impact on our lives. Fueled by data, the media started covering catcalling like the actual, serious issue it was, and women began uploading videos to social media of their harassers. One woman filmed herself simply walking throughout the city with a hidden camera, showing just how many times she was harassed by men. It went viral. Eventually people pointed out that all of the white male harassers had been edited out to create the picture that all of her harassers were men of color, and a counter video was created, showing how much white men do in fact harass women on the street. It was a hot, complicated topic.

  My boss Leila and I wanted to make a video about it, too. We set up a meeting with our video team, which was two straight white guys. Having a video address such a topical theme seemed like a no-brainer, but to my dismay, we couldn’t convince them to make it. They just didn’t think it was a big enough issue. One of them told us that his girlfriend, who was “very beautiful,” absolutely never got harassed, so it really must not be a problem for other people. I think my eyebrows hit the ceiling. Not understanding what he’d said that was offensive, he followed up with, “I didn’t mean to imply that you all aren’t beautiful, too.”

  Eventually I had to bow out of the conversation because I was too mad. What they landed on was a series on sex; they’d cast “real women” and have them tell unfiltered stories about their sex lives, talking about taboo things like period sex. It was a good idea, one that would definitely drive traffic, but on the first day of filming I walked into the studio to find an all-male crew: camera guys, sound guys, male director, and a man who was going to be conducting the interviews. It was set up, basically, like an interrogation, with the all-male crew facing a woman sitting on a chair, alone. I intercepted, telling them it was unacceptable to have a series about female sexuality created under those circumstances. The compromise was that I would be the one to conduct the interviews. Sitting on an apple box beneath a camera operated by a man, I tried to maintain eye contact with the subjects, beaming an invisible force field around us that might somehow render the space safe to be vulnerable. I had no power to tell them to stop filming until an appropriate crew was put in place; I was just a senior editor and didn’t oversee the video team. But it was a small victory.

  That experience was one of the first times I started to suspect that what I really wanted was final say over the way all of our content was made. It was hard to stomach the fact that my strongly held convictions could be dismissed. And in general, how broken mainstream women’s media was is why I wanted to work in the field in the first place. I desperately wanted mediums where femininity equaled power, not weakness; where the things that marked you a woman were the reasons you could enter, not the reasons you weren’t safe; where women had the agency to define their own lives; and where no one would judge you for your aesthetic or who you loved. And I’ve watched the industry become close to that, and I’ve been lucky enough to be one of the entitled millennials who have successfully demanded more from the articles we read and the photos we look at. Because really, that’s what all the men who have accused me of being entitled have meant: that I feel entitled to being treated equally, to being safe in public, to not just survive as a woman but to enjoy being alive. And for many of them, that kind of entitlement is so alarming it becomes an insult, hurled at me to try to make me feel small, but I no longer take it as one.

  When I was in Texas for SXSW right after the Scorpio and I broke up, after I spent a couple of days hiding, I ran into my friend Kat. She’s one of two friends from my childhood who turned out queer (you might remember Kat as the friend who taught me how to smoke pot after prom—the other you might remember as the best friend I kissed on a dare in high school). Kat was playing drums in a very cool indie band that was receiving critical acclaim, so she was there to perform. She had been on tour for weeks and was exhausted from sleeping on couches and floors. Over tacos from a truck, I told her about the breakup; she listened with a concerned face and didn’t say much, but her presence was the most comforting thing I could imagine. My room had a pullout bed, so without much convincing she came back to the hotel with me and promptly passed out. I woke up hours before her and was fully dressed and caffeinated before she even stirred, but just having someone else in the room with me was all I needed to prevent me from continuing to lay there in my bathrobe, Gchatting my exes and feeling sorry for myself. Later, an aesthetician DM’d me on Instagram and offered me a free facial out of her home; she gently scrubbed my pores, professional affection that I really needed. And, that same day, I took a meeting with two PR people in the courtyard at the Four Seasons and ended up spilling the entire breakup story; they responded with much-needed pep talks about how I needed to start putting myself first. It turned out one of them lived near me and invited me to have dinner with her family. Despite how lonely I had felt at the beginning of that trip, I wasn’t alone in the slightest.

  And similarly, the morning after I was attacked on the subway, I had to go to Fort Wayne, Indiana
. I don’t know why I always had to travel right after traumatic things happened. Maybe I was just always traveling. At any rate, I was going there to speak at their Design Week, or DWFW; I was told that a group of local college students had specifically requested they hire me, and I never said no to young people. Going there felt surreal. I wore a red jumpsuit that I’d just bought in Paris, trying to look more powerful than I felt. The talk went well; to my astonishment there was laughter and applause, frequently. When it was time for audience questions, a young woman said, “How did you become such a badass?”

  Still coming down from the trauma of the day before, I felt anything but badass. I felt scared and tired. And I was taken aback by the question. So I said, “I’m not.”

  I looked into the audience and could tell that’s not what they wanted to hear, so I quickly backtracked, talking about how when you’re a woman and you’re gay, you learn early to fight extra hard for yourself.

  Afterward, a woman who was a bit older than me introduced herself and then embraced me tightly. She said, “I’ve been reading Nylon for a long time, and I feel like I can tell when you started working there.” She told me how much it meant to her to see racial diversity improve in the content. And then she said, “Are you hungry?”

  I admitted, “I’m starving.”

  She, her sister, and her daughters took me and two of the other speakers out to dinner at their favorite restaurant. They told us about their work—they were community activists who had recently put on a gallery show about natural hair. I didn’t tell them what had happened to me the day before, but I feel like they all sensed that I needed nurturing, because they carried the conversation, and they fed me, and they made sure I got back to my hotel safely.

  I was so thankful I wanted to cry. That kind of support was more valuable to me than any kind of award or being on any kind of media list. And I know now, after years of therapy, that I am entitled to support, that I don’t have to go through hard stuff alone—it’s not a burden to lean on people who love you. If anything, it’s a burden to shut them out.