Put me in the “its assault” corner. Or, more specifically, the “I think that’s
assault, but I also *get* that our society does not recognize this behavior as
assault, which is specifically why I have purposefully minimized my reaction to
and discussion of such events when they’ve happened to me in the past."
I have no interest in turning my sexual
history into social currency; exchange rates are so unpredictable.
So I hurry up to add, "It wasn't that bad."
Because I’ve always known that if
I loudly declared that what happened to me (i.e. experiences like Grace’s) felt
horrific, there would be PLENTY of people, just like in reaction to Grace, who
thought I was crying rape at discomfort, or thought I was (with uniquely feminine
misunderstanding or sensitivity or whatever fucking way you want to describe to
it) “dramatizing” in order to gain sympathy, or just flat out
lying/manipulating others for my own benefit. All the shade that every woman has thrown at
Grace; that’s what would have come my way if I had publicly cried assault. I
was never naïve enough to not recognize that Grace’s fate would have been my
fate too, if I had ever decided to share, beyond a very few close friends,
feelings that I had been “assaulted” after being pressured to engage in sexual
conduct by someone I was – at the beginning of the encounter – interested in. So,
I stopped talking about it. And if a friend
asked me about it later, I brushed it off.
And I swept it away in my mind under the category of “bad sex.” And now this
insightful woman has hit the nail on the head of why I’d felt so uncomfortable
declaring a “side” in the Ansari debate.
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