Content Warning: Sexual Assault
The initial reaction I had to my encounter with sexual assault was embarrassment.
I was taking the train home from Montreal to Toronto, and had decided to take a nap during the five-hour ride. After feeling uncomfortable for some time, and after convincing myself that I was imagining things, I woke up to the man seated next to me groping me. The first words out of my mouth were, “Sir, you can’t do that.”
I called my sexual assaulter “Sir,” a term typically used to refer to authority figures, to people who demand respect. I reprimanded him gently and quietly. I didn’t want to cause a commotion, and I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed, first, because I thought that I might be delusional and surely, this couldn’t be happening to me. I am cautious and part of that percentage of the population who has never faced a violent crime. Then, I was embarrassed because I was wearing shorts and a tank top – maybe people would be right to claim I was “asking for it.” I was also embarrassed because I had called the police and decided to press charges; was I making something out of nothing? I mean, he didn’t rape me. And I felt bad. Not for myself, but for my harasser: his college-aged sons were on a different car of the train and they watched as their father was escorted away by the police. Had I just ruined this man’s life?
My experience with sexual assault is not that different to the experiences of many other women, though the details vary. Embarrassment is always part of the equation, but only on our part and never on theirs.
About a month ago, my friend was harassed by a male acquaintance of mine. We had all gone out to a bar, and for a while, they stuck together and danced with each other. As the night came to an end, he offered to walk her home and she accepted. I didn’t think much of it until the next day, when my friend confessed to me what really happened. She had felt uncomfortable all night long, but felt that she couldn’t reject his advances as he was an acquaintance of ours and it would have been awkward if she told him to back off in front of all his friends.
His ego would take a hit.
Half way into their walk home, he stopped her in the middle of the street and attempted to grab and kiss her. She managed to ward him off, but he insisted on walking her to her apartment. He went for his second attempt when they reached her front door. Why can’t he come in? He knew she was “DTF.” After all, she’d been teasing him and giving him hints all evening. My friend didn’t want to embarrass him. She gave him excuses, saying that she felt gross and had to shower, she was tired, it was late in the night. He wouldn’t take no for an answer though, “I can’t come in just for a cuddle? Seriously?!”
Seriously.
We are expected to protect men’s egos, but we do not expect to be protected from sexual assault. While I was embarrassed that I was sexually assaulted, my friend felt obligated to save her harasser from embarrassment. Isn’t it ironic that the victim feels shame while the abuser is protected from shame? I myself have felt a similar obligation to protect men from shame many times. In instances like my friend’s, we are left with two options: either go along with it, or try to let him down gently. If we go with the second option, there are factors to weigh, a potential threat to consider. If we threaten their egos by rejecting them, would we be physically overpowered? Would we be raped? Our rightful sense of safety is gone. These are questions my friend asked herself before she gave her excuses in an attempt to say no. To not constantly think about these questions is a privilege typically enjoyed by males. I know that men’s rights activists would lash out at this claim I just made. But it does not take away from the sexual harassment that men face to say that women often do not possess the same privileges that men do.
There is a certain sense of entitlement that some men feel, and this is not all men, I acknowledge. But some men feel entitled to take what they believe to be rightfully theirs – sex, attention, our bodies. If they are refused or rejected, they feel as though something that is owed to them has been taken away. The man who sexually assaulted me felt as though my body was an object free to take. The man who harassed my friend felt as though she owed him sex because he had been nice to her all night.
Donald Trump has normalized this kind of behaviour and attitude. When The Washington Post first broke news of the Trump/Billy Bush tape, I was immediately taken back to that train ride. Donald Trump bragged about being able to do what my sexual assaulter ultimately did: groped me like I was little more than an object. They both feel it is within their rights to do this to women. And if Trump was embarrassed about these leaked tapes, he was only embarrassed that he got caught. Instead, he’s angry at us: angry that we have the audacity to claim that these tapes represent something about our society and about him, angry that the media had the nerve to reveal something about him which we already suspected, and angry that we are angry at all. According to Trump, we have no right to be angry. In this new (well, I question whether this is new at all) age, misogyny is mere locker-room talk. Here you go, a get-out-of-jail-free card – in some cases, like Brock Turner’s, literally.
Trump has normalized a world where women are dealt with the card of embarrassment while men enjoy entitlements. The men who catcall, who grope inappropriately, who force their advances onto women – if these men felt any shame before, they certainly will have lost all sense of it with the President-elect of the United States approving their actions.
Looking back at that singular moment on the train, I can remember each vivid detail. When I asked my sexual assaulter to please evacuate the seat next to me, he simply smiled and said, “Of course, no problem.” He was calm, I was ashamed. I can still remember that burning feeling in my heart, my palms, my cheeks – it’s the red-hot feeling of shame.
1 in 4 North American women will experience sexual assault during their lifetime. If you add in moments like my friend’s, the moments that seem too negligible to press charges but at the same time which make you feel at risk or uncomfortable, that number might be higher. I often wonder if I was right to press charges, and am embarrassed that I did so. The incident had shaken me to the core, but at the same time, it seemed so minor, so inconsequential – it seemed like a mere step above catcalls and those were part of everyday life. My friend had a similar train of thought: this guy was harassing her but that too is not an unfamiliar situation. We have no expectation of safety. It is our embarrassment and their entitlement that gives the comfortability which my sexual assaulter and my friend’s harasser felt.
Now, years after the assault, I feel a strange triumph in the fact that I no longer feel that burning shame. Why should I be embarrassed about something I did not do? In this shame game, I am handing in my pieces, I refuse to keep playing.
Image obtained from The Washington Post via Getty.