One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

by Scaachi Koul

  A few weeks before that, I’d gone to dinner with another friend. We ordered a second bottle of wine for ourselves, a typical routine for us. (She once told me to start drinking rosé because it’s “a literary drink,” which is maybe the best excuse I’ve ever heard to start drinking something new.) When the bottle arrived and we let out a delighted laugh, we noticed two men seated near us lean in and say to each other: “We’re in.” We grimaced and drank our bottle, then a third after that.

  Years before that, when I was just barely old enough to get into a bar and order a drink, a man had offered to buy me a drink. I said no, no thank you, I’d just got one. He was hitting on me, clearly, but I didn’t realize that, so naturally he tensed up and got angry at me, the way any good guy would. “What are you even here for?” he said, picking up his ball and going home.

  Often, people describe rape as an unfortunate accident, two drunk bodies colliding: it’s more about mis-communication than intentionally ignoring a lack of consent, or actively seeking a body and mind that can’t say no. But rape culture doesn’t flourish by error; it’s a methodical operation so ingrained in our public consciousness that we don’t even notice when it’s happening, and we rarely call it out even when we do see it.

  Men watch women in a way we’ve long since normalized. It’s normal for men to watch you when you enter a bar, to watch what you’re drinking, what you’re doing, in an attempt to get closer to you. It’s normal for them to offer you a drink, and when you say no, to press a little further with are you sure, come on, have one drink with me. (When a guy asks to buy you a drink, suggest he buy you a snack instead and see how that goes over.) Men watch women at the gym, at work, on the subway: in any space occupied by men and women, the women are being watched.

  The men seated next to me at the bar recently weren’t trying to figure out how to talk to me. They weren’t discussing what would work as a good opening line or how to impress me so I would willingly go home with one of them. They weren’t even deciding whether they wanted to buy me a drink or what I actually needed, which was a burrito. They were conspiring.

  —

  Have you heard of “party culture”? It’s one of many false culprits that rapists blame for their actions, as if party culture influences them to assault an unconscious or drunk woman. Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer found guilty in 2016 of sexual assault, argued that alcohol and party culture were to blame for what he did to a drunk, unconscious woman. It somehow strips away every modicum of morality or ethics you have. It’s not his fault; it’s just that they were both drunk.

  Turner’s blaming booze is hardly the first time alcohol has been considered a bigger factor in an assault than the formulaic, intentional calculation of a rapist. In 2012, seventeen-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, killed herself after she was gang-raped while intoxicated and the photos of the assault were circulated online. That same year, in Steubenville, Ohio, a high school girl was raped by her classmates while she was drunk, then photographed. In 2013, Vanderbilt University football players were accused of raping an unconscious twenty-one-year-old student in a dorm.

  What a coincidence that rapists so frequently seem to find women who are drunk.

  We know being drunk doesn’t mean you deserve to be assaulted, and we know that there are plenty of men who can drink without raping someone. When we think of rape, we tend to think of coordinated calculation: Men who drive around in unmarked vans with duct tape and chloroform in the back. Men who follow women around, tracking their daily moves, catching them at their most vulnerable. We think of rape in terms of how men create intricate plans for hurting women, for sexual violence at its most gruesome, men who use physical force to hold women down. But we don’t, for some reason, associate it with a man who surveils you in public, maybe for an hour or two, to see if you’re getting drunk on your own or if he needs to help you along by buying you a drink. These types of rapes—rapes where women are too drunk to consent, or unconscious, or when no one bothers to ask for consent in the first place—are considered accidents. Everyone was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Youthful indiscretion. Party culture. It’s the wine’s fault. We forget that there’s calculation, that he walked up to you because you were teetering and he thought it would be easy.

  Pickup-artist culture is most obviously dedicated to monitoring women, to tracking their moves and how the little ways we let our guard down may benefit a man. Roosh V, a pickup artist perhaps best known for saying rape should be legal, gives tips on his site for which girls you should pick up at a bar: “I look for girls who are drinking…It’s possible to have a one-night stand with a sober girl, but a few drinks in her makes it easier.”

  But we see it in far less insidious places too, normalized in what we consume as entertainment. On the U.S. version of The Office, Michael Scott spent much of the first few episodes sexually harassing his boss, Jan, ignoring her when she said no and following her around. After a night of drinking, they slept together, but she still rejected him the next day. He continued to harass her at work and monitor her actions to see if something suggested she didn’t mean it when she said no. How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson had pickup techniques that, if displayed in the real world, would get him arrested. Plenty of Mad Men episodes were about getting women drunk in order to take them home.

  Surveillance feeds into rape culture more than drinking ever could. It’s the part of male entitlement that makes them believe they’re owed something if they pay enough attention to you, monitor how you’re behaving to see if you seem loose and friendly enough to accommodate a conversation with a man you’ve never met. He’s not a rapist. No, he’s just offering to buy you a beer, and a shot, and a beer, and another beer, he just wants you to have a really good time. He wants you to lose the language of being able to consent. He’s drunk too, but of course, you’re not watching him like he’s watching you.

  —

  The first time I was roofied, I was barely eighteen, and as I walked home from one bar I was swept into another by a man who promised me a glass of water and a comfortable seat. “I’ll get you some water and then you’ll be able to get home okay,” he told me. I said okay because I didn’t have the language for, “No, please get me a cab.” He was nice to me and he had a soft, French accent and he was cute. (I think he was cute. I just remember a vague brunette blob holding my hand and guiding me to a table.)

  He put a glass in front of me and I drank greedily, until my brain got foggier and my limbs felt weak. He sat next to me for most of the night, he watched me tip the glass to my mouth, he waited for my words to become more and more indistinct. He turned his back for a second and I stole away to the bathroom because I knew something was wrong with my body, knew that my brain couldn’t send a message to my legs to stop shaking or my heart to beat slower. It was a distress signal I had heard about from other women who always told me to be careful with my drinks, to cover them up, to drink out of bottles if possible, to avoid a drink that might be fizzing unnecessarily. It was the first time, and yet, familiar: I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror—hair matted, forehead beaded with sweat, lips dry and cracked—before my legs locked and I collapsed.

  Outside the door, a woman heard me fall, and she came in and picked me up. She asked me what my name was and where I lived and I don’t remember telling her anything. She carried me out front, through a snowbank, and into a cab. The guy who had spent the night with me, who was running around the bar trying to find me, rushed up before she could close the door. “Wait,” he said, “she’s with me. I’ll take her home.”

  The woman turned to him, blocking me from his view. “Okay,” she said. “What’s her name?”

  My name is difficult enough for the sober, for people I have known for years, never mind a stranger at a bar, someone who I do not think ever asked me what my name was. He backed off immediately, and the woman handed my cab driver some money and put my seatbelt on for me. “Take her straight home and make
sure she gets inside,” she said. “And if you don’t, I will find out, because I’m a lawyer.” I woke up the next morning on my kitchen floor in my penguin pyjama bottoms.

  The second time, a bartender drugged both me and my (male) friend. Our best theory is that he was trying to get to me, and that was easier if my friend was out of commission. We were both dizzy and hysterical and confused after two drinks apiece. I walked him to the subway at midnight and remember nothing else, except that he lost his phone and we were both sick for days. I laughed it off—“I’ve done this before,” I told him—but he was so rattled he didn’t ask to see me for months.

  Both times, I knew I was being watched. The first time, I was being watched when I stumbled down a street by myself, and so I got pulled into a bar I didn’t want to go into. I was watched while I drank, watched while I struggled to give answers. My drunkenness was monitored, because the drunker I got, the less resistance I could offer. Saying no is a clear full stop, but if I can’t really speak at all, if my words are running together and I’m closer to sleep than struggle, then it’s somehow okay to take me home.

  The second time, I was being watched by a bartender who spent too much time hovering over our drinks, who filled them up from an area behind the bar I couldn’t see. Who knew I had to be wary of the guy whose job it was to give me a drink and, preferably, not poison me? If you can’t trust your bartender, you can’t trust anyone.

  And yet, being surveilled with the intention of assault or rape is practically mundane, it happens so often. It’s such an ingrained part of the female experience that it doesn’t register as unusual. The danger of it, then, is in its routine, in how normalized it is for a woman to feel monitored, so much so that she might not know she’s in trouble until that invisible line is crossed from “typical patriarchy” to “you should run.”

  So now, when I drink, I’m far more cautious. I don’t like ordering draft beers from taps hidden from view. I don’t like pouring bottles into pint glasses. I don’t leave my drink with strangers, I don’t let people I don’t know order drinks for me without watching them do it, and I don’t drink excessively with people I don’t think I can trust with my sleepy body. I don’t turn my back on a cocktail, not just because I like drinking but because I can’t trust what happens to it when I’m not looking. The intersection of rape culture and surveillance culture means that being a guarded drinker is not only my responsibility, it is my sole responsibility. Any lapse in judgment could not only result in clear and present danger, but also set me up for a chorus of “Well, she should’ve known better.”

  The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn’t premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you’re drunk and you run into a girl who’s also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you’re being accused of something you’d never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn’t a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don’t notice when someone’s watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink.

  Papa , March 3, 2016

  I’m a big fan of Suge Knight.

  He upset the humdrum routine of everyday life.

  Scaachi , March 3, 2016

  He might be a murderer.

  Papa , March 3, 2016

  Murder is necessary to social order.

  Mister Beast Man to You, Randor

  The most terrifying prospect that comes with learning about oral sex is appreciating that someday you might want to let someone’s face be that close to your vagina. With their mouth. Their mouth.

  I was eleven or twelve when I learned about oral sex, and I hadn’t even looked directly at my vagina yet. It would be another year before I’d take my mom’s old compact mirror, pull back the folds, and try to make sense of what was going on down there. I’m supposed to let a man put his mouth on this? Does he blow into the hole? What if I pee directly into his mouth? Oh my god, does he pee into the hole? What kind of laughable hellscape is womanhood supposed to be?

  This horror was just the first in a long string of miserable realizations, which came around the time I noticed that my body made me different from the girls at school I considered attractive. My skin was darker than that of my female peers, and my body wasn’t shaped like a white girl’s—I had thick arms and dark knuckles and ashy knees. My lips were full (not trendy quite yet) and the bridge of my nose was wide and broken. When I played with the other girls, they got to be Mary Jane and I was, inexplicably, Spider-Man: not normal enough to be human, not cool enough to be a worthy superhero.

  Puberty hit fast and ugly. Almost overnight, I looked over the expanse of my body and noticed sharp, dark, thick hairs sprouting all over me. I was covered in hair by the sixth grade, with a unibrow forming, my arms already furry and my legs like sparsely sewn wool leggings. My mom agreed to facial waxing by twelve—I demanded we do it over summer vacation, so I could try to convince people that the hair magically vanished when it got hot. There was shame in having to admit that you had a little moustache when all the white girls at school didn’t even get wispy hairs on the backs of their thighs. It would be embarrassing for anyone to call me out on actively trying for perceived perfection. I had a teacher once describe white-girl facial hair as “peach fuzz,” hair on the cheeks and above the lip that only shines in the sun. Peach fuzz is cute! It’s pink and soft and you kind of want to rub yourself against it because it feels nice. I’ve done my research, and there’s no positive connotation, at least for a preteen, for “prominent female moustache, subcategory: sable.”

  So while a man’s face near my clitoris was unheard of, the idea was made even worse by the sight of the shorn pussies I saw in pornography, girls that were smooth and rosy, looking more like Hostess treats than real girls. They barely had skin, never mind hair, every inch of them looking the way a woman was supposed to look, like a candy, something you might let roll around in your mouth. I wanted to know how you could get so hairless, so perfect, so determinately female.

  —

  My hair came in so thick and unrelenting and widespread that by fourteen my mother was investing in countless implements to make removing it easier: creams that burned the hair clean off but left me with a rash, electric contraptions my older cousins reassured me were virtually painless but actually plucked each hair out individually, and various razors with different benefits—one with built-in moisturizer, one that rotated around your knee without cutting you, one that vibrated to really get at the roots of your hairs. Neeta, the cousin who set up my illicit social media accounts, once sat with me in my mother’s bathroom, helping me use a tweezing implement to become as perfectly hairless as she always was. (She brought me a cup of ice and recommended numbing the area first. She was twenty-seven, and I loved running my hand along her tanned, waxed arms.) Regardless, there were only so many hours in the day, and I couldn’t dedicate my entire life to eradicating the hair from my face and arms and thighs and calves and back.

  At fifteen, I found a thick black hair growing out of my nipple, sticking out like a shard of glass that I somehow never noticed had impaled me. I looked at it all afternoon, trying to decide if it was actually my hair or if a synthetic hairbrush bristle had lodged itself into a part of my body where every sex ed teacher told me it was physically impossible to grow hair. None of my female friends reported back from puberty with nipple hair; all they said was that sometimes their periods would hurt and the blood looked more brown than red. My mother never suggested this would happen, either, and her skin was always smooth and poreless. Everything was a lie. It took me a few days before I could bring myself to pluck it; I felt so c
lose to it, like a family member I hated but might possibly grow to love. There’s something so carnal about pulling little parts of your body off or out of yourself.

  When I did pull the hair out, the root was twice as long as the visible section. I held this iceberg between my fingers, yet another indication from my body saying, “You, you are not quite a woman, inside or out.”

  Little is worse to a teenage girl—except, maybe, being overweight, or single, or dumped, or not having enough friends, or not getting invited to parties, or not being sexy, or being too sexy, or being a virgin, or not being a virgin, or being a smartass, or not being smart enough—than having hair where the world does not think you should have it. It’s rarely you who decides there’s something wrong with you; instead, you get your cues from someone who is the right combination of bored, cruel, and insecure about themselves to begin with. In the eighth grade, Junior High Bully and Track Doofus James sat next to me in English class. Our forearms bumped and he looked down at my hairy limb, the hair standing on end from static cling, and compared it to his bald one. “You’re…really hairy,” he said with the same wrinkled face you might make if a literal wolf showed up to class and started rooting around in your backpack. The adult version of me might have retorted with how much of a shame it was that James’s genes were so weak he couldn’t grow any chest hair while I was perfectly capable of growing the full beard of an escaped convict. But the thirteen-year-old me just squirmed until I thought enough time had passed for me to pull my sweater back on.

  The white girls I went to school with didn’t have sideburns like me, and I never bothered to ask them if they, too, plucked short, thick, black hairs from the tips of their noses. (I often heard them talk of “blackheads,” and spent many months considering whether that was white-girl code for facial hair.) Being a woman, I’ve always figured, has meant shedding this layer of primal protection. How is it that evolution still hasn’t caught up to me in knowing that I don’t need my anus hair to grow so long that I can braid it?