I love women. And as I get older, my life is becoming increasingly about them. I dance with women, I speak with women, I am coached, sponsored by, and counseled by women. I meet them for coffee. I talk to them about sex. I ask them for advice. I hold them while they cry. I love the deep feelings. And the competition. The struggle to be seen and held. The intimacy. The complication. The ability to heal.
My experience at S-Factor has deepened this for me, surely, but on some level, it’s always been this way for me. I remember reading Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent in middle school and being just obsessed with the vivacious, earthy, female community of the novel. It was this raucous irreverent crew separated from everyone else just because they were female. They were special, ancient, and secret. Aunts, cousins, daughters, grandmas, sitting on moss and bleeding in a tent in the desert, while rubbing each other’s feet with oil and cackling about their husbands. Oh my god. I wanted to eat it. I wanted to be there.
It echoed for me. Because even as a middle-schooler, I knew that being a woman does feel like that. Quarantined and venerated. Ever since I went through puberty, I’ve felt like I was a part of a club that everyone was obsessed with and also couldn’t wait to abuse. On the public bus, in a piazza in Italy, I remember those first pre-teen moments, when people started watching me. The power you’re gifted just by being a woman. It comes without your permission, and it’s heady, potent.
But the lack of control over that power; it comes too. The first time you feel it, it’s both. It’s neither. You don’t have tools to deal with it yet. You didn’t ask for it. It just arrived. On that same trip to Europe, just as I started to glow under male attention, someone in Turkey tried to buy me from my family. My parents joked. The man was serious. I was 12.
It’s a complication that I’ve spent years trying to unravel, and one of the main reasons I went to S-Factor in the first place. Before I learned to dance, my sexuality felt like something that was always a reflection of someone else. Desire was put upon me, but I could only mirror it back, enjoy it sometimes, but know that it wasn’t mine. So as a woman, when you start hearing stories of rape, on TV, from your friends, it isn’t a surprise. At least, it wasn’t for me. Because on some level, I’ve always known that I was prey. You feel it. You do.
But as an adult, my outrage at these stories is becoming difficult to carry. Suddenly, despite knowing about this quiet threat for years, sensing it in corners and alleys and at clubs, and in class, I can’t handle it anymore. The more empowered I become personally and the more obsessed I become with women and what they hold inside of them, the more I’m starting to feel like I can’t live in a world where sexual assault continues to happen. Globally. Epidemically.
And I do mean “feel.” I actually feel it. The nausea, watching the gang-rape scene in Top of the Lake, the helplessness, watching the news coverage of the Ariel Castro case, the absolute horror, the outrage, the disgust, rising up in the back of my throat as I hear about the rampant rape of women officers in the army, or in prisons, or the insane spinning blathering about the Woody Allen case. This happens over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, to my friends, to my teachers, to my role models, to my sisters. It happens so much that it’s on TV. It’s a part of our entertainment. Of course Top of the Lake or The Killing didn’t spare me from the gory details of their fictional gang-rapes. Why would they? We’re used to this. We aren’t horrified anymore because it happens so fucking often. Women are victimized, women are victimized, women are victimized. Bodies chopped up. Invaded. Buried. The end. Tune in next week.
There is an entire Law and Order series dedicated to sexual crimes. We tune in to watch it with a tacit acceptance. A sigh. Yes, this happens. What a shame. We shrug and watch and feel better that fictional justice is meted out, but don’t worry about the fact that no one helped her in the moment. No one stopped it – not the abuser, not the people who may have heard her screaming. No one decided that this woman, that all women, are too beautiful and complex and real to dehumanize and violate, and just stopped it. These fictional abusers took what was there, because they’ve learned that we allow that. And we do allow it, don’t we? Doesn’t it continue to happen? Everywhere?
In order to function as a woman in the world, you have to walk around pretending you’re not that vulnerable. As individuals we believe that we’re stronger. I remember, at 24-years-old, play-fighting with my boyfriend in his bed. “Bet you can’t pin me” I teased. I did spin-class. I did yoga. I believed it. So we tussled. We rolled around, and pushed and hit. And he pinned me. Easily. So we tussled harder. Then we tussled again. And again and again. Because he could always pin me. All skinny, pale, 6 feet of him could pin me. Every time. Even when I fought past the point of flirtation. Even when I started to get pissed. To really try. He could pin me. He could always fucking pin me. And it all came home to me, right then, that I couldn’t get away. If anyone wanted to do anything to me. I couldn’t claw, fight, scratch my way out of it. Not even me, who felt so strong. Who did so much research. It doesn’t matter how capable you are if someone decides to take something from you. And we’re living in a world where that happens all the time. Where subconsciously, we must be validating this behavior, or it wouldn’t continue on such a profound level.