The driver said, “I passed you once and thought that it was none of my business. Then I thought it looked like a Hitchcock movie, so I came back.”
I’m grateful a man rescued me from a man. I wish I had not been in a Hitchcock movie where I needed rescue.
Though I was followed and yelled at and mugged and grabbed and more than once strangers threatened to kill me and men I knew menaced me a few times and others pursued me uncomfortably long after I’d tried to discourage them, I was not raped, though many friends of mine were, and all of us spent our youths navigating the threat, as do most women in most places. It gets you even if it doesn’t get you. All those years, I noticed the little stories tucked away on newspaper back pages, given a paragraph or two, mentioned in passing on broadcasts, about dismembered sex workers and murdered children and tortured young women and long-term captives, about wives and children slain by husbands and fathers, and the rest, each one treated as an isolated incident or at least something that was not part of any pattern worth naming. I connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns I saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation.
4
The threat of violence takes up residence in your mind. The fear and tension inhabit your body. Assailants make you think about them; they’ve invaded your thoughts. Even if none of these terrible things happen to you, the possibility they might and the constant reminders have an impact. I suspect some women push it down to some corner of their mind, make choices to minimize the reality of the danger so that it becomes an unseen subtraction of who they are and what they can do. Unspoken, unspeakable.
I knew what was lost. And the weight of it crushed me then, in those years when I was starting out, when I was trying to make a life, have a voice, find a place in the world. I did all those things, but I joked later that not getting raped was the most avid hobby of my youth. It took considerable vigilance and wariness and constantly prompted changed routes through cities, suburbs, wild places, through social groups, conversations, and relationships.
You can drip one drop of blood into a glass of clear water and it will still appear to be clear water, or two drops or six, but at some point it will not be clear, not be water. How much of this enters your consciousness before your consciousness is changed? What does it do to all the women who have a drop or a teaspoon or a river of blood in their thoughts? What if it’s one drop every day? What if you’re just waiting for clear water to turn red? What does it do to see people like you tortured? What vitality and tranquility or capacity to think about other things, let alone do them, is lost, and what would it feel like to have them back?
At the worst point, I would sleep with the lights and the radio on so it would seem as though I was still alert. (Mr. Young told me men had come by and asked which apartment I lived in, which of course he didn’t tell them, but it fed my nervousness.) I didn’t sleep well and still don’t. I was, as they say of traumatized people, hypervigilant and I was setting up my home to appear hypervigilant too. My flesh had turned to something brittle with tension. I used to look at the thick steel cables holding up the Golden Gate Bridge and think of the muscles in my neck and shoulders that felt as taut and as hard. I startled easily and flinched—cringed, really—when anyone made a sudden movement near me.
I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women’s fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change. I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth without this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzlingly alive and that a joyous confidence