I do not remember the very first time i was acquainted with sexual misconduct but in the events that are still vivid in my mind. I remember feeling dirty ,powerless and scared.
I do not know why at that point where I was being disrespected and violated my flight /fight response failed me . I know that I was in disbelief ,my body literally froze. I could not cry my heart was pounding and my tongue felt stuck in my mouth.
God knows why I felt bad and I just wanted to be far away. There is something that our mind does when we experience trauma .We begin to forget some parts but the anxiety around that episode rests fresh in our minds . It doesn't have to be something that happened to you for an hour or even five hours. The five minutes where you feel that you have no control is indescribable.
The worst thing is when you are in a room full of people but you feel stifled and alone and the presence of that one person makes you want to hurl . I was in a room full of people but this human still had the guts to make sexual passes at me . He talked about how sexually excited he was that he wanted me to jerk him off and how i looked like I would be great in bed. I can still smell his sweat, him creeping up close to me talking about how he could not wait to get me alone.
This was in a room full of familiar people yet he managed to make me feel like i was outside alone. Circumstance had it that I would be seeing this person every day and on another day in the same week he grabbed my breasts squeezed them , i swatted his hands off he persisted and he only stopped when I raised my voice.
I buried that deep in my mind . I wanted to get over it . Truth is it does not work that way you may force yourself to forget and move on with your life till some random day in the future again where you have to demand to be respected. Something happens that you even fail to put into words .Then similar events spring up in your head and you are forced to relive all the moments that made you wish that you could die for a bit .
Barely a year later , Mister Perv was in jail for sexual assault and the victim was twelve. I thought damn, finally however I could not help thinking that in my silence I had awarded him the opportunity to be abusive to other girls who had probably gone through worse. Another thing that I feel really bad about is that I remember being asked about his conduct and I just said something along the lines of 'keeps on hitting on us "and I brushed the issue off .I minimized the issue because I did not want to think about it. I feel bad like I was an accessory to a crime.
I felt annoyed that I had become like those people who say be grateful it could have been worse . You only experienced level one of harassment you could have experienced level five type of thing .
I felt like the enablers I despise in society because most of the time when we know of people who behave like this for the sake of 'peace' we allow constant interaction with these people by giving soft solutions to hard problems . We say things like keep him away from the kids , this one should not be left in a house with kids instead of cutting him off completely .
I may not have been stripped naked but the stickiness of those words and the hands on my chest can be felt till this day sometimes .It comes up unexpectedly . No warning . I feel very angry mostly at these thoughts that become such an inconvenience .
Then there are those incidents that you do not attach to a face . The time when you walked in a crowd and felt your body being groped . It happened in a few seconds . You do not know who touched you because you were just going about your business and moving on with the business of living your life when this inconvenience happened . No reaction , you just continued walking and wondering what the hell had happened to you .
One thing we assume is that people from loving homes with loving fathers and mothers may never experience this degradation . Believe me even when you have a safe space where you can talk about what happened to you , you convince yourself that it was not that bad and you will be fine you will get over it. You feel like talking about how someone made you feel dirty and less than will stress the people around you .
It angers me how things that are your crown as a woman are weaponized against you . Your attractiveness is used to make you feel like a target, that whatever degradation that you may go through is a consequence of you being nice to look at .
This is not just a women versus male abusers problem . So many stories are untold of men who are sexually assaulted . Men who say no to sex and as women we think that it is impossible for men to not want to see us naked . That man who said 'No' multiple times and he was forcibly touched and felt aroused. It was assumed that he enjoyed it after all which man says no to sex.
The culture of helping ourselves to people is part of the problem. I can not be comfortable with being touched by you yet i do show some intimacy with other people . Respect those boundaries . It might not seem like a big deal to you but it is to me . I am not asking you to understand why but I am asking you to respect my space.
I cannot speak for all the women and men who have felt powerless at some point in their lives . What I know from experiences that I am willing to speak about and some which I hope to never talk about is that the memory creeps up on you and you wish you could shake it off but it does not go away easily .
It was the old creepy men for me and I find myself feeling grateful that I did not experience this in my romantic relationships . Then i think again why am I praising these fishes for swimming. It is strange that I weigh these issues out , kind of like being glad that your leg was only fractured but did not fall off.
I hate having to explain common sense concepts like respect to people . It enrages me . Why do I have to explain this to people who clearly know what they are doing and were counting on me to be quiet ? Why is it my problem?
Even in the instances where I have taken back my power I felt like a weak bitch, tearful ,mad not put together . Why would anyone choose to ruin my day like that for no reason?I thought we learnt it in Grade One. No means No! Why do I have to be inconvenienced by disrespect as I go on with the business of living my life ?
Why is it the duty of victims to explain why they are victims . I hate the word victim and I aggressively disassociate myself from it .I do not want sympathy just respect .
Anyways . Love and light . If your body part causes you to sin even the man from the sky said you can cut it off!