The Cheese Grates It: Me Too

Image copyright Andrea Arroyo

This is a response to a post by Juliet James on Medium

Honestly, Noah sounds like a horrible human being.

I have plenty of these stories myself. There was a guy named Shawn who I went to junior high and high school with. The girls all called him Scummy Shawn. He was always grabbing our breasts and buttocks. When we would go to an adult about it, we were brushed off as being overly sensitive. Boys will be boys. Just tell him to stop it.

One day Shawn was with a guy named Charlie. Charlie was a bit of a doofus, but he was harmless. Shawn grabbed my buttocks and told Charlie "grab her tits, dude." 

Charlie blushed and said no, he didn't think that would be cool.

Shawn grabbed my breast, and I wheeled around and kicked him in the marbles. He doubled over and groaned that I was being childish. I told him I'd become downright infantile if he ever touched me again. He never did.

I wish I hadn't had to resort to that, but I'm not sorry I did it.

A couple of years later, I ended up in the mental hospital after a half-assed suicide attempt. There were a lot of things that led to this. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had type 2 bipolar disorder, which didn't help. The factors leading to this incident were the fact that my aunt and my two cousins had moved in with me, and the cousin who was my age picked on me constantly. I was bullied at school, and my boyfriend, who was two years older than me, coerced me into letting him take my virginity. He then dumped me.

I was treated abominably at the mental hospital and promised myself that I would die before I ever ended up in one of those places again. I have kept that promise.

Looking back on it, the majority of sexual experiences in my life have been coercive. The guy who ended up raping me after I broke up with him used the come-on line "you don't want to be celibate for the rest of your life, do you?"

In fact, I would have been fine with being celibate for the rest of my life. I don't like sex very much. However, I have a very low self-esteem and still carried in my mind the idea that a woman without a man was somehow not a complete person. This is an extremely toxic idea and leads to women remaining in abusive relationships, but many of us have been fed this idea from a very young age.

It is distressing to me that there are enough people in this country who think a woman being assaulted matters so little that we now have "President" Pussy-Grabber in the highest office.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~