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Sunday, September 30, 2018

#Metoo is a movement because the stories are real.

I was six years old the first time I received an unwanted sexual advance, though I didn't know what to call it back then. A boy we looked after exposed himself to me in our basement. The entire experience lasted 2 minutes. We were not unsupervised. We were playing house, and he wanted to have sex, so he took his pants down. I was six, and I didn't know what he meant, or what sex was. Thankfully, he didn't really know either, and his sudden exposure and his pushing himself against me were as far as it went.  Even at six, though, I already knew I didn't want what had just happened, I was very upset, and I created a vault in my soul. No one can ever know. This is the first time I've told this story outside the confines of secrecy and shame. Admittedly? I'm still embarrassed.

When I was seven, our neighbor's son saw me playing in our backyard, got my attention, and when I turned to say hi, he pulled his pants down and stood there naked. Nobody else saw. As I turned away I remember feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable, as if I had done something wrong. Why did he think he could show himself to me? When I was 8, a boy in my class physically held me against the wall and kissed me despite my protests. When I pushed back to defend myself, even telling the teacher why, it was I who got sent to the principal's office, got in trouble, got a talking to for my behavior. He stayed in class.

Skip ahead to grade six. I know very well by now that boys will be boys; we all do. I hear them talk about and to the girls in my class, about their bodies and body parts. I see the girls in my class pretend to be stupid and laugh things off so the jokes won't get worse. Thankfully, mercifully, I was an awkward teen, and expressly unwanted and unnoticed by the boys. Except for the occasional cruel joke, I didn't get attention. My friends with breasts, my friends and classmates with beauty, they got attention. Even at twelve, I knew to be thankful I was being ignored.

When I was fifteen, my sister and I were walking down the street in our snowsuits, armoured against the cold so only our faces were showing. A man walking by stopped, looked intently below our necks and said, "I'd love to see what's underneath all that."

When I was eighteen, I attended a conservatively minded college, and there it was solidified what I had learned my entire childhood. There were speeches from leadership about it: if a man should desire us sexually, unwanted or not, it was our fault. The onus of responsibility for their behavior fell entirely to us. I was used to that information: it's the kind of information life and learning had given me already, many times over. But I was eighteen, and it was starting to piss me off. I began to say so. When I talked to the guys who'd been raised on the same information I was, it was news to them. They believed, like I did, that it wasn't their fault. If a woman tempted them, they could not control themselves as a result, nor could they be expected to.

When I was in my twenties, I dated a man who professed publicly to be an upstanding citizen, a man with a congregation of devout followers. Close the doors, and everything changed. Emotional abuse is a brilliant tactic. Fast forward a few months in to the quiet dismantling of my self esteem, where everything I said was wrong and stupid. My self esteem had been held to such a low standard before this, that it plummeted without control. I started to believe him, I didn't question him. He was a man, after all, and my worldview had been carved from a sick tree, where men could behave as they would, and it would always be my fault. So when he started to push the boundaries of our physical relationship, I didn't say much, because I didn't know I could and I also didn't know how to. And then, it was like I turned eighteen again: I started to speak up. He started to get more and more violent with his words, and more abrupt and frightening with his actions. And then one day he picked me up by the shoulders (I can still feel his hands), and tossed me four feet through the room (it all happened so fast, my hair rushed in front of my face), because I wouldn't sleep with him. When I broke up with him, a shameful few weeks later, he told me I needed to repent for being a whore and leading him on.


I'm 35 years old. These stories have been buried, and these are only the ones I remember after years of keeping things in. I've never been raped, thank God, but I have had to fear it.

Women stay quiet because we know what happens when we don't. Holding a story in secrecy provides a certain type of solace: nobody cares, because nobody knows. But the real heartbreak comes in this: even when we tell our stories, it doesn't matter.

What if I had named all the men in this article? The boys I wouldn't: in adulthood I learned they each faced abuses during their childhoods that are traumatic in their own right; because of their exposure, our trauma was shared. But what about that last man? I know he's not a safe person: I was there. After I ended it, I grew strong, found my footing, learned truths that sustain me even now. But I could still name him, and would if it became necessary. Even as I say that, I know, naming my abuser would bring me more grief. Publicity would allow him to deny it and act the victim for my obvious instability. Because no one else was there, I am immediately discredited. He knows as well as I do: what happens to women behind closed doors is a world cloaked in immunity. Bringing those actions to light is a task marred with impossibility. It is only by a woman's fault that an action takes place, and only by her agenda that an abuser is named.

I am realizing in a new way, now that I have daughters, how important it is for women to share their stories. I needed the freedom, even from the age of six, to say no, to tell without fear of blame. The shame from my childhood only feels that way because of my education: I was taught by a world, and therefore I believed in the way of that world. Now it's decades later, and these stories are as true as they were the days they happened. I tell them knowing how many women could write their own six-paragraph version of events. There is power in story: either to hold us, or to be held by us. Let us continue to free our stories from the vault, so our daughters don't have to make their own vaults, too.