- I was 10 and playing at a friend’s house. Her father took us into the woods and removed our clothes. Things are fuzzy from there. I remember being told to lay down in a very shallow stream of water. I remember him above me. He wore a white T-shirt. I remember the smell of the dirt and what the pebbles felt like on my back and legs. I remember the water was cold. His daughter faced the other way. Eventually I grabbed my clothes and ran. I don’t want to remember this.
- In sixth grade a group of boys grabbed at my breasts nearly every day on the bus. Instead of telling the boys to stop, the driver (a man) told me to change seats and ignore them.
- When I was 14 I had to walk past a boy to get to my desk in a history class. He always stared at and commented on my breasts. One day he tried to grab me. I complained to the teacher (a man), and the teacher took me outside the room, looked at my chest and said “Well, I can’t blame him.”
- When I was 16 I worked at a grocery store. Almost daily an older man would make sexually explicit comments. One customer in his 40s started showing up at my register nearly every night. He would bring flowers and ask me to go out with him. I would laugh and make jokes and turn him down, but he kept showing up and kept getting more aggressive. One night he snuck up behind me, stuck his face in my neck and growled, “Let me eat that cherry tonight.”
- When I was 17 a manager grabbed my butt and told me I had to go home with him if I wanted to leave work. I complained to another manager and asked not to work with him again. I kept being scheduled on shifts with the grabber, so I complained to a higher-up manager. The next day I was fired.
- At 17 a friend asked me to get in his car. He took my cell phone and started speeding. He said if I didn’t tell him I liked him he would crash into a lake. I tried opening the door and he sped up more. I screamed that I liked him (I didn’t like him) and he stopped the car. He slammed my head into the gear shift and then tried to force me to give him a blow job.
Published by womenstrikeback
I am a journalism professor who studies issues of race, gender and sexuality in the media. I am a former newspaper reporter. My Ph.D. is in journalism.
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Women Strike Back 
At 21 I went on a first date with a friend of a friend. Something must have been slipped in my drink, because my memories are blurred from the evening and I only had two beers over the course of several hours. I remember messing around at his house. I remember waking up and he was having sex with me. Asking him to please stop and get off of me. He called me a stupid bitch. I fell asleep again only be awoken once more by this man having sex with me. My body felt heavy and I was very calm. Then something snapped in me, I grabbed my things and bolted out the door. I had to go work later that night where I cocktailed at a neighborhood watering hole and put with a steady stream of sexual harassment that is consistent in the service indusrty. My rapist continued to text over the next week, asking if I was “still mad at him? Haha.” His best friend was aware of the situation and openly bragged about it to some co-workers I later found out. This friend then approached me in public on two separate occasions in the following years and harrassed me. He cornered me in the dark, asked if I knew who he was, because he knew all about me. I am thankful to be surrounded by strong, supportive women of all ages who refused to let me dissappear and continue to blame myself for the wrongdoings of another.
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