Bras and consent

 

I saw him as I rounded the corner. A sunny day on a quiet street. I wanted to be on his side of the street but I heard him through my headphones talking, I presumed to me, and so decided to keep my path. Off went the earphones but my already brisk pace remained steady. I held him in my peripheral vision, a habit borne of experience.

He crossed to my side of the street. His pace faster now, or maybe I imagined it. I heard his voice, although now I was unsure who he was talking to. He mumbled something about meeting me at the trashcans, just as I approached a few trashcans stashed on the side of an apartment. And without a second thought I jogged. Jogged right through a parking lot, around a corner and straight to the busiest street I could find. I’ve long forfeited the fear of hurting someone’s feeling.

It has been a while since I've felt the unpleasant internal rush from a stranger’s unknown intentions. Pandemic living maybe? I don’t know why, but as I revisit today’s encounter I am thankful for the reprieve.

Before I'd left for the store I'd debated wearing a bra. One of the most liberating things about COVID has been my renunciation of bras (much to my mom’s dismay). Underwire is the devil and bras are, by design, binding. Around the house and family, I am “born free”. With strangers and job interviews, I conform to the norms of our day. But the store? The store is up for debate. Had I driven I'd likely have kept my free status and not thought much about it. In the tank-top I'm wearing I'm as likely to get stared or commented on with or without so, why bother?

But walking demands I consider what type of attention I might arouse from strangers when I don’t have an easy escape path. So I put on the bra.

And yet…

I realize that my senses might be heightened because of a recent argument I had a friend. An argument about...consent. Or rather power. Maybe intentions? An argument that has left me struggling to respond to him when he reaches out.

It started with the idea that some advances, man to woman, are unwanted. Especially in secluded places or late hours. He argued that it was unfair to “forbid” a man from approaching a woman and it made every man out to be a predator and every woman his victim. He questioned rape statistics and when our waiter, a complete stranger, disclosed her own victimization he brushed that off as anecdotal. Never mind the feelings of the person he’s approaching, he centered his feelings of “I want”. Desire trumping fear. Power usurping discomfort.

I cursed at him and fumed. A “fuck you” that echoed across the patio where we sat. Not my finest hour but it felt willful. It felt cruel. It felt dangerous.

We managed to find a stopping point. I don’t remember how. I apologized for the cursing but not the sentiment that caused it. I couldn’t I apologize for that because I don’t know a woman who hasn’t been effected in some way by the power dynamics of a man’s unwanted attention. The need to smile as he compliments because she doesn’t know how he’ll take rejection (but can’t smile too much or she’ll be accused of leading him on). The impulse to have sex even if she didn’t want to because now he’s aroused and she doesn’t know how he’ll take a “no” when he feels owed a “yes” (and acquiescing feels safer). A brisk run through a brightly lit neighborhood (because she’s also had a man angrily scream “raggedy bitch” at her after he followed her in the dark and rebuffed his advances. Or the hands on her hips, her butt, the “just playing” from friends.

So I put on a bra to go to the store.

It changed nothing. There was still unwanted attention, still words I didn’t request. It changed nothing except if this walk hadn’t ended with my possible misunderstanding of this man’s intentions or my ability to outrun him, if something awful and awfully common had happened, a bra might have rebuffed at least one extra injury, “well what do you expect, look how you are dressed?”

Crisis in the Middle

Midlife crisis has always been painted in shades of flashy cars and infidelity. Or maybe that’s all I remember from a time when midlife seemed like an impossible eternity from my experience in the world. And now...now I am square in the middle of life. An apt place for a crisis of my own. Only mine doesn’t look like any of the templates I've watched in bad 80s movies.

Instead, my crisis sits at the intersection of grief and change.

Of course, with closer inspection, most midlife crises probably meet that same criteria. The only difference now is the preponderance of crises that are larger than what I can fold my arms around and trace my own steps to how exactly I got here.

Not that I can’t trace any parts. Some have my distinct dancing footprints in the sand.My choices, my consequences. But others...others wear a pandemic’s face mask and play the theme music for Red Dawn, re-heating the Cold War to temperatures I'd prefer not to experience.

There are the more mundane of midlife follies. The ones that no one will write about or remember when I die, or even next year if my life plays nice and stops straying so waywardly from expectations: sudden (though no longer new) unemployment, my dad’s surgery, trying to forge new friendships with my unsure footing.

The marvel of this moment in my life is that as hard as it feels, as fragile as I feel in it, most people are just as fragile. My woes are no greater and of no more importance than someone struggling with small children, grad school with a shitty professor, or adolescence as the world whirls feverishly on its axis (with second by second video updates on the turmoil). So many people are hanging precariously by a prayer (for the faithful) or bewildered tenacity (for the heathens) as the winds of circumstance tangle all our strings into complicated knots.

The reality is that a midlife crisis is only memorable for its timing. Unsure and unmoored in your 20s and no one blinks. Twenty-two, hell, even 28, are not ages where folks assume everything is figured out.

But 46?

As uncomfortable as this space I'm occupying is, I can’t say I'd do anything different.One thing different means everything is different and that seems excessive even in my midlife crisis fantasy life.

And still…and still…

There is no quick fix. Nothing to soothe the sorrow or quell the rage of this strange space I find myself navigating. There is laughter, and intermittent tears. There is more than fleeting uncertainty and equal parts trust that my world (if not the wider world mired in plague and war) will sort itself out and I'll find my way.

That doesn’t make this space in time any easier. Doesn’t make my daily frustrations and fear any less palpable. But it doesn’t make it any less important either. Even if it only means something to me. Even if it only matters in this brief moment in the greater expanse of my life.

Me Too: an "almost" story

I can't see his face. I can't hear his voice. But I can still feel his full weight against me. I can feel the terror as I realized he had my shorts down to my knees.

If you asked me to pick him out of a lineup, I’d fail.

If you had me cross-examined by a room full of old white men who are predisposed to not believing women – to not caring about the damage a wayward sense of entitlement to someone else’s body can do- I wouldn’t be able to produce the details they deem most pertinent. However, I still remember what his living room looked like. His bedroom. How I told him that Sign o’ the Times is my favorite Prince album.

The lack of other details wouldn’t make it any less true that my freshman year in college a guy I was dating tried to rape me.

“You should have told me you were a virgin,” he castigated me when I somehow – miraculously – got his solid frame off of me.  He sat sheepishly on a stool in the corner while I hugged by legs to my chest on the bed. “I wouldn’t have tried if you had told me you were a virgin.”

As if only virgins are permitted to say no.

“I don’t plan on having sex so if that is a problem just let me know.” We’d literally had that conversation the day before, sitting in front of his couch listening to Prince. “No problem,” he’d responded, “I like you.”

Even so, that next day as I prepared to get in his car, something felt off. I had a surge of not exactly panic but noticeable unease that I chalked up to paranoia and silliness.

I thought about that feeling during the long minutes of him moving seamlessly from the two of us watching television to his weight pressing down on me, my arms pinned under the mass of his body, his hands sliding my shorts down.

We weren’t even making out.

That wouldn’t excuse anything but it added to my bewilderment. I had commented on something on the screen and then I was saying “no, No, NO!”

Miracles happen.

Somehow I got him off of my 125 pound body. If I hadn’t…well… I was at his house far from campus with no car of my own, years before cellphones littered everyone’s pockets and in a sleepy neighborhood that probably wouldn’t have heard my screams.

It is that thought that chills me.

Months later, walking on campus, I ran into my almost rapist. He attended a neighboring university so I was surprised to see him. He waved and smiled and walked directly towards me, as if excited to see me.

“You tried to rape me,” I said to him as casual as his hello.

His smile faltered and his hand fell and then he walked on.