Congratulations on not raping anyone. Bummer it’s not enough.

“I am mad because he is an accurate reflection of the world we live in, where the ones that benefit most from white supremacist patriarchal society contribute the absolute least to correcting or compensating for its ills and horrors and tortures, who at the end of the day think they are good because they are not rapists, and let that be enough, let that be their contribution, while we walk down a dark alley with a knife they bought us for $45 on Amazon to protect ourselves from the thing they refuse to acknowledge their part in.”

—Me, on my ex, who had time to play a lot of Candy Crush but not enough to deal with rape

I wrote this essay below about an ex-boyfriend’s bumbling response to rape culture in Spring 2021, around the time I was leaving Tempest, when I’d lost a great deal of my self-trust and confidence. Before I posted it, I asked a friend to read it, and she made a little grimace at the end, did a little nervous laugh, and said I sounded angry. Or maybe she said it just sounded like I hated my ex-boyfriend. And I was tired of being the one that looked angry and unhinged and like a real fucking killjoy all the time, so I didn’t.

(I was sexually assaulted on a date, by a man, in between writing this and publishing this.)

I think this week what changed for me is, I just don’t fucking care anymore if I alienate men (or anyone!) by telling the truth about men. That I don’t care about making it comfortable for everyone, that I don’t fucking care if I’m the one that is always ruining all the things or being a really fucking bummer because I’m trying to stop women from being assaulted raped murdered tortured trafficked, while so many men I know, and actually all the men I know personally—all of you and especially you who is sitting there thinking about all you have done¹—pretend what is happening is not.

Anyway. Here’s an essay I wrote a long time ago about how this one time, my shitty ex-boyfriend bought me a knife from Amazon.com to solve rape.

Congratulations on not raping anyone. Bummer it’s not enough.

FROM THE ARCHIVE
Spring 2021 — unpublished

I keep thinking about this: One time in my twenties, a body worker I hired to fix my tangled back slapped my bare ass in the middle of the session.

His name was Charles, and he was one of the professionals in my network we all relied upon—my friends and their friends and their friends’ friends all used him. He was known among us as a single name that didn’t need qualification, the Charles, because he was something of a miracle worker. He could disappear a thrown out back, a clenched neck, even a flu if caught early enough. He practiced in the back of an office on Market street in San Francisco and worked without frill—no oils, no music, no scents, no candles. Just sheets and a stiff massage table.

I’d written him off as too much of an old hippie to care about fucking me, which is why when I showed up and stripped down to my lime green lace thong with him still in the room, instead of the customary abandonment of the room by the body worker as one changes, I didn’t think more of it than I might have thought of it had he been your grandma or a nurse or my mom. When he delivered the slap mid-session, and said my “bottom” was “too cute for me to not,” and then continued working out the knots in my thighs, lower back, sacrum, and other such areas, I cannot tell you what it was I felt, aside from dirty. I burned red, not from anger but from embarrassment.

That is what we do, you know. The one who should be embarrassed is too entitled to even have the blinking notion of how actually embarrassing their behavior is, and the one who is hurt eats it for them.

This is one example of what, hundreds? Probably thousands. Thousands of times that things happened to me that I knew were wrong, that I knew were violating, that I ate for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and an as afternoon snack from a box labeled This is your fault that I washed down with a drink from a can labeled This is your responsibility. Over the years, those thousands of meals of someone else’s bad behavior have not metabolized, like real food does. Instead, they’ve settled into a sediment at the bottom of a place I cannot locate within me but know is there because it weighs so much.

I live by myself on a dead end street in the middle of nowhere, my closest neighbor a few acres away. I do know, for certain, no one can hear me scream, because I’ve tried it. I’m not scared of living here, of being murdered in the woods in some version of every horror story I’ve ever seen where rural plus alone plus female equals disembowelment. But I am aware that I’m a sitting duck, an invitation. Yesterday, as two men entered my home to remove a table, one asked, “You live alone all by yourself out here?” To which I replied flatly, “I have many guns.” (I do not have any guns.)

Last summer, as I took long hikes by myself in completely remote areas without cell service, I began sending the pinned locations and estimated time of return to my then-boyfriend. I asked him to call emergency services if he did not hear from me within two hours of my expected ETA. On one such occasion upon my return, he laughed when he picked up the phone, and rhetorically asked: “No one murdered you?”

He’s white, he’s big, he’s a he, and I lost it. Because it struck me: I think about getting murdered, raped, and sexually assaulted almost every day of my life². Every action I take is calculated from this baseline of an existence. If I go into the woods by myself, I am not worried about wildlife, getting lost, or the things people should be worried about while in the woods by themselves. I am worried about the man in camouflage with the rifle who just walked by, who knows the terrain better than I do, who knows how easy it would be to fuck me and disappear me, because the more likely scenario is that he’ll be what gets me out there.

The moment then-boyfriend laughed is the moment I realized, not only are women responsible for ending rape culture, or preventing it through the defensive actions they take to minimize it (such as wearing specific clothing or not wearing other specific clothing, or not walking by themselves in dark, wooded forests or not wearing lime green thong bikinis to get adjustments) but we are seen as lunatics for the measures we go to, or the suspicions we have, about something so very real, so very omnipresent, so very threatening.

He thought I was crazy, overreacting, and that is only because he cannot recite the statistics, because he doesn’t have to know the statistics, because he is not in the statistics. Some of those statistics are: 1 in 6 American women are victims of attempted or completed rape, and a sexual assault occurs every 73 seconds.³

After this event occurred, he did send me a knife, a nice knife. It was meant to be a kind gesture, one intended to say I take your fear seriously. But the ultimate take away was hard to miss: It’s on you to protect yourself from us. The only thing he could think to do as a meaningful action was buy me a weapon, instead of going to the source of rape itself, also known as the club he belongs to, to see about what could be done to lessen the need for women to carry knives in their purses.

Recently, I wrote about a boundary violation on Instagram involving this same ex. The upshot (which is entirely unrelated to any piece