6/10/19: enough

As I stepped into the coffee shop, a man came toward me, freshly purchased coffee in hand, so I paused to step to the side and hold the door for him because manners. As he passed me, he said chipperly, “Thank you, sweetheart.”

I felt the universe pause for just the tiniest moment and then, in the space of a heartbeat, my eyes turned black and I let loose an unearthly shriek, a noise which only became louder and higher as my body began to unbend and grow: long, knife-edged legs unfolding from my torso, my head now bulbous and furry and crushing the ceiling upward, people keeling over all around me as I staggered back onto the sidewalk so I could unleash my true form, the noise of a thousand thousand bats still coming from my throat as eddies of birds began to gather overhead, pulsing and swooping and diving down to pluck at the eyeballs of the men who lay twitching, felled by the unfathomable weight of sheer rage I gathered up and whipped loose to echo up and down 8th Avenue, cars crashing into lampposts, dogs howling with terror, and then, faintly the sound of sirens, a hesitant, almost tentative eeeee-aw? as the machines of men stuttered toward me, small as toys now and yet a comfortable weight when I gathered one up in a leg and slung it over my torso and let it bounce down 53rd Street behind me. Too late to put this creature back, I gave a moment’s regret to the iced coffee I’d never have, then set my sights for midtown and the gleaming erect towers of men. Enough had, apparently, finally been enough.

Sigh, I wish. But seriously, I’m also not a huge fan of “honey,” and I don’t think anyone even over 85 should be using “dear” or “dearie”; and let’s please not even talk about referring to women as “gals” or “chicks” or, goddess forbid, “girls.” I don’t mind “ladies” so much, but if you come anywhere near me with “babes” I cannot be responsible for what happens next.

As so many women do, I’ve got many a story about what it’s like being a woman, but the first time I really realized, finally understood in my bones, that I—that we—are different from them was when a professor in my graduate program invited me out for drinks, ostensibly to discuss my work, but actually it turns out to invite me to share his bed. He was married, he hastened to admit, as if the wedding ring hadn’t given me a clue, but “that part of [their] life is over now,” and those words will go with my to my grave because the sheer chutzpah, the unbelievable crassness, of that man. He was born the same year as my father and was a tenured professor with the ability to use his standing to impact my academic and future professional career. He lured me to this bar under the pretense of being an avuncular advisor, the kind of generous mentor-figure who would make time in his schedule to meet me for a drink and encourage my work. And then when he had me there, he was completely, earnestly sincere about what it was he really wanted.

I had been so nervous for the meeting, though I’d had classes with him and knew him well enough because oh yes by the way not only was I his student I also worked in the department (as a condition of my scholarship), but even still I was so excited that he’d singled me out for personal attention, that he saw something in me which he wanted to develop and encourage—well, I am certain I annoyed the ever-loving shit out of all my friends talking endlessly about how HE had invited ME for A DRINK to discuss MY work. I planned out all the questions I would ask him about my projects, designing them carefully to maximize the advice and wisdom I could get from him without taking up undo amounts of his time, and played out a few fantasy scenarios to see which I might like best: would he offer to introduce me to his agent? Wait, no—what if his agent was THERE, as a surprise? No, too much. What if he just told me in all his years teaching he’d never come across a mind as sharp and incisive as mine? That, I reasoned, would be a more than satisfactory outcome. All the agent-introduction stuff could come later.

Factually speaking, we did discuss my work, but we weren’t half a beer in before he laid out his actual proposal. He’d thought it all through and outlined for me my obligations (one) versus his (many), including making sure no one at the university found out and that I felt cared for and safe, he would never do anything to make me uncomfortable, of course not, and with a word I could end it at any time, and on and on so that even dumb 23-year-old me finally realized this was a finely honed pitch and I was but the latest foolish grad student to be summoned on stage for this tawdry little farce.
I didn’t take him up on his offer, for SO many reasons, and I’m not judging anyone who did or might have. I’m judging him, that arrogant ass, and all the other ones like him who have all manner of explanations and reasons and excuses and defenses but in the end, could we pin them down like specimens, their little arms waving helplessly in the air, we would get from them the truth. It boils down to just this: we have something they think they deserve.

This is the place where anyone telling their version of this story usually stops to acknowledge that so many others have had it SO much worse and that women of color and impoverished women are especially vulnerable to being preyed upon by men, and that, of course, there are men who are victims of men as well, and just to cover all the bases yes, there are probably terrible women out there in the world too, and no, of course, not, I’m not saying all men are bad and I’m sure we all have men in our lives who would never behave inappropriately and by the end of this hypothetical paragraph I’d be so turned around in caveats and acknowledgments and hedges and trying to argue that yes, are infinite degrees of provocations, from wolf-whistles to murder, but no, all of them matter, that I might find myself tempted to move right on to Phase II, in which I would open up about how I, too, have engaged in sexist behavior (certainly) or behaved inappropriately, say in dating a man who was subordinate to me (indeed), and remind us all that this professor and I were both consenting adults and hey, can’t blame a guy for shooting his shot.

I’m not doing any of these things, though: I’m not going to try to locate my own experiences within some ranking system that spans all of human experience and I’m not going to bother to spend time explaining all the ways in which I, too, am human and have erred time and again, and I’m certainly not going to offer any allowances for his behavior.

I’m not doing that because these things don’t matter: what happened to me that afternoon almost twenty years ago isn’t changed by the fact that as I was sipping Guinness in a cozy bar discussing my privileged education, somewhere a woman was being sold as a sex slave or beaten to death by her husband or raped—or was she?—in a hazy confusion of alcohol. My own history of sexist behavior doesn’t matter, either, unless you want to believe that I earned what I got in some kind of karmic balancing scheme, in which case go with god, my friend, that seems kind of messed up but you do you. And sure, the phrase “You can’t blame a guy for trying” might try to spring to the lips, but: NO. None of that matters.

What does matter is that ever since that day I have heard a faint humming in the background, a radio turned so low I have to strain to hear, but when I tilt my head just right or pause in a moment of silence the words become clear:

Thanks, sweetheart. You’re not like them. 

He was being such a little bitch. They see you differently than they do each other. 

Oh, don’t you look nice today! You have something they want and on any given day, any one of them could decide to take it. 

Oh relax, I didn’t mean anything by it, you’re making a big deal out of nothing.

That last is the hardest. It lands with the sound of a prison door clanging shut. I like to give it space to echo a bit, to see if any heads lift at the ringing, but most of the time there’s just a great gray wall and too many locks and not enough keys and so the thing I feel like we're starting to talk about is this: we’re inside, ladies. We’re all of us inside. If we’re going to lean into something, let’s lean into this: let’s get stronger, let’s get smarter, let’s make sure the new women know the deal, let’s not bother waiting for the parole board to set a date for our reviews. Let’s pretend we’re here for life and start figuring out how to work this system from the inside out, together. Call all the birds, birds: the sound is getting louder and from everywhere I'm hearing that enough is finally enough--we can't change them. Let's change us.

Comments

  1. Those last seven words...... and all that came before them are stunning, just stunning.

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  2. Replies
    1. thank you for these nice words--i appreciate them & you. :) xoxo

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