We've all been there at some point.
Or, at least all women have been there.
You are walking down the street, and you hear someone approaching behind you. You have learned to listen. Is the person running, walking, biking? If you are the one approaching someone else, you know to either speed up or slow down to avoid that awkward moment when you are right next to each other. You wait to hear the "excuse me" or the "on your left" or you say those things yourself. Yesterday, at 3:30 in the afternoon, I was taking a walk in my neighborhood. I was about 4 blocks from home, across the street from a park. I heard footsteps behind me. They got faster and faster and nearer and nearer. I made an assumption. I assumed there was a woman (specifically) walking behind me, and that she was speeding up so she could pass me. But she got really close and I heard no "excuse me."
And then I felt a hand grabbing my ass.
I spun around, shocked and yet not really because that shit has happened so many times before, you know?
And I was looking right at a boy who could not have been older than 13.
He looked mortified when he saw my face. He said excuse me, uh I'm sorry, and then he literally ran across the street into the park. I didn't have time to do anything more than glare at him.
And then I started questioning my own interpretation of what just happened. He looked so embarrassed, it must have been an accident. Maybe he just bumped into me because he wasn't watching where he was going. Hmm. But no, that's not possible. Does your hand ever accidentally form itself into a cupping shape and then oh my god how did that happen there's a woman's ass inside it? I have lived on this earth almost 39 years and that has never happened to my hand. So I knew he did it on purpose, but I couldn't figure out his reaction. I shrugged my shoulders and muttered something to myself about punk kids and then continued on my walk and kind of forgot about it. When Gabe got home hours later he asked me how my walk was and I remembered and said I had something to tell him later after dinner. When I told him this story, rolling my eyes in the process, he had an interpretation that hadn't occurred to me.
"He thought you were a kid, like him."
"Huh?"
"From behind, you looked like a kid, like a young teenager or something. When you turned around he realized you were a grown woman and he got scared."
"OK, that's plausible. But what the hell? So it's ok to go around grabbing random young girls' asses?"
"Well, he thought if you were a kid, he would get away with it. He thought you wouldn't say or do anything."
And therein lies a lesson that boys have learned by middle school, apparently. Young girls are embarrassed and scared and confused when weird and offensive things happen to them, so go ahead and do those things! They're not talking! But these moms, you never know, after more than a quarter century of this shit they might just call the cops! Stay away from them.
And then I started wondering about the thought process in this boy's brain. Was it just a matter of thinking, huh, that's a nice ass, I need to speed up and grab it? Was he trying to intimidate me? Did he think I would giggle and flirt or maybe grab his ass in return?
Now look. This incident was not that big of a deal--at least to me. I have a very thick skin, and even when I know things are offensive or wrong, I shrug them off pretty easily. Some women might have been very upset, others might have been flattered; there are a million possible reactions. I felt annoyed and then indifferent.
But my reaction is irrelevant.
It is not my reaction that dictates that the thing was wrong. He knew it was wrong. He would never have looked so terrified if he hadn't.
And I know that there's a question percolating in the minds of at least some who are reading this. Don't lie. You are wondering:
What were you wearing?
I won't even bother to answer that question.
I think this incident is pretty minor in the scheme of things. But the overall message is less so.
Let me start by saying that my ass has been grabbed by people more times than I could possibly remember. And by "people," I do not mean boyfriends, lovers, or husbands. In those cases, hands might have been on my ass multiple hours of the day. I regularly get annoyed at Gabe for excessive ass-grabbing. But, I also love him. And I chose him. And I know that he will back off when I glare at him. And I grab his ass in turn. He in fact has his share of ass. A lot of guys, white guys especially, cannot claim any junk in the trunk. Not so Gabe. And yet, a stranger has never grabbed his ass, not one time. Similarly, no stranger has ever touched his stomach, his chest, his face, his hair, the small of his back, his hips, or his legs. All of these things have happened to me numerous times. We are exactly the same age.
When I had long curly hair, it was normal--well, not normal, but common--for people I didn't know to touch my hair. Men did this all the time. Sometimes old ladies did it too. A few times, people (men) stopped their cars in the middle of the street, got out, grabbed my hair, told me it was beautiful, and then went back to their cars. I have had men grab my face in a bar and tell me how pretty I am. On the very first blind date I ever went on, I got into a conversation with the guy about car accidents, because we had both survived bad ones. He had broken a few ribs in his, and I told him about my broken hips and needing to learn to walk again. After dinner, he held the door open for me and we started walking down the street. He positioned himself in front of me, grabbed my hips with his hands, and said "wow! you've got great hips! that accident couldn't change that!" This guy really liked me and we went out on a few more dates and I never, ever let him touch me after that.
You can tell me that this is just small stuff, that none of this matters, that I am overreacting. But I am not writing this to say that I was traumatized by some idiot boy's hand on my ass.
What I am thinking about is how this kind of relentless and unwanted touching and the assumption that it happens all the time and is just a yawning bore affects our nature and potentially changes it.
My mother will tell you that I was never a particularly affectionate kid. My brother loved to be held and cuddled and sung to and to have his back rubbed. I cried in my mother's arms as a baby until she put me down in my crib and left me alone to chatter happily to myself. This overall pattern has never changed. I can be affectionate, but never overly so. Every boy and man I have ever been with has been more affectionate than me. So, that is my nature. But I do wonder if my nature was exacerbated by the constant and unwanted attention and touching. This was at its worst from ages 12-19. It was so bad in high school I learned to walk with my books close to my chest so that one boy with the locker near mine wouldn't grab my breasts in between classes.
That is overtly sexual touching. But the space invasion starts much earlier and is more subtle. Let me use my children as an example. I would say that of the two, Augie is absolutely the more naturally affectionate child. He grabs your face to kiss you. He likes to snuggle and wrestle. Lenny likes to read by herself and give you a little kiss goodnight. Now, maybe they are just like that. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that people have been touching Lenny and getting in her face all her life. Telling her she is beautiful. Stopping her in her path at 2, 3 years old, crouching down, getting right up in her grill and saying what a pretty girl she is and touching her hair. Adults have told her she is tiny, she is gorgeous, she's a beauty. The child is eight.
Then there's Augie. The one with the beautiful curly hair, just like mine was. People comment on his hair all the time. But there is a huge difference.
They never--NEVER--comment on his hair to him.
They say it to me, or his dad.
Men and women notice his hair. They stand aside and let him run around and do whatever he is going to do, and then they remark about it, to some trusted adult. They must think it would seem weird to get in a little kid's face, tell him he's a handsome son of a gun and oh my god that hair while they grabbed his curls. They must think he has the right to move his body and not be stopped in his tracks.
They must realize he's a boy.
We do this in so many subtle ways. We lament how boys are being asked to give up their nature; we wring our hands over it if boys are told to do things we have decided are contrary to their nature like sit down, read, or pay attention. Never mind the assumption that any of those things are true, what interests me is how we think it is such a shame for boys to ever have to do anything that is contrary to who they are.
Because we ask girls to do this all the time. Maybe girls are just as horny as boys, but we teach them not to be. Or, like me, they are too suspicious of people and they don't trust boys or men enough to act out on the promiscuity that probably comes naturally to them. Maybe girls are just as goofy or restless or crazy in their natural state but at some point they learn to tone it down so as not to be so noticeable. Maybe girls look at people's asses, and manage to keep their hands to themselves anyway.
Would it be so wrong to find some sense of balance, where we tell boys to deny their urges and desires more often and girls to pay attention to them? I mean look. We are all human beings with hormones and instincts. But we also live in a society where it matters how we behave and how we treat other people.
I would love for my daughter to be as free and trusting as my son. But she isn't. I see her get smaller in herself when she gets attention for how she looks. And I see him puffing up his chest and reveling in it.
One day, Lenny was lamenting her straight hair. This was mostly because she hates brushing it, and you don't need to brush curly hair. "I wish I had hair like Augie's," she said.
"No you don't, honey," Gabe replied. She said she did, and why not?
"Because people would touch you all the time if you did. You would hate that."
"But they don't do that to Augie."
"No, they don't."
And ain't that the truth.
This is a small story. It isn't really an important one. But it is one that I can tell easily, and that every woman I know could tell just as easily as me. Above all else, there is one thing I regret about the way this story ends.
I wish I had had more time. I would have grabbed that kid's phone out of his pocket and threatened to call his mother.
