Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed

  But even though what happened to me that night at fourteen was common, was not as severe as what happened to my other friends or to me later, it still had an impact. I stopped playing pool with my male cousins in my aunt’s basement. And more than a decade later, when a guy I really liked, the guy I would eventually marry, asked me on a date to play pool, I had a sinking sense of dread and shame. I didn’t know how to explain why I didn’t like to play.

  * * *

  Grab them by the pussy.

  Just locker room talk.

  Those phrases infiltrated my brain in October 2016. The violence behind the one. The dismissal, the devaluation of so many lived experiences, including my own, behind the other. The smug face that spoke them, the way he and so many others shrugged like those words didn’t matter. This was the living, breathing embodiment of So fucking what. The embodiment of the years of damage endured by me and every other person who had had their body violated.

  Perhaps because I had grown so used to being told in many ways that my body didn’t matter—through boob grabs, through nonconsensual sex, through the many men trying to legislate what I could do with it—the first phrase didn’t bother me as much as the second.

  The second phrase gave permission; it created the space that made the first phrase possible. The second phrase is the justification behind rape culture. No, it simply is rape culture.

  And it reminded me of my own locker room talk, which was a very different sort, but stemmed from that same idea that boys and men could say anything no matter whom it hurt.

  The first place I went in my head when I heard that dismissal was not the pool hall or the back of that pickup truck. It was not the bedroom floor where the rug scraped against my bare ass and the ring on my necklace bruised my chest and tears bloomed in my eyes because I was too afraid to say stop. It was the locker room of my junior high. It was day after day after day in seventh and eighth grade, when I slumped down on the bench and pulled my regular clothes out of my locker, trying to change into them as quickly and discreetly as possible, not because I was modest but because I’d spent the last forty minutes being told by the boys in my class how ugly I was. My chest was flat as a board. My hair was stringy and gross. I looked like a man, not a girl.

  So I didn’t want to see my nonexistent breasts, my skinny legs that they said I should really learn to shave. I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see the face or the body that was clearly freakish, ghoulish, and would never be loved.

  That was my locker room talk. Their voices in my head, reducing me to the sum of my parts, and my parts were clearly worthless.

  * * *

  I was fifteen, a sophomore in high school, the first time I had sex. It seemed like most of my friends had already done it, but while that was in the back of my head, it was not the reason why I did it. Greg and I had been dating a month, and we were so deeply connected it felt like we’d always been together and always would be. Soul mates. True love. Like Kurt and Courtney. Like Sid and Nancy. Those were our versions of Romeo and Juliet, and we happily ignored the fact that they also ended in tragedy.

  We did it for the first time in my bedroom. My parents were out, and I paid my little brother ten bucks to stay downstairs and watch TV. The entire act from when we started kissing until Greg was pulling off the condom lasted roughly twenty minutes or five and a half songs on an album I can no longer listen to. That album isn’t banned from my life because of that night—I thought that night was blissful. I mean, the sex wasn’t mind-blowing, but it wasn’t painful like I’d feared it would be. It made me feel closer to Greg, as close as two people could get, and that was all I wanted. To feel like I wasn’t that girl from the locker room anymore. I was not ugly and unloveable. My bond with Greg assured me of that.

  We dated for almost six months. We had sex eighteen times. I’m not sure why I still remember that exact number. I do not at this point remember the proportions: how much of that was sex I wanted and how much was sex I endured because I thought I had to. I do remember the exact date that the switch occurred. Roughly three months into our relationship. April 11, 1995.

  At that point I was down to one friend besides Greg; he’d found reasons for banishing all of the others from my life. My wardrobe had also been restricted: baggy band T-shirts and jeans were okay; the baby-doll dresses and fishnets I’d collected were not. He’d made me let him read my diary because nothing should be secret between us. I’d found a way of telling myself that all of these things were just signs that he cared, that we were so close, so in love. I found a way of swallowing my instincts, my gut feeling of wrongness. It would literally burn holes in my stomach; at sixteen I’d be diagnosed with ulcers.

  April 11, 1995

  It was raining. We were dropped off at the one remaining friend’s house. Greg said that before going inside we should have sex in her garage. She was already right there at the window, and did I mention it was raining? So I said no, for the first and last time.

  He gave me the silent treatment for hours until my friend convinced him to go into her bedroom with me and talk. Just talk. She was firm on that, and I was in agreement. I didn’t want to have sex in her room. I didn’t want to have sex at all.

  But here’s how the conversation went:

  If you don’t have sex with me, I feel rejected. We had sex before, so if you don’t want to have it again, it must mean you don’t love me. If you don’t love me, we should break up. If we break up, I will die because you are the only person in the world that I care about. Are you rejecting me?

  No.

  Do you want to break up?

  No.

  Do you love me?

  Yes. Of course, yes.

  Saying yes to love meant saying yes to sex. And that is how I ended up on my friend’s bedroom floor (“We can’t use her bed” was my one caveat) with the rug scraping against my bare ass and the ring on my necklace bruising my chest and tears blooming in my eyes because I was too afraid to say, Stop, this hurts, because that might be perceived as rejection.

  That is also how I repeatedly ended up on my knees in a park bathroom during lunch, ignoring the cold, the smell of piss, the ants marching by, and the grate of the drain digging into my skin.

  That is also how I ended up in his basement having sex without a condom even though the thought of pregnancy terrified me.

  The basement was the last time. He broke up with me after that because he wanted to have sex with other people.

  Again, I don’t know how many times out of that eighteen times total that I had sex with Greg out of fear instead of love or desire, but it was enough that sometimes I still freeze up during sex. Sometimes I’m still afraid to say no.

  * * *

  It was the Tuesday after “Grab them by the pussy” and “Just locker room talk,” when I walked to the front of a university classroom and stated that I was a survivor. The woman standing next to me—my friend, colleague, and event co-organizer—stated that she was a survivor as well. We were there to read the words of another survivor, the woman whom Brock Turner, a nineteen-year-old freshman, had brutally assaulted on the Stanford campus in January of 2015. The woman, a twenty-two-year-old who’d attended a campus fraternity party with her sister, was intoxicated and unconscious when two international students found Turner on top of her behind a Dumpster. At the hearing and in the media, much was made of the fact that Turner was a swimmer with an athletic scholarship and how much he stood to lose if punished for, as his own father put it, “twenty minutes of action.” The survivor read her powerful 7,138-word victim-impact statement at the sentencing, and after Turner received only six months despite this, her words were published online and read on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Turner was released after serving only three months.

  The highest number of sexual assaults on college campuses occur within the first six weeks of classes. We’d decided it was crucial to host a community reading of this survivor’s letter and a discussion about rape c
ulture during that window. It felt even more pressing after that weekend when rape culture had so brashly, so unapologetically been put on display.

  Our campus is not huge and neither was our crowd—maybe thirty people who came and went over the two-hour period, but it was significant for every person who was there. The reading truly was a community reading. Everyone in that room was invited to come up when they felt so moved and read as much or as little as they wanted. A few lines, a page. “You can stop when it becomes too much,” we told them. My friend and I started it off, we stepped in whenever there was not someone else up there to take a turn, and we both stood near the podium at all times so no one would be alone while reading.

  I ended reading the last portion of the letter, where she thanks those who supported her—from her sister to the two men who saved her. I did so through thick tears because I’d forgotten to grab Kleenex from the box nearby. I choked up. I considered stepping back, but I didn’t want to. I knew that the most powerful part was coming, where she addressed girls everywhere to say that she was with us, fighting alongside us, believing us, being a lighthouse and shining out in the darkness as a reminder that we are powerful, valuable, and cannot be silenced. I cleared my throat and let the words ring loud and true.

  In that moment I was in two places at once. I was in a Seattle classroom in October of 2016 and I was in an anarchist space in Chicago in May of 1996, at another event that I’d helped organize: The Midwest Girl Fest.

  In the aftermath of my relationship with Greg, I’d taken scalding-hot showers, I’d smashed mirrors and carved lines and words like “Slut” and “Lost” with broken glass and sharp pieces of metal, I’d starved myself just to prove I had control over my own body, but I’d also found release in music. I’d gravitated naturally to angry female voices. To Courtney Love and Hole. To Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill. To Corin Tucker and Heavens to Betsy, and later, Sleater-Kinney.

  I immersed myself in their words, in their rage. I sought more and more and through that I found a community of girls who made music and zines and shouted for “Revolution Girl Style Now!” Some still called themselves riot grrrls at that point, though to others that movement had been flawed—and it was, largely due to a lack of intersectionality—but they still wanted to fight, to do something. So, those of us in Chicago birthed The Midwest Girl Fest: a weekend of workshops and frank discussion about sexism, racism, and classism. There was also an open mic, and though I had not been planning to read at it, I had a journal with me. A journal containing a letter I’d written to Greg about everything he’d done to me. I went up to that microphone and read it through my tears, telling the full story of my relationship aloud for the very first time.

  Girls I barely knew hugged me afterward. A lifelong friendship was sealed with the girl who held my hand as I spoke. The open mic was recorded, and I made sure to get a copy. I listened to myself only a couple of times, but it was enough just to know that, like my musical heroines, I’d spoken my truth.

  Strengthened by the response to my reading, I continued to write about my relationship with Greg. I put together zines about what I’d been through and I was grateful for the dialogue they created—for the girls I didn’t even know who wrote me to say that sharing my experience gave them strength.

  But it was easy for others to take the power I’d struggled to regain. In the last zine I ever made, just after I graduated high school, I’d included a handwritten, diary-style piece describing how “my boyfriend took me to a public bathroom at lunch to fuck me.” Behind my handwriting, I’d collaged the typed words “rape” and “sexual assault.” I also revealed that I’d cried about it for the first time just two days earlier and told my roommate, “I was raped, like, twice a week for a month.”

  It was the most vulnerable I’d ever been, not just speaking that word aloud, but putting it in print: rape. Before that I’d always said “sexual abuse” because I felt like I could defend my use of that phrase. I could say, “My boyfriend emotionally abused me and it led to sexual abuse.” And in the same way I’d known deep down that what happened to my friend and me when we were fourteen would be easily dismissed, I’d also known that I would have to defend myself. That though no one in my life had taken Greg to task for his actions, my words would be put on trial. And sure enough they were.

  After I mailed out my zine, a male friend sent me a letter telling me I was “victimizing” myself, and though I’m sure he used a euphemism of some sort, that I should get over it. He also made it clear that I didn’t have the right to use words like “rape” or “sexual assault.” Those were words for women who’d fought and said no.

  For the next three years I drank heavily and wrote nothing, and those feelings of worthlessness, of being ugly and damaged only became more suffocating.

  I was still struggling with how I was “allowed” to define my experience two decades later at that community reading of the Brock Turner survivor letter. After I finished reading, we opened the floor for discussion, a safe space to share. I didn’t know if I was going to, but then a college student described her experience, which clearly, unquestionably was rape, and she followed it by saying, “But he was my boyfriend and we’d had sex before, so . . . I don’t know what to call that.”

  I looked her in the eyes, mine tearing up again, and said, “I know exactly what you mean.” Then I’d described how, a few months earlier, I’d seen a poster for an anti-rape campaign that read:

  MYTH: “NO” MEANS “CONVINCE ME.” IT’S NOT RAPE IF WE GET TO “YES.”

  FACT: COERCED SEX IS STILL RAPE, EVEN WITH THE LACK OF PHYSICAL FORCE, EVEN WITH A “YES.”

  “I was walking down the street and it was on a lamppost,” I told them. “I cried because a lamppost told me what I’d needed to hear since I was fifteen years old.”

  As it turned out, a few of the people there had seen that lamppost and also felt validated. I sent the picture I’d taken of it to them so we could always carry that with us: the knowledge that we believed one another and so did the strangers who’d made and put up those signs.

  * * *

  When the man who unapologetically committed sexual assault was elected as president of the United States, I felt like half of my country had betrayed me. Half of my country had said to me and every other survivor, So fucking what? It hurt deeply, but what bothered me the most is that, at my core, I’d expected it. There was a numb, cynical, conditioned part of me that had been there since before I was groped in that pool hall or harassed in gym class that knew I lived in a society that turned a blind eye to sexual violence in all of its forms.

  No good has ever come from that numbness, though. I know that from the three years I wallowed in it after my experience had been invalidated and the words I used to define it were taken from me.

  I know that speaking up is a matter of survival. And I am heartened by the fact that I see it happening more and more. That people are coming together on college campuses to tell their stories and talk about rape culture. That people are tweeting that they believe survivors, that they are survivors. That people are speaking out and saying unequivocally that “Grab them by the pussy” is sexual assault. That “Just locker room talk” is bullshit. It is rape culture. It is unacceptable.

  There are people out there, I want to tell the version of me trying not to cry in a pool hall, on the bench of a gym locker room, on the dirty cement floor of a public bathroom, people who will not say, So fucking what? They will not tell you how to define your experience. If you speak up, they will listen, and they will believe you, and together we can say, These stories, these words, are mine.

  Some days I find that I still can’t speak up for me, but I can do it for the friends who were raped and abused at a young age. I can do it for the women and girls—cis and trans and genderqueer—all those people I’ve met only once, who bravely shared their stories in an anarchist space or in a college classroom. I can do it for everyone who has written me e-mails after hearing or reading my words to
tell me their stories or just to say please keep speaking up because I don’t feel like I can.

  I can do it for you. For all of us. Our experiences matter. Our voices matter. And the deafening silence that protects those who have violated us must be broken.

  FAT AND LOUD

  Julie Murphy

  Here’s something that simply reading my printed words might not otherwise reveal: I’m fat. Not polite fat. Not Hollywood fat. Not cute fat. Not fat from certain angles. Not chubby. Or curvy. Or even voluptuous. Or some other euphemism for fat. No, I’m fat. Truly fat. And I always have been.

  I’m also one of those angry feminists who won’t shut the hell up. I’m that person at family dinners and events who is always bringing up politics. It almost never ends well, and yet I do it anyhow. I get into Facebook arguments as part of my nightly routine. I may not be changing minds in the comments section of my local newspaper’s Facebook page, but if practice makes perfect, fighting in the comments section is my daily workout.

  You might wonder what the hell my being fat has to do with my politics, but hear me out.

  My tendency to always be political did not come out of the blue. It all started in second grade, when we had a classroom mock election to coincide with the 1992 election. Our choices were George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. I don’t know what it was about that age, but I remember my world expanding that year. It was the first time I could remember being obsessed with the Olympics, too. It’s not that my world was becoming bigger; it’s that I was coming to realize that the world was and would always be big. It was me who would do the growing to meet my world, not the other way around.

  Leading up to that Election Day in 1992, I spent many nights sitting with my dad as he watched the news. My dad was a lifelong Democrat and encouraged me to vote for Bill Clinton. At that age, I’d do almost anything to make my dad proud, but I found myself obsessing over small details that had nothing to do with the candidates. Specifically Hillary Clinton’s headbands and the texture and color of her hair.