There’s a story I know by heart. It’s a monologue I once performed often, about a woman named Laura. It’s adapted from a true story, but I can’t tell you much about Laura the person, only Laura the character, as I imagined her from a patchwork of sources—the monologue itself, guesses at her larger story and my own experiences.
My Laura, much like me, had straight hair and brown eyes with a determined sweetness in them, a seldom-used capacity to glare. She grew up Christian, with, I imagined, all the associations that come with it—lots of siblings, matching pajamas on the family Christmas card. She was very committed to her faith, had a purity ring, went to Bible camp. She had straight As and a good relationship with her parents. I pictured the day her name was called in church to be confirmed, how she felt the pride she deserved like a current behind her, her parent’s full smiles, her pastor’s affirming nod, her own steadfast faith, glowing somewhere in her chest. She did everything right. But not in that hollow, indoctrinated way we sometimes assume. In the script, she says this much plainly—“I actually meant all of it.”1
After graduation, she went to state school to study pre-law. Her motivation didn’t falter, but she discovered, like I hoped to one day, that being studious didn’t have to mean being a square. She was surprised by how funny she could be, how free she felt dancing at a party. One night, she went to a frat party with some of her new friends and drank a little more than she meant to. It should have ended like other similar Fridays, giggling on a dorm-room floor with vending-machine candy bars. But it didn’t. Instead, she was raped. Her life was changed overnight. When she turned to her support system—her family and church community—they responded with blame, rather than understanding.
●
During my sophomore year of high school, I performed Laura’s story as part of my speech team. I was in a category called prose or dramatic interpretation (drama for short): I picked a serious ten-minute monologue at the beginning of a six-month season, memorized it, polished it and performed it at weekly competitions. That year, I received second place in the state competition, which means I performed the piece, between practice and competition, thousands of times for thousands of people. It was more than a contest or an extracurricular activity, though. I took telling Laura’s story very seriously. I was encouraged to embody her character as fully as possible, and my approach was empathetic. I built her a backstory and spent time in her head. It was important to me that I understood her as deeply as possible.
At lunch, after school, on the bus to tournaments, I’d put on melancholic music (usually Coldplay), and lose myself in the printed-out script. I’d go through the spoken words, line by line, and write Laura’s thoughts, feelings and memories in the margins, usually using the first person, until the pages were cluttered with my pen scratches. I created little pools of experience, an inner reality rich with detail.
Then, in front of an audience of my peers and an adult judge, I’d stand in a dingy high school classroom at eight in the morning in a skirt suit, take a breath and start to speak. With my amateur acting chops, I’d engage in a kind of psychological gymnastics, aiming for that serendipitous place where character and person funnel into one. If it was a good round, I found it.
“I was drinking so I was sinning,” Laura and I would say, during the piece’s climax, echoing the judgments of her church. “I was breaking the law. I was giving in to drunkenness… You see, I’m not just a survivor. I’m a sinner.”
Then, in a burst of anger, shame and betrayal, Laura would take off her purity ring and throw it to the ground. Her early promises warped with hurt as she repeated—“I actually meant all of it.”
The audience could see it play out across my face—the horror of what this woman went through and her bravery for overcoming it. It was a kind of magic, a kind of catharsis, a kind of justice. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
●
It was 2018, right at the height of the #MeToo movement, and I wasn’t the only one doing a speech like this. Hundreds, probably thousands, of high school students, especially girls, were performing similar “survivor stories,” prefaced by dedications to breaking silence in honor of those who had experienced the horrors of sexual assault. It wasn’t uncommon, in a classroom of six performers, for three monologues to be centered around a sexual trauma.
These stories were all around me. Between October 2017 and October 2018, the #MeToo hashtag was used more than nineteen million times. There were a few high-profile cases that punctured into my daily life—the decades-long crimes of Harvey Weinstein, the Larry Nassar hearings, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. But there were reverberations in my immediate circles of friends and family, too. I heard family friends at dinner parties, when they leaned against the kitchen counter and murmured with unfamiliar intensity—half hope and half horror. I watched my teacher’s faces on their lunch breaks go pale over their phone screens. I felt my mom’s intake of breath when NPR came on during a drive.
For me, the tweets, videos and articles inspired disgust, sympathy and anger, but in a detached sense. I didn’t start out thinking of their battle as mine. My romantic history, at that point, mainly consisted of crushing on boys in my choir class who were probably gay. Sex was a vague someday, its potential dangers similarly theoretical. At the boundary between child and woman, I also stood at the boundary of the movement. #MeToo loomed like a rite of passage—one that Laura, inadvertently, was guiding me through.
●
I understood, in a basic way, the intent of all these stories. I knew that people who had endured sexual violence, especially women, were sharing their experiences in the pursuit of awareness, solidarity and, hopefully, accountability. And I thought I understood why I was sharing one of these stories too, even if it wasn’t mine. My coach suggested Laura’s story, and I was enthusiastic. I believed, as she did, that it was noble and empowering to be embodying this piece—that it was a way for me to lend my limited platform to a cause that mattered. But a story doesn’t always mean only what we want it to.
Was it noble? I had developed a connection with Laura, given real thought to her character outside of the harm she experienced, but did the audience see that? Or did they just see a woman’s most traumatic moment? Is that the part of her she wanted shared and repeated?
And was it empowering? I thought I was pretty mature; I think others around me thought the same. It was easy to assume I was processing it all well, but I’m not so sure anymore. What did it mean that I was listening to, much less acting out, the moments leading up to and following sexual violence over and over again—before I’d even had my first kiss?
I knew romance, and therefore sex, was complicated—thanks to the broad array of movies and books my parents gave me access to (if sometimes accidentally). I imagined it like a conversation, except with hormones, an expression of what was between two people. I knew that betweenness could be all kinds of things—pleasurable, fun, boring, difficult, painful, loving. But threatening, humiliating, damaging and traumatic weren’t so much a part of that vocabulary. Over the course of that year, those descriptors would come to overshadow the others.
This change came from a tangible place. I remember it like this—sitting in a standard-issue classroom chair in a drama-speech round, waiting for my turn to speak. Another girl would get called up for her performance, and within three sentences, I would know if her monologue was going to revolve around a sexual assault. From there, I knew more or less what she was going to say and do. I experienced the next ten minutes with a kind of numb anticipation, like pressing play on a video I already knew the ending to. There were crucial variations in the speeches—where and how and who—but the basic shape of the story was consistent enough to predict.
It would start with a few minutes where the audience got to know the character. She could crack a few jokes, show her personality, reveal her passions. But you couldn’t really let your guard down, because soon the tone would change and the scene would be set—the party or the doctor’s office or the living room. And then the assault would happen, acted out to various degrees. The rest of the speech would be spent untangling all the ways that the trauma had changed and hurt her, distanced her from the person she used to be. A few speeches later, it would be my turn to do more or less the same thing.
The problem wasn’t that any of us individually were doing these speeches. By themselves, they could be troubling or too intense, but also heartbreaking, revealing, even beautiful. But they became so common that they started to blur together. And the form I expected the stories to take was bigger than Laura’s script or any one person’s—it was the script. It was a pattern, even an assumption, a groove in my mind that got deeper the more stories funneled through it. I started to see sex as something to protect myself from, or to engage in only with extreme caution. And not because of the traditional reasons—risks of STIs or pregnancy—but because of its potential to be emotionally devastating, something I would have to survive or heal from.
●
As particular as my experience was to the world of speech and debate, it reproduced, if in a heightened form, something playing out in our larger conversation surrounding sex and sexual assault. In 2018, my generation was coming of age. We were turning thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. We were having our romantic and sexual firsts: dates, kisses, desires. We were forming the foundations of our sexual identities—what physical intimacy and relationships would come to mean in our own lives—all against a backdrop of mass reckoning.
The #MeToo movement was raising awareness of an existing cycle of abuse through powerful, individual stories. In the process, these stories constructed a new public narrative. This new narrative did a lot of good. It helped us articulate and implement higher standards for our leaders, our organizations, our media and our private lives. But for those in my demographic, it sometimes had an unintended consequence: fear. We were watching people relive inhuman sexual abuses in a courtroom on live television at the same time as we were googling how to French kiss. And I, at least, always understood that if I were to play a part in the stories I was hearing, it would be as the victim.
In a Good Morning America feature from 2018 called “College-age young women open up about coming of age in a #MeToo world,” several young women talk about their impressions of the #MeToo movement and what they think it means to be an empowered woman. An adolescent psychologist then suggests a series of tips for navigating the challenges they might face. She advocates for “mental rehearsal [as] an important strategy for coping with complex stressors,” like sexual assault. “Your mind can lay the tracks for an effective response should an assault occur … like fire drills in school or safety announcements on airplanes.”
I can’t and don’t want to speak for everyone in my generation, but in conversations with my female friends, I recognize an undercurrent of anxiety around romantic life. Most of my straight friends hardly date. The ones who do approach it with at least as much caution as excitement. When we talk about crushes or new boyfriends, we might start with giggles, but almost always ebb into warnings: I don’t know if I felt comfortable. I heard that so-and-so dated him and she said… I’m happy for you, just be careful.
My generation as a whole is having less sex, with less people, than that of our parents and grandparents. Researchers and writers have come up with all sorts of reasons for this decline—the COVID-19 pandemic, social media, a slower growing-up process. And there are certainly many factors. But maybe one of them is that we’re afraid. When it comes to sex with men, this was certainly the case for me.
●
In my freshman year of college, I went on my first ever solo trip abroad, to Barcelona. As the classic coming-of-age movie goes, I met a guy. He wore the same red and black flannel all three days that I knew him, but that didn’t prevent me from wanting to scrunch it in my hands. We flirted at hostel dinners in broken English, went out of our way to see each other passing through the lobby, made it seem like an accident when we both signed up for the same pub crawl. Once his hand had brushed my back on the way to the bar, I knew it was a done deal. It was barely three songs of awkwardly bumping into each other on the dance floor before we were kissing. We were a little playful, a little shy—swing dancing to club music.
Afterward, we rode home on the metro. It was nearly four in the morning, and we were both exhausted, leaning against each other. I watched our reflection in the dark train windows. We looked lovely together, all dirty jeans and smudged lipstick, his nose buried in my hair. In my mind, I fought to keep us in that image, interpreting it as what I hoped it was—two people who liked each other, clumsily connecting. But away from the booze, the music, the strangers, the club music, I felt a dis-ease pooling in my stomach, a dread. And I started to tell myself a story, just in case.
Stella, at nineteen, takes a trip all by herself. She thinks she’s competent, but she’s been told she’s too trusting. She goes on a pub crawl with a guy she likes, thinks it’s safe to cut loose. She has a few gin and tonics. They’re dancing together, but not asking many questions. Like, how old is he exactly? And what does he expect?
On the metro, he’s leaning on her like they’ve known each other forever, but later, she’ll remember it’s only been three days. The man is hot and charming in the right lighting, but drunk and nasty when he realizes he’s not going to get lucky. The hostel lobby is empty. The friends they came with have gone to sleep. He is leaving tomorrow (he mentioned it earlier, didn’t he? the private room he got for his last night?). He will never have to see her again. This is perfect, just perfect, for him.
By the time we’d gotten inside, hand in hand, I was no longer enjoying myself. I was on a mission to get to my own room. I told him I was going to bed. He nodded, but I read his eyes, syrupy and tired, as pleading. When he tried to follow me into the elevator, I panicked. I pushed him, gently at first, but when he didn’t respond right away, I pushed him again, hard enough to send him stumbling. The elevator door jolted between us, and when I saw the blank, bewildered expression on his face, my fear quickly turned into embarrassment. It was an instinct, over in an instant, but there was no salvaging the moment. I let him into the elevator and we stood tentatively at opposite ends. He muttered a nonsensical “sorry,” and I think I laughed. With rushed pleasantries, he got off at his floor and I got off at mine.
When I got home from my Barcelona trip, I didn’t tell anyone about that last part. I dressed up the story differently, told people I’d made out with a hot German guy and left it at that. Maybe because I was embarrassed, or wanted to remember it differently. But also because I just didn’t fully understand why I reacted like I did.
I kept thinking about it, and it kept happening—in different, subtler iterations. I’d be on a date with a guy, and everything would be going well, except for the dread in my stomach, the premature blame. That feeling bothered me, as much as any actions that corresponded to it. It created a dissonance that I found almost sickening—it’s hard to chat casually over coffee, much less hook up, with someone you can’t help but imagine the worst of. I wondered if something was wrong with me, and then I realized I hadn’t gotten here by myself. The #MeToo movement was meant to teach people in power a lesson, and it did. But it also taught me one: sex is a minefield.
●
It’s natural, when confronted with so many stories of threat and harm, to want there to be a takeaway, to attempt to reclaim them as control. It’s what happened in speech, when teen girls and their coaches reached for survivor stories. It’s what happened to me, when I listened to, crafted, performed and literally rehearsed so many survivor stories that I developed a narrative. But the fear it produced, in the absence of any real control or thought on the part of the adults around us, wasn’t empowering or productive. After you’ve learned to see every date, every man who expresses interest, every room you’re invited up to, as a plot point on the way to the inevitable climax where you get hurt—it makes your mind tangle up, like a sewing machine on a knotted stitch.
I wish that I had concrete answers for how to undo this knot, but instead I mostly have questions. What do I do with my awareness? What is everyone else doing with theirs? And the anger, fear and grief? How do I balance vulnerability with cynicism? How do I find moments of romantic innocence, simplicity, fun? How do I still go on dates with men, have sex and fall in love, while I’m waiting for the world to catch up?
I’m not sure, looking back, how to reconcile the positive and negative effects of my clumsy attempt at wielding Laura’s story. But I don’t regret doing it. And there’s one moment in the speech that I am unambiguously proud of. It was at the very end. With tears still on her face, Laura goes to pick up the purity ring she threw to the ground. She holds it, considers it, feels the pang of missing what it used to mean to her, the sincerity she wore it with. She hovers in that grief and the audience hovers with her, lending her the empathy her family and church should have. She describes a moment, years after the rape, when a chaplain cried after hearing what happened to her.
“My story is sad,” she says, “And it should be cried over. That day, I felt something I thought I had lost. The feeling that someone was watching out for me, that God is still with me.”
I think, if I could do it all again, I would have started with that moment. I would have examined the new tightrope she was walking, looking for joy again in the places—religion, family, sex—that she had learned to associate only with their ability to harm. Maybe Laura could guide me, too, as I try to find intimacy on the other side of disillusionment.
There’s a story I know by heart. It’s a monologue I once performed often, about a woman named Laura. It’s adapted from a true story, but I can’t tell you much about Laura the person, only Laura the character, as I imagined her from a patchwork of sources—the monologue itself, guesses at her larger story and my own experiences.
My Laura, much like me, had straight hair and brown eyes with a determined sweetness in them, a seldom-used capacity to glare. She grew up Christian, with, I imagined, all the associations that come with it—lots of siblings, matching pajamas on the family Christmas card. She was very committed to her faith, had a purity ring, went to Bible camp. She had straight As and a good relationship with her parents. I pictured the day her name was called in church to be confirmed, how she felt the pride she deserved like a current behind her, her parent’s full smiles, her pastor’s affirming nod, her own steadfast faith, glowing somewhere in her chest. She did everything right. But not in that hollow, indoctrinated way we sometimes assume. In the script, she says this much plainly—“I actually meant all of it.”1The monologue was adapted from Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, by Linda Kay Klein.
After graduation, she went to state school to study pre-law. Her motivation didn’t falter, but she discovered, like I hoped to one day, that being studious didn’t have to mean being a square. She was surprised by how funny she could be, how free she felt dancing at a party. One night, she went to a frat party with some of her new friends and drank a little more than she meant to. It should have ended like other similar Fridays, giggling on a dorm-room floor with vending-machine candy bars. But it didn’t. Instead, she was raped. Her life was changed overnight. When she turned to her support system—her family and church community—they responded with blame, rather than understanding.
●
During my sophomore year of high school, I performed Laura’s story as part of my speech team. I was in a category called prose or dramatic interpretation (drama for short): I picked a serious ten-minute monologue at the beginning of a six-month season, memorized it, polished it and performed it at weekly competitions. That year, I received second place in the state competition, which means I performed the piece, between practice and competition, thousands of times for thousands of people. It was more than a contest or an extracurricular activity, though. I took telling Laura’s story very seriously. I was encouraged to embody her character as fully as possible, and my approach was empathetic. I built her a backstory and spent time in her head. It was important to me that I understood her as deeply as possible.
At lunch, after school, on the bus to tournaments, I’d put on melancholic music (usually Coldplay), and lose myself in the printed-out script. I’d go through the spoken words, line by line, and write Laura’s thoughts, feelings and memories in the margins, usually using the first person, until the pages were cluttered with my pen scratches. I created little pools of experience, an inner reality rich with detail.
Then, in front of an audience of my peers and an adult judge, I’d stand in a dingy high school classroom at eight in the morning in a skirt suit, take a breath and start to speak. With my amateur acting chops, I’d engage in a kind of psychological gymnastics, aiming for that serendipitous place where character and person funnel into one. If it was a good round, I found it.
“I was drinking so I was sinning,” Laura and I would say, during the piece’s climax, echoing the judgments of her church. “I was breaking the law. I was giving in to drunkenness… You see, I’m not just a survivor. I’m a sinner.”
Then, in a burst of anger, shame and betrayal, Laura would take off her purity ring and throw it to the ground. Her early promises warped with hurt as she repeated—“I actually meant all of it.”
The audience could see it play out across my face—the horror of what this woman went through and her bravery for overcoming it. It was a kind of magic, a kind of catharsis, a kind of justice. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
●
It was 2018, right at the height of the #MeToo movement, and I wasn’t the only one doing a speech like this. Hundreds, probably thousands, of high school students, especially girls, were performing similar “survivor stories,” prefaced by dedications to breaking silence in honor of those who had experienced the horrors of sexual assault. It wasn’t uncommon, in a classroom of six performers, for three monologues to be centered around a sexual trauma.
These stories were all around me. Between October 2017 and October 2018, the #MeToo hashtag was used more than nineteen million times. There were a few high-profile cases that punctured into my daily life—the decades-long crimes of Harvey Weinstein, the Larry Nassar hearings, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. But there were reverberations in my immediate circles of friends and family, too. I heard family friends at dinner parties, when they leaned against the kitchen counter and murmured with unfamiliar intensity—half hope and half horror. I watched my teacher’s faces on their lunch breaks go pale over their phone screens. I felt my mom’s intake of breath when NPR came on during a drive.
For me, the tweets, videos and articles inspired disgust, sympathy and anger, but in a detached sense. I didn’t start out thinking of their battle as mine. My romantic history, at that point, mainly consisted of crushing on boys in my choir class who were probably gay. Sex was a vague someday, its potential dangers similarly theoretical. At the boundary between child and woman, I also stood at the boundary of the movement. #MeToo loomed like a rite of passage—one that Laura, inadvertently, was guiding me through.
●
I understood, in a basic way, the intent of all these stories. I knew that people who had endured sexual violence, especially women, were sharing their experiences in the pursuit of awareness, solidarity and, hopefully, accountability. And I thought I understood why I was sharing one of these stories too, even if it wasn’t mine. My coach suggested Laura’s story, and I was enthusiastic. I believed, as she did, that it was noble and empowering to be embodying this piece—that it was a way for me to lend my limited platform to a cause that mattered. But a story doesn’t always mean only what we want it to.
Was it noble? I had developed a connection with Laura, given real thought to her character outside of the harm she experienced, but did the audience see that? Or did they just see a woman’s most traumatic moment? Is that the part of her she wanted shared and repeated?
And was it empowering? I thought I was pretty mature; I think others around me thought the same. It was easy to assume I was processing it all well, but I’m not so sure anymore. What did it mean that I was listening to, much less acting out, the moments leading up to and following sexual violence over and over again—before I’d even had my first kiss?
I knew romance, and therefore sex, was complicated—thanks to the broad array of movies and books my parents gave me access to (if sometimes accidentally). I imagined it like a conversation, except with hormones, an expression of what was between two people. I knew that betweenness could be all kinds of things—pleasurable, fun, boring, difficult, painful, loving. But threatening, humiliating, damaging and traumatic weren’t so much a part of that vocabulary. Over the course of that year, those descriptors would come to overshadow the others.
This change came from a tangible place. I remember it like this—sitting in a standard-issue classroom chair in a drama-speech round, waiting for my turn to speak. Another girl would get called up for her performance, and within three sentences, I would know if her monologue was going to revolve around a sexual assault. From there, I knew more or less what she was going to say and do. I experienced the next ten minutes with a kind of numb anticipation, like pressing play on a video I already knew the ending to. There were crucial variations in the speeches—where and how and who—but the basic shape of the story was consistent enough to predict.
It would start with a few minutes where the audience got to know the character. She could crack a few jokes, show her personality, reveal her passions. But you couldn’t really let your guard down, because soon the tone would change and the scene would be set—the party or the doctor’s office or the living room. And then the assault would happen, acted out to various degrees. The rest of the speech would be spent untangling all the ways that the trauma had changed and hurt her, distanced her from the person she used to be. A few speeches later, it would be my turn to do more or less the same thing.
The problem wasn’t that any of us individually were doing these speeches. By themselves, they could be troubling or too intense, but also heartbreaking, revealing, even beautiful. But they became so common that they started to blur together. And the form I expected the stories to take was bigger than Laura’s script or any one person’s—it was the script. It was a pattern, even an assumption, a groove in my mind that got deeper the more stories funneled through it. I started to see sex as something to protect myself from, or to engage in only with extreme caution. And not because of the traditional reasons—risks of STIs or pregnancy—but because of its potential to be emotionally devastating, something I would have to survive or heal from.
●
As particular as my experience was to the world of speech and debate, it reproduced, if in a heightened form, something playing out in our larger conversation surrounding sex and sexual assault. In 2018, my generation was coming of age. We were turning thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. We were having our romantic and sexual firsts: dates, kisses, desires. We were forming the foundations of our sexual identities—what physical intimacy and relationships would come to mean in our own lives—all against a backdrop of mass reckoning.
The #MeToo movement was raising awareness of an existing cycle of abuse through powerful, individual stories. In the process, these stories constructed a new public narrative. This new narrative did a lot of good. It helped us articulate and implement higher standards for our leaders, our organizations, our media and our private lives. But for those in my demographic, it sometimes had an unintended consequence: fear. We were watching people relive inhuman sexual abuses in a courtroom on live television at the same time as we were googling how to French kiss. And I, at least, always understood that if I were to play a part in the stories I was hearing, it would be as the victim.
In a Good Morning America feature from 2018 called “College-age young women open up about coming of age in a #MeToo world,” several young women talk about their impressions of the #MeToo movement and what they think it means to be an empowered woman. An adolescent psychologist then suggests a series of tips for navigating the challenges they might face. She advocates for “mental rehearsal [as] an important strategy for coping with complex stressors,” like sexual assault. “Your mind can lay the tracks for an effective response should an assault occur … like fire drills in school or safety announcements on airplanes.”
I can’t and don’t want to speak for everyone in my generation, but in conversations with my female friends, I recognize an undercurrent of anxiety around romantic life. Most of my straight friends hardly date. The ones who do approach it with at least as much caution as excitement. When we talk about crushes or new boyfriends, we might start with giggles, but almost always ebb into warnings: I don’t know if I felt comfortable. I heard that so-and-so dated him and she said… I’m happy for you, just be careful.
My generation as a whole is having less sex, with less people, than that of our parents and grandparents. Researchers and writers have come up with all sorts of reasons for this decline—the COVID-19 pandemic, social media, a slower growing-up process. And there are certainly many factors. But maybe one of them is that we’re afraid. When it comes to sex with men, this was certainly the case for me.
●
In my freshman year of college, I went on my first ever solo trip abroad, to Barcelona. As the classic coming-of-age movie goes, I met a guy. He wore the same red and black flannel all three days that I knew him, but that didn’t prevent me from wanting to scrunch it in my hands. We flirted at hostel dinners in broken English, went out of our way to see each other passing through the lobby, made it seem like an accident when we both signed up for the same pub crawl. Once his hand had brushed my back on the way to the bar, I knew it was a done deal. It was barely three songs of awkwardly bumping into each other on the dance floor before we were kissing. We were a little playful, a little shy—swing dancing to club music.
Afterward, we rode home on the metro. It was nearly four in the morning, and we were both exhausted, leaning against each other. I watched our reflection in the dark train windows. We looked lovely together, all dirty jeans and smudged lipstick, his nose buried in my hair. In my mind, I fought to keep us in that image, interpreting it as what I hoped it was—two people who liked each other, clumsily connecting. But away from the booze, the music, the strangers, the club music, I felt a dis-ease pooling in my stomach, a dread. And I started to tell myself a story, just in case.
Stella, at nineteen, takes a trip all by herself. She thinks she’s competent, but she’s been told she’s too trusting. She goes on a pub crawl with a guy she likes, thinks it’s safe to cut loose. She has a few gin and tonics. They’re dancing together, but not asking many questions. Like, how old is he exactly? And what does he expect?
On the metro, he’s leaning on her like they’ve known each other forever, but later, she’ll remember it’s only been three days. The man is hot and charming in the right lighting, but drunk and nasty when he realizes he’s not going to get lucky. The hostel lobby is empty. The friends they came with have gone to sleep. He is leaving tomorrow (he mentioned it earlier, didn’t he? the private room he got for his last night?). He will never have to see her again. This is perfect, just perfect, for him.
By the time we’d gotten inside, hand in hand, I was no longer enjoying myself. I was on a mission to get to my own room. I told him I was going to bed. He nodded, but I read his eyes, syrupy and tired, as pleading. When he tried to follow me into the elevator, I panicked. I pushed him, gently at first, but when he didn’t respond right away, I pushed him again, hard enough to send him stumbling. The elevator door jolted between us, and when I saw the blank, bewildered expression on his face, my fear quickly turned into embarrassment. It was an instinct, over in an instant, but there was no salvaging the moment. I let him into the elevator and we stood tentatively at opposite ends. He muttered a nonsensical “sorry,” and I think I laughed. With rushed pleasantries, he got off at his floor and I got off at mine.
When I got home from my Barcelona trip, I didn’t tell anyone about that last part. I dressed up the story differently, told people I’d made out with a hot German guy and left it at that. Maybe because I was embarrassed, or wanted to remember it differently. But also because I just didn’t fully understand why I reacted like I did.
I kept thinking about it, and it kept happening—in different, subtler iterations. I’d be on a date with a guy, and everything would be going well, except for the dread in my stomach, the premature blame. That feeling bothered me, as much as any actions that corresponded to it. It created a dissonance that I found almost sickening—it’s hard to chat casually over coffee, much less hook up, with someone you can’t help but imagine the worst of. I wondered if something was wrong with me, and then I realized I hadn’t gotten here by myself. The #MeToo movement was meant to teach people in power a lesson, and it did. But it also taught me one: sex is a minefield.
●
It’s natural, when confronted with so many stories of threat and harm, to want there to be a takeaway, to attempt to reclaim them as control. It’s what happened in speech, when teen girls and their coaches reached for survivor stories. It’s what happened to me, when I listened to, crafted, performed and literally rehearsed so many survivor stories that I developed a narrative. But the fear it produced, in the absence of any real control or thought on the part of the adults around us, wasn’t empowering or productive. After you’ve learned to see every date, every man who expresses interest, every room you’re invited up to, as a plot point on the way to the inevitable climax where you get hurt—it makes your mind tangle up, like a sewing machine on a knotted stitch.
I wish that I had concrete answers for how to undo this knot, but instead I mostly have questions. What do I do with my awareness? What is everyone else doing with theirs? And the anger, fear and grief? How do I balance vulnerability with cynicism? How do I find moments of romantic innocence, simplicity, fun? How do I still go on dates with men, have sex and fall in love, while I’m waiting for the world to catch up?
I’m not sure, looking back, how to reconcile the positive and negative effects of my clumsy attempt at wielding Laura’s story. But I don’t regret doing it. And there’s one moment in the speech that I am unambiguously proud of. It was at the very end. With tears still on her face, Laura goes to pick up the purity ring she threw to the ground. She holds it, considers it, feels the pang of missing what it used to mean to her, the sincerity she wore it with. She hovers in that grief and the audience hovers with her, lending her the empathy her family and church should have. She describes a moment, years after the rape, when a chaplain cried after hearing what happened to her.
“My story is sad,” she says, “And it should be cried over. That day, I felt something I thought I had lost. The feeling that someone was watching out for me, that God is still with me.”
I think, if I could do it all again, I would have started with that moment. I would have examined the new tightrope she was walking, looking for joy again in the places—religion, family, sex—that she had learned to associate only with their ability to harm. Maybe Laura could guide me, too, as I try to find intimacy on the other side of disillusionment.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.