The recent #MeToo years have made me wonder why the sexual assaults I experienced as a teen didn’t have much impact on my life. At first I chalked it up to my own resilience – though now I’ve come to believe it was as much in part due to the behavior of the men around the men who harassed me.
I was a teenage rebel in the 80s, hanging out in what would come to be known as the alternative scene – which included a group of punk rockers, guys in their late teens and early twenties with mohawks, combat boots, and a desire to throw punches whenever the opportunity presented itself. Yet not one of these guys ever laid a hand on me that I didn’t want. Indeed, it was from this group of proud outcasts that I learned my body was my own.
Two incidents stand out in my mind, one that ended in direct confrontation with the predator, the other playing out so subtle it didn’t even initially register. The first occurred at a drunken frat party that we had collectively crashed. Somehow I’d found myself in the laundry room, making out with a clean cut college dude who’d been plying me with kamikaze shots, sitting on a stranger’s dryer without much of a clue as to what was going on. As I focused my attention on not throwing up I semi-consciously noticed the safety pin-wearing soldier (the only punk in our group who didn’t buy his combat boots second-hand at the Salvation Army) that I had an on-again-off-again relationship with walk into the room.
He told the guy to get out. The man refused. A back and forth ensued, culminating in the mohawked Army enlistee I actually wanted to make out with calmly saying, “You can either walk out or I can throw you out.” The alcohol pusher left. That was that. The simplest of exchanges that sent a powerful signal that I did not deserve to be taken advantage of. (I never did have sex with the punk soldier, by the way. The one time we got close – drunkenly making out in a parked car – I said a quiet, “I don’t want to,” and the fumbling with clothing ceased. He rolled over and we both fell sleep.)
The second time it happened was at another party, this one on more familiar ground (the apartment of a local punk band). Once again a mix of alcohol and strangers sealed my fate. I was on the verge of passing out when a creepy hanger-on – to this day I’m not sure how this straitlaced dude managed to make it into our antiestablishment inner circle – pulled me onto his lap and began groping, trying to take off my shirt right in front of a group of male partygoers in the living room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the band’s guitarist disappear into a bedroom.
A few seconds later my best friend came rushing out from that room, unleashed a drunken scream of outrage before dragging me off the molester’s lap. Then she took me into the bathroom, sobbing, and buttoned up my shirt. I wasn’t at all sure what was going on in that moment, but upon sober reflection later I came to understand that another powerful signal had been sent. To my best friend that she needed to make a scene, get me the hell out of there and fully dressed. But also that what was happening to me was not acceptable. And that it was in no way my fault.
In other words, twice I’ve had guys not just “come to my rescue” as if I were some helpless damsel in distress, serving only to ego-stroke their image as heroic saviors. Neither made a big deal of interrupting a sexual assault – it was simply the moral thing to do. And more importantly, in both instances they had dropped nonverbal clues that any man who would harass a drunken teen was the one in the wrong, the one to be shamed and ostracized – not me. It was a life-changing statement to send to a youth whose identity was still taking shape. Three decades on I’m still grateful to those guys who, without any fanfare at all, showed me what it means to act like a man.
Photo: Charlotte Cooper