Every farmer knows that if you don’t want your females bred, you manage your males. You separate them. You fence them. You take responsibility for their behavior because you understand what they will do if you don’t. No farmer blames the ewe. No farmer tells the hen to cover herself.
The same men who understand this about their livestock come inside and tell us to watch what we wear so we don’t turn on the men around us. Including our fathers.
The logic did not fail them. They applied different logic to their daughters than to their animals. Because they believe we exist to serve men, including being available to be violated by them, and that managing that violation is our job, not theirs.
Before we were old enough to understand what we were being protected from, we were told to protect men from ourselves.
That is not a warning. That is an installation.
It tells us that male desire is an uncontrollable force of nature, like weather. That we are the variable. That we are what can be adjusted, what must be managed.
So when something happens to our bodies that we did not choose, we turn the question inward. What did I do? What did I wear? What did I signal?
We were never given the other question. Why did he believe he was entitled to my body?
I was 18. I said no. I covered myself. He pulled my hands away and forced himself on top of me. And I froze. I could feel his whole body on top of me. I had a vision of kicking my legs and him flying into the wall. That didn’t happen. My body had been taught that my purity was my only value. When that was taken, my nervous system had nowhere to go.
The freeze response is real. It is your body making a calculation under threat. But the conditioning we were raised inside made that freeze permanent in a different way. It silenced us after. It told us the story of what happened was ours to carry, ours to be ashamed of, ours to manage into invisibility.
Women in their 70s and 80s are writing in public comment sections for the first time in their lives. Something happened to them. They never told anyone. Not because they forgot. Because they were taught that telling was the second violation.
I know what it is to sit across from the man who raped you and feed his family.
Fifteen years after it happened to me, I met him at a hot spring in Nevada. He had a wife. Two sons. I was there with my own husband and children. His name was Jessie. His grandfather lived in Redding, California.
I invited them onto our bus. I shared food with them. I asked questions carefully, the way you do when you need to be certain, when part of you is still hoping you are wrong. I wasn’t wrong.
I didn’t plunge a knife through him. I just sat there and stared at the man who had held my body down on a friend’s couch when I was 18 years old.
His wife is still on my Facebook.
She does not know. She may never know. And she is married to a man who decided that my no meant nothing.
This is what we carry. Not just what was done to us. But the years after. The running into them. The watching them build lives. The knowing that they moved forward while we learned to freeze, to silence, to manage ourselves smaller so it would never happen again.
Women are not reacting emotionally right now. We are doing math.
81 million men visited a website to watch women who did not consent to being filmed, did not consent to being drugged, did not consent to being watched by strangers paying to see them violated.
We watched nothing happen to billionaires who raped and murdered children. We lost rights over our own bodies. And we are watching little girls get told to watch what they wear so they don’t turn on the men in their own homes. I am hearing from friends that their husbands are not who they thought they were.
We are done.
My children are learning ju-jitsu. They are building muscle memory so that if someone does something to their body they don’t want, they do not freeze. I am not teaching my daughter to manage theirself so men stay comfortable. I am teaching my children that their bodies are theirs. That is not something I was given. I am giving it to them anyway.
The indoctrination said our purity, as girls, was our only value.
We are saying our bodies were always ours.
That is not a radical statement. It is a correction that is long overdue. And we are not waiting for permission to make it.
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