Residuals of Masculinity Pressures

Trigger Warning: This post contains mentions or discussions of rape, violence, and crude language.

Advisory: The following is an account of my personal experiences and should only be taken and accepted as my personal experience. I do believe individual experiences contribute to the identification of a problem and solution.

            The first time I ever experienced sexual harassment, I was nine-years-old. A man exposed himself to me and played it off as an accident. I remained silent despite my discomfort. I knew he knew I was there. He took my silence as permission and decided to test the waters further. I found myself alone with him, so he took the liberty of smacking my nine-year-old butt and squeezing it so hard that he pinched it with his whole hand as I ran off. I went outside where my parents stood chatting with people from the neighborhood and I clung to my mother’s leg. I clung just as tightly to my silence.

            My mother was a hardened woman with high standards and a lot on her plate, while my father was a soft and gentle man lost in his own world. The world had told me women didn’t fight and soft men cower at confrontation, but when I looked at my parents and thought about their reactions if I told them, I could only picture them in handcuffs. Both of my parents walked a thin line of gendered roles. Both tried to fill the mold society asked of them. My mother took care of her children and a big home, cooking meals every night, cleaning, gardening, and tending to her husband. She worked, too, as an RN for psychiatric, salaried. My father considered himself a romantic, sending flowers to my mother’s work on random days with cards signed “just ‘cause.” He hated his own father for the abuses and pressures he had to endure and typically related to women more than men. He buckled in confrontations with my mother, but studied weaponry such as guns and bows. He liked hunting and cleaning his weapons in front of any boy I brought home. My parents were complex people in my eyes, often confused about who they were and what they stood for, but I was confident in how they felt about their children. If I told them, there would have been violence.

            Like a majority of film and TV, the depiction of parents stopping at nothing to protect their kids is painted in nobility and intense love. It’s difficult to argue that point, but this notion prevented me from speaking out sooner and that man continued to live amongst my family. I chose between silencing myself and protecting everyone else’s feelings. It’s an inherently selfish decision as that man continued (and still continues) to walk freely, potentially hurting other young women and girls. It isn’t anyone’s fault. I was a child with only an inkling of the realities of the world. I actively kept my parents and siblings in the dark, so they could do nothing about it. I learned to make myself okay, day-by-day.

            When I was thirteen, it happened again. This time the perpetrators were two boys, both my age. One was my best friend. He was the first boy I had ever had a crush on and I met him in elementary school. He was the first boy to reject my bold expression of affection, but we became friends shortly after. The other was my new crush. I had only known him for a few months through a mutual friend, but he was smart and funny. I had dropped quite a bit of my baby weight, often a subject of boy-one’s jabbing insults, and I felt giddy to finally meet a standard and rid myself of boy-one’s ridicule, even just for a moment. I walked over to his house, where both boys were waiting. We had plans to leave when our fourth group member showed up, but she kept us waiting for a bit. I had brought my video camera with me, attempting to follow in my brother’s footsteps as a filmmaker. They took it. I didn’t know what they had planned, but they turned it on and pointed it at me.

Next, they took my hands and cuffed them. I was under the impression they were fake until I struggled to get out of them. Then, they tied a rag around my head to cover my mouth and placed a rubber mask on me. I don’t know what their intentions were and I don’t think they knew either. They fumbled for what to do with me next with the camera focused on me. Boy-two picked up the hockey stick next to him and began poking me with it. They poked my breasts, between my legs. They continued to poke at me, lifting my shirt with the end of the stick, all the while filming it. The arrival of our fourth friend startled them. I ripped my hands from the cuffs, removed the mask and gag, took my camera and left. I tossed the tape into the canal and screamed. Then I walked home, gulped it all down, and clung to my silence again. Keeping my family together still meant more to me.

            Over the next few years, I would give in to the reasoning of ‘playing around’ and ‘earning my stripes’ in the group. I continued to hang out with them after some time. They convinced me I had overreacted and lacked trust in them. They made me tougher, I’ll give them that. But they also took my sense of self, and in reaction I fell in to the obsession of masculinity. It became a safe-haven for me. If I acted like a man, I’d be perceived as a man and therefore not-to-be-messed-with or found unattractive enough to be left alone.

It was like covering myself in cow manure to blend in with dung beetles.

It wasn’t until my twenties when I was living alone, hours from any family, that it all caught up to me. To say these were the only instances of sexual harassment would be a blessing, but it never mattered what my age was, how my hair looked, what I wore, or how I acted – I became a target to someone, somewhere.

            The telling of this has mostly served as catharsis, but it’s truly a demonstration of the interweaving of issues we may only see as “men’s issues” or “women’s issues”. This is only one aspect of my life that masculinity has affected. The issue’s I have with my father, the struggles I observe my brothers endure, and what I’ve witnessed my mother overcome barely touches the surface of it. Shedding light on personal experiences, though, brings about a self-awareness that I’ve found healing and that others have found informative. It will always be most difficult to face ourselves, but the basis of change lies within being mindful.