On
a spring day in recent memory, I was strolling up Ninth Avenue alone,
after leaving a bistro lunch with a gentleman caller and my
soon-to-finish-N.Y.U. son. It was sunny but not yet steaming.
Businessmen had their ties tugged loose or suit jackets slung over their
shoulders. There were floral frocks and filmy blouses among the
adorably pierced and punked-out goths of Hell’s Kitchen. I could almost
feel the financial yoke of my son’s college tuition slipping off my
neck.
Then an approaching guy
chatting equably with a tall friend dodged at me to grab my crotch. I
don’t mean brushed by it maybe accidentally; I mean he grabbed between
my legs with a meaty claw, big as a waffle iron. He also called me the
C-word with breath that stank of beer. Then he passed on into a sandwich
shop with his buddy.
He wore a
royal-blue plaid short-sleeve shirt you might find in a J. Crew ad,
nicely hemmed jean shorts, and pricey sneakers. He was half my age and
twice my weight and had the wide, muscled form cultivated by Equinox
aficionados. Translation: he wasn’t dope sick or a flat-out loon.
In
case you haven’t been on the receiving end of this sort of assault, you
should know the primal physiological response it evokes—in this woman,
anyway. The stomach drops, as if you’ve been shoved backward from a
skyscraper and are flailing through space. Time dismantles. There are
more frames per second, and people’s facial features become very
specific. This guy had a squashed-down forehead, wide-set eyes, and
heavy but neatly waxed brows.
Cops
later told me my description was uncannily detailed—the result, I think,
of the kind of change in perception post-traumatic-stress experts call
“hypervigilance.” The reptilian area of the brain jolts you either to do
battle or to bolt. Adrenaline and cortisol juice through you like a hit
of meth, so you might find yourself still up and jittery at 4 A.M. (maybe even watching something as god-awful as “Waterworld,” the way I later did).
I
stood outside the doorway of the sandwich shop—pulse pounding in my
ears, my heart doing mule kicks in my chest. Inside, the Grabber, as I
thought of him, was waiting in line to order a sandwich. He was fine; I
was the one with the problem.
Shame
hit, a cold backwash of elemental shame: something bad had been done to
me; therefore I was bad. Even though I knew better, I started scanning
for how I’d incited this. Pedestrians glided past. A sandwich was being
made. I took stock of what I had on: in some ways, I wish I had been
wearing booty shorts and Lucite heels and prissing past the Port
Authority Bus Terminal holding my décolletage in my hands and saying
“hubba hubba.” I should be able to dress that way if the urge possesses
me.
Instead, I was wearing a modest
dress and platform slides with big cork soles to save the feet from
pounding concrete. For an instant, the shoes looked radiantly slutty,
the old-maid equivalent of dominatrix spikes. I was drenched in sweat,
and part of me wanted to bolt the two blocks to my apartment, scramble
up the stairs, double-latch the door, and crawl behind some heavy
furniture. But inside all that noise in my head, some space bar got hit,
and a moment of quiet opened up.
One
good side effect of a childhood as chaotic as my own is that I’ve
worked up habits that can pay off in the middle of a butt-whipping. (I
take twenty minutes of silence morning and night, and I see a
therapist.) While the Grabber paid for his tidily wrapped sandwich, I
noticed all the young women passing by—some, yes, in booty shorts, and
with bodacious tatas—and I thought, If this sick bastard will do this to
me in broad daylight, what’s he doing to these young’uns at 3 A.M.?
My mind shuffled through the myriad times that run-ins like this had
happened before. Then I came to and shouted from the doorway, “Not
today! Not this bitch! You picked the wrong woman to fuck with today!”
The
counter guy, bills in hand, craned around the line to see the madwoman
outside. As the Grabber half-turned, the size of him shocked me and I
backed away farther, to the other side of a parking meter, where my eyes
could still shoot flying cartoon daggers at his broad back, albeit with
some yardage between us.
Then a voice rose from the sidewalk. “What’d he do?” It was a man on a rectangle of cardboard you might normally step around.
“He
grabbed”—polite words didn’t seem fierce enough, and the gross ones
struck me as obscene—“my private zone!” This was the name my kid’s
grade-school teacher had used for any area covered by a bathing suit: private zone.
So many guys might shrug it off: What’s the big deal? This one jutted his jaw out, saying, “He cain’t do that”
with such fire that I started dialing 911. In a moment, I was on with a
police dispatcher, describing the Grabber as he got his change and
hustled out of the shop with his friend. They ignored me and started to
get away, walking fast toward the bus station. My new friend on the
cardboard said, “Go, go, go!” and I started to trot. They broke into a
sprint, outpacing me right off.
Around
Forty-first Street, a cop car pulled up, and I hopped in and recounted
it all as they peeled out like they do on “Law & Order.” The
female officer riding shotgun radioed the description I gave her to
other cops, who nabbed him and hauled him, handcuffed, before me outside
the Port Authority. “That’s him!” I said. He was blank-eyed, as if this
whole thing were happening to somebody else. His buddy was amped up,
though, claiming his friend hadn’t done anything. I shot back that that
was horse hockey—yes, he had—and the buddy walked off as an officer put
the Grabber in the back of a cruiser.
How satisfying was all this? Very.
En
route to the station, the female officer looked back through the cage:
Did I need counselling? I told her I’d had enough counselling to chase
the sucker up Ninth Avenue. I only wanted to press charges.
I
filed a report. Later they told me the guy was a thirty-something from
Jersey. He had a light rap sheet with no record of sexual assault.
Nobody ever called me to court, but the cops had cuffed him, dragged him
out of the bus station, and booked him. A woman should be able to count
on follow-through from the justice system—they’d eventually fail to
charge him—but at least he spent a night at Rikers. At the time, I felt
somewhat vindicated.
For days after,
I kept chewing on what thrill the Grabber got from his move. It just
won’t translate to my gender. There are plenty of guys I might fancy
kissing on the mouth, but to grab a passing one in the crotch and say, nice package?
One pal joked, “Oh, yeah, try it,” suggesting that, for men, any sexual
overture is welcome. I asked how he’d feel if a fellow weighing
three-forty cornered him somewhere isolated and manhandled him. Suddenly
this struck him as way more sinister.
Statistics show that nearly twenty per cent of women
in the U.S. have been raped at some point in their lives, and around
forty-four per cent of women have reported some other kind of sexual
violence. But I suspect that the figure is more like a hundred per cent
for women who will have endured things many men might consider minor—an
unwelcome penis pressed against your leg at a party; being humped at the
water cooler; being fondled, lunged at, felt up, squeezed, rubbed
against. Verbal assaults few try to count. I’m glad to have aged out of
the days when every street worker or blunt-puffing idler was part of a
masculine gantlet I had to clear.
Since
ending a ten-year relationship this fall, I’ve been subject to several
gropings and gross jibes of the type you’d expect behind a junior-high
gym dance, and they’ve been delivered by grownups, putative pals, not
one of whom I even dimly considered getting jiggy with. Did they think
that coarsely describing some body part or restraining me in locked arms
or bending me over furniture would help to bed me? A few tried to say
that at my age I should be flattered.
Not
all offenses hurt the same way. Crude cracks seldom overwhelm the way a
physical attack can. Nor are the sloppy lunges of somebody at a
well-lit party as intimidating as some random dude grabbing you in an
alley. One girlfriend of mine had a stranger in a first-class cabin turn
his computer to show her snakes coming out of a woman’s private zone.
It deeply upset her. “Some things you just can’t unsee.” At a
Thanksgiving dinner where I hosted my son and his fiancée, a boorish
guest showed everybody smartphone shots he’d taken of a woman’s breasts.
(I told him that if I wanted to look at boobs, I’d go to a titty bar.)
The point is: even a boundary violation mild enough to invoke nudges and
winks among less sympathetic people can leave you feeling slimy.
Underlying
all these actions exists the apparently unshakable tenet that any
expression of male sexuality is somehow normal and every man’s right,
whether or not a woman on the receiving end is repulsed or upset by it.
All of us—male and female—envision all manner of erotic encounters
without acting them out. But many of my male friends brush aside the
behaviors that women find truly scary, the kind we know from experience
can be the prelude to a nasty or even dangerous run-in. And something in
the repetition of these behaviors—and in the culture’s blindness to the
insult—wires itself into your body fibres and instills a debilitating
sense that you’re not quite safe walking around.
My
therapist—less a how-do-you-feel-about-that nodder than a wry commenter
on my human comedy—didn’t argue with my estimate that all women have
been to some degree sexually assaulted (as she was, as every one of her
female patients over thirty-plus years has been). “It’s nothing you’re doing,”
she said, adding that guys who force themselves on ninety-year-olds
don’t target them for how hot they are but for how easily overpowered.
My
own pet opinion is that the guys who make creepy comments on the street
or grab you or constantly seek to reassert sexual possibilities in ways
that make you uncomfortable aren’t just oafs. They seem to get a
perverse thrill from mortifying you. That’s why I chased the Grabber
down. It bothers me to say that it took a man’s urging to give me the
gumption. Still, I’ve often wanted to find that guy living on a piece of
cardboard, to thank him.
