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#MeToo

A Personal Collection of Skipped Heartbeats and Scary Moments

By Kate NicholsPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
Top Story - November 2017
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There’s this hashtag going around Facebook recently - you might have seen it? It goes like this:

"If all the women/femme aligned folks who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "#MeToo” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem."

I very rarely participate in these status copy-paste directives, but I decided to make an exception for this one because I’ve been sexually harassed and assaulted literally more times than I have kept count of. So I posted my "me too" and tried to move on with my life, but after reading far too many articles about people who decided not to participate or hesitated in participating because they felt like their "me too" wasn't significant enough, I decided I could not move on just yet.

I started thinking about that time in college when I almost got raped, and then I realized it’s more like that one particular time I almost got raped. I started thinking about how I could have made better decisions in those situations, and how I might have avoided those bad situations, but the thing is, they weren’t really that bad. Often when people think about rape, they think about dark alleys and the bad parts of town and sketchy strangers following you down the sidewalk. None of my stories take place in questionable surroundings, in places I shouldn’t have been or with people I should have known better than to be around.

The following are my "me too" moments. I want to share them with you to say that sexual assault and consent issues are insidious, and they're ubiquitous, but there's no threshold for significance. If the incident mattered to you, then it should matter to us all.

Number One

I was hanging out with my boyfriend and he wanted to go over to his friend’s house. There were about four guys there and everyone was already drinking. We circled up and started passing a bowl. I was fairly stoned but otherwise sober when the friend suddenly started ranting about how it wasn’t right that I was totally messed up and they weren’t and it was pretty much inevitable that the gang bang would start any minute. Totally freaked out, I looked over at my boyfriend and he was completely oblivious. I knew he would be absolutely no help if his friend decided to try something, so I got the hell out of there and he stayed to party some more.

Number Two

The first time I ever got drunk it was because a boy invited me over to his dorm room to “watch a movie” and then decided we should have a drinking contest. He managed to pressure me into drinking three beers in about 20 minutes and the next thing I knew I was in his lofted bed with no memory of climbing up there, and he was trying to take my clothes off. I started feeling sick and I only escaped him because he didn’t want me to vomit in his bed. A friend found me and helped me get back to my room. The next day I had to enlist another friend to go back and find my key card, which had fallen in the crack between the mattress and the wall.

Number Three

One of my friends was dating a frat guy and she set me up with one of the brothers because she didn’t want to go to their winter formal alone. This was probably only the third or fourth time I’d gotten drunk, and my friend abandoned me pretty quickly to lock herself in her boyfriend’s room. I was tired so my date told me I could sleep over and we wouldn’t do anything — I had very little experience with men at that point so I got in bed with him. He immediately started touching me and I told him not to because his roommate and another girl were in the room. He didn’t stop and I felt him between my legs. I really wanted to go to sleep and I figured when he was done I could sleep, so I told him he at least had to wear a condom. He said he already was, and I remember feeling angry that he’d put one on after I just told him we weren’t going to have sex, but in retrospect there probably was no condom. The next morning I went home, then had to come back later in the day to retrieve my friend. I slept with my date a second time while I was there just to make it feel more like it had been my choice.

Number Four

I used to go running at a jogging trail near my house most mornings. There was hardly ever anyone there so early and I loved how secluded the trail was. Then one day as I was heading back to my car, two men were heading toward me. One of them was jogging with headphones in, and the other was wearing street clothes and didn’t look like he belonged on the trail. As soon as he saw me, he stopped and stood to the side of the trail as if he was looking at the lake that ran alongside it, but I was pretty sure he was actually just waiting for the other guy to jog past me and out of sight. It made my blood run cold and even though I was exhausted from my run, I sprinted all the way back to my car because I knew I was in trouble if I didn’t get away from him before we were alone. I haven’t been back to that trail since.

Number Five

This one’s a compilation of all the skipped heartbeats and scary moments that I’ve experienced on account of so many men, strangers and friends. They’re not quite as bad or as blatant as one through four, but each one of them jolted me into fight-or-flight-mode as the men involved evaluated the situation and decided how the encounter would go. There was the friend who abruptly pulled me onto his lap one day and wouldn’t let go until my voice reached a panicked register that freaked us both out. There was the time when a coworker and I were alone in the office and he cornered me, pulled me into a hug, and refused to let go until I kissed him. Again, my voice got shrill and he let go. There was the pot dealer who thought money wasn't enough and I should also sleep with him in appreciation for… allowing me to buy a dime off him? Something like that.

Some of these were men I’d flirted with. Some I’d led on accidentally, and some on purpose. A few were total strangers, but most were at least acquaintances, or even friends. Almost all of them were working under the notion that flirtation constituted consent and every one of them felt that I owed them my body.

#MeToo

feminism
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