She says: "Kavanaugh physically pushed me into a bedroom as I was headed for a bathroom up a short stair well from the living room. They locked the door and played loud music..." "...Kavanaugh was on top of me..." "...They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state." "After a few attempts to get away, I was able to take this opportune moment to get up and run across to a hallway bathroom. I locked the bathroom door behind me."
And? So what? She had some guys jack with her at a party? One guy 'tried to disrobe [her]?' Excuse me while I take some time in my safe space to prevent myself from being triggered by her traumatic experience.
I don't know what kind of rich, charmed white bitch life she'd been living, but THAT experience wasn't sexual assault; it was guys being dicks who needed their asses kicked because they did something inappropriate.
She says, "I have received medical treatment regarding the assault." For what, exactly? The fact that someone actually violated her comfort zone? Fuck her. Fuck her and her "trauma."
Shall I address this in chronological order, or in order of severity? Oh, let's do it chronologically. This one's bad but, in my opinion, it gets worse so...let's do this in a series of posts. This will be "STFU Christine #1."
Junior high. Probably 12 years old. My school bus route picked up kids from a super-shitty part of the neighborhood as well as the mostly-shitty part where I lived. On the way home, my stop was last. The worst apartment complex was right before my stop, so little tiny 75-pound blonde me was the only white girl on the bus anyway but, in the afternoons, I was the only white kid period and had to endure the shittiest of shitty kids when the bus was virtually empty because only my stop was left.
I'm not trying to make this about race, but it is. As the solitary member of the minority, I was a target. I always had been. My parents knew things were bad - not HOW bad because I kept almost all of it to myself - but we just COULD not afford to move because the neighborhood was SO shitty that they would have lost their asses trying to sell the house.
One rainy day, I was on the bus headed home. I always just sat wherever I could because that's how it worked. As the bus emptied, I always began to move up seats closer to the driver. On this particular day, it wasn't going to happen.
There was this black kid, "J," who was a few years older than me, who had failed two grades anyway so was two years older than everyone else in his class in 8th grade. He was sketchy. Ugly. Crude. Clothes always smelled musty but, even at my young age I was compassionate enough to realize that not everybody was lucky enough to have a washer and dryer in their home, or the chance to pull out the wet clothes from the washer immediately after (we lived in a stupid hot, humid climate and clothes could turn sour fast if the w/d was outside.), or that they even necessarily had the money to dry the clothes. I lived in the ghetto. I had poor friends. I knew the deal. So I never judged him on his mustiness. I judged him on his behavior. His "I have to be loud to be the center of attention" behavior. His "if I cuss all the time it will shock people into paying attention to me." As such, he was an asshole in my book. But we had no interaction, so it didn't matter.
Until we did, and it did.
The third to the last kids got dropped off. There were only about 4 kids left on the bus. I was about to move up when "J" grabbed my backpack from my seat as I was starting to move.
"I ain't giving this to you yet. Come sit over here." He motioned at the seat across the aisle from him with his golf umbrella. We were near the back of the bus but I looked toward the driver and could see his face in the visor/mirror thing they had so they could monitor us. He wasn't looking up into it. I was standing up and moving while the bus was moving, but the driver said nothing.
"J" began insulting my body. Telling me that I didn't look old enough to be in junior high because I was so small and all I had were "mosquito bites." At that point, he took the tip of his umbrella, shoved it under the hem of my shirt, began to lift my shirt, and that's when I jumped back toward the window of my seat. It didn't matter. He was big, his arms were long, and his umbrella was long as well. He began poking at my yet-to-be-developed breasts with his umbrella. I was still wearing what I guess is a "training" bra (training me for what?) so I wasn't completely bare, but he just poked at me. And continued berating my mosquito bites.
Even though I was a strong personality, typically outspoken and some might even say bossy, I said nothing to him. I was scared. Very scared. And I had reason to be.
[I'm skipping quote marks from here on out. You get the point.]
He began talking about how he knew I could never get a man with tiny titties like mine, so I must still be a tight little virgin. He raked the metal tip of his umbrella down my chest toward my crotch. I tried to back up more but he was on the aisle edge of his seat and I was up against the window of my seat. I turned to face forward. I started coughing loudly and obnoxiously, hoping the driver would look up to make sure I wasn't dying. But he didn't. And the other kids didn't either.
In the blink of an eye, J jumped across the aisle, grabbed my arm, and threw me down onto the floor of the bus. I was between two seats on my side, he was in the aisle. I yelped, but I'm guessing nobody saw or, if they did, they didn't do anything about it. I mean, I'll be honest; like, every kid was scared to death of this asshole.
I was on the dirty rubber floor of the bus, scrambling to get back up onto the seat, but he had me by the ankle. He grabbed the cuff of my pants and yanked. Hard. It caught me off guard, lost my balance, and fell onto my back. I was still in that rapidly growing phase so my mother was insistent on elastic waistbands. That was a detriment on this day. My pants started to come down, I was squirming trying to keep my ass in them, and he laid his umbrella on my seat and grabbed the cuff of my other pants leg.
I KNOW I made a noise. I know I had to have yelped again, or screamed, or something. I mean, even J was laughing so you would think someone would have looked to see what was going on. If they did, they didn't do a thing.
With my pants pulled down to my knees and futile struggling to grab them, J started talking about my tight white virgin pussy and was running the metal tip of his umbrella up my thigh. He got to the leg of my underwear and shoved the tip of his umbrella under the elastic. He was still laughing and telling me how much of a rich baby white bitch I was and how dare I be so stuck up that I never talked to him on the bus.
He began just randomly poking around with the tip of the umbrella.
HOW COULD WE NOT BE AT HIS STOP YET?!
Because it was Houston and it floods and if there's even a moderate amount of rain, the water runs to the right lane and collects in the gutter along the curb. School buses at the time were required to stay in the right lane, which meant that, on this day, it was taking literally forever. Of course.
The worst pain I'd ever felt in my life up to that point was shooting up into my body from my genitals. He just kept poking and poking around with that umbrella tip until he found an area that didn't give resistance.
Yes, I was a virgin but I was 12, had received sex ed both from my parents and from school, and had poked around on myself enough to know what he was doing and what he was invading. And it hurt like a motherfucker. Not only was the pointed metal tip of the umbrella inside my delicate female parts, but the leg of my panties was pushing on the umbrella, causing it to kind of push to one side inside of me. I could feel the tearing.
I was scared to death to fight back because he was big, strong, and a position to hurt me even worse. How would my insides feel if I moved even an inch? And he was scary as fuck. I will never forget the spark in his eyes with the whites that were more yellow and bloodshot than white, or the way his dry lips curved back in a crooked smile over crooked, gapped teeth.
I know I screamed out and I was already crying. There is literally no way that, out of about 5 people on the bus, not one of them - especially the adult - didn't see something wrong going on. Nobody intervened.
It probably didn't last any longer than 15 seconds, but it felt like 15 minutes. Then he just stopped.
He grabbed the tip of his umbrella, ran his hand over it, then wiped it on his jeans.
I pulled my pants up and cowered into the corner of the seat leg and the wall. He just kept smiling. And laughing.
A few moments later we pulled into the circle drive of his apartments. The bus came to a stop and, laughing, he threw my backpack at me while I was huddled up. "You stupid white bitch...you like this nigger fucking you?" He literally cackled and walked down the aisle to the door.
I KNOW someone heard him say that. I cried as he exited the bus and got back up into my seat. I didn't even move forward this time. I just pulled my legs up to my chest as I sat sideways on the seat and tried not to sniffle too loudly.
There was one kid left on the bus and the driver, who were both looking back at me after J got off the bus. No one said a word. We went another 15 minutes in complete silence before my stop. It hurt to move. My body was sore from being yanked around and falling. My vagina was sore because J tore me up so badly. But we got to my stop and I - along with the other kid - stood up to exit the bus.
I got to the door and the driver to whom I'd always been so polite merely said, "See you in the morning." I turned around, still softly crying, but couldn't look him in the face. I looked at the collar of his shirt. It was a Polo-style, color-appropriate, district-provided shirt, buttoned all the way to the top. There was a little bit of light brown chest hair poking out of the top, despite the high neckline. I felt nauseous and began to dry heave. He didn't say anything but just sat there, hand on the grip of the mechanism to close the door as I turned and ran/stumbled/fell out of the bus. I landed on my hands on the concrete and scraped them up. I saved the knees of my pants. My backpack fell off and I heard my Thermos crack. It soaked up the water on the sidewalk and, later I found out, warped the covers to one of my textbooks, which I got in trouble for at the end of the year.
Mom was almost always home when I got there, so I had to pull myself together fast. It had stopped raining, so she wasn't parked at the end of the street to pick me up, but she was probably still at home.
I couldn't tell anybody what happened. My dad was already bitter about the house situation and the danger I was in every day. He had already had to "handle" some incidents that had happened to me in the past. They weren't NEARLY as bad as what had just gone down.
I sat on the covered porch of a vacant house two doors down before I'd reach my house. I knew I only had a few minutes to get it together or Mom would know something was wrong. We'd already been delayed because of high water. I decided for sure that I was going to keep it all to myself. Nobody else thought it was important enough to do anything about - not even an adult who, I was pretty sure, was supposed to protect me. My dad, however, was the polar opposite. If he knew and found out who it was, he'd likely kill that kid and end up in prison. Being the breadwinner and my daddy, I knew our lives would end if he left.
When I went to the bathroom later that afternoon, my panties were bloody. I panicked. If I put them in the hamper, my mom would see it for sure. Although I knew what a period was, my family didn't get theirs that early. It was usually around 14, so I was sure she wouldn't assume that. Plus it would be days later when she did laundry and would wonder what I'd been doing for feminine hygiene all that time.
I shoved them into my small gym pouch. I planned on throwing them in the giant trash can in the locker room during PE when we dressed out the next day.
The only problem was that I was terrified to get back on the bus. As is typical, I had crazy anxiety for a few days and told my parents I didn't feel good and didn't want to go to school. They bought that for one day. The next day, it was a hissy fit about wanting someone to drive me to school and come pick me up because I didn't want to ride the bus. My parents knew what kinds of kids were on the bus with me so they basically demanded to know what had happened. I whined and bitched to buy time to think about what I was going to tell them. I ended up just minimizing the entire thing by telling them that there was a group of older kids who were bullying me. After I'd reassured my dad that nobody had hurt me (he would have killed them), I heard the whole lecture about you can't let them get to you, ignore them, you know the insults they throw at you aren't true, you're better than they are and they're mean to you because there's something missing inside of them, etc.
I never told anybody about it until I was about 26 and was dating the man I thought I was going to marry. I'd seen psychiatrists for awhile but kept it to myself even then. But my man was understanding and gentle and held me while I shook and curled up into a ball against his chest.
And when that was over, it was over. I'd released it. The shame I'd felt disappeared. I've given the other important men in my life a very short, concise sentence about what had happened, usually consisting of nothing more than, "When I was in junior high, I was sexually assaulted by a guy I hated who used an umbrella to violate me." And that was it.
Did I deal with it? I'm not sure. Did I unknowingly take that trauma, pack it up into a little compartment in my brain and file it away in the archives as a way to cope with the pain? I'm really not sure. I've never really cried, I've never really talked through it, and this is the first time the full story's ever been told. I'm fully aware that I am affected by a case of PTSD but I'm not sure it was this sole incident that caused it. It could be that this, along with Parts 2, 3, & 4 worked together to make me feel crazy.
So. This privileged, rich, white woman WITH A DEGREE IN PSYCHOLOGY wants to whine and complain about how HARD it's been for her to cope with a drunk guy jumping on her drunk ass and *attempting* to remove her clothing. Again, to Christine Blasey Ford, I say fuck you. You have NO FUCKING IDEA what "trauma" is. You have no idea what "sexual assault" is. Get outta here with that shit. Yes, I'm sure it was scary and nothing she'd had to deal with before. But still. Fuck you.
I'm sure you'll just love Part 2, although Part 3 is where it really picks up. Part 4 is kind of dull compared to the others but is probably much more in line with what the majority of women go through, is probably more relatable to most, but is still a violation and abuse of trust.
Until then...
I am...
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
What's on your mind? Lay it on me...