Every Woman Has Something
by: Damieka Thomas
Editors’ note:
The Inner Child Issue of the Siren discusses sensitive topics for much of our community, including childhood trauma, body image, domestic violence, religious trauma, sexual harassment, child sexual harassment, sexual coersion, and rape. These subjects are approached with care and intention, but we recognize they can be deeply triggering. These themes are all detailed in this essay, and we encourage readers to engage at their own pace while acknowledging and considering the intersectional feminist themes of our contributors' work. For more of The Inner Child Issue, read here.
Much love - Juli & Fox
above: as seen in The Inner Child Issue of The Siren, print version (extended cut below)The first time I remember being catcalled, I was eleven years old.
Since it was laundry day, I was wearing underwear with princesses on them and a yellow tank top that was a little too tight. My hips had just spread, taking me from a tall lanky girl who’s jeans would not stay up on her waist to this half-woman creature, and I wished that I’d stayed the same. I wanted to remain a child forever. I was utterly crushed the week before when the scale at my grandma’s house told me that I was 102 pounds. I didn’t eat dinner that night and maybe this was the beginning of a lifelong fucked up relationship to food and my body because what woman doesn’t have a lifelong fucked up relationship to food and her body?
Lately, I’d taken to staring, transfixed, at my hips in the steam of a fogged window after a shower, already wide and yet still ever-expanding, littered with bright red stretch marks. I was still young enough to believe in God and magic, and I’d begun praying to God that he’d make the growing stop. As usual, God never listened. My ass and thighs also expanded. The stretch marks continued to litter my body like soft red lightning bolts. The growing pains continued. My breasts came in, small nubs with puffy brown nipples at first, then expanding rapidly until I could fit them into a full B cup bra. I had a weird obsession with keeping my nipples soft, noticing the way they puckered when I watched Selena Gomez in that scene where she is staring at the mirror and dancing with her love interest, long thick hair whipping about lithe hips, in Another Cinderella Story. Just straight girl things.
The day that I was catcalled, I was walking home from school. I was carrying a Nancy Drew novel that I’d been reading on my walk. I’d just moved to a new school and was lonely, having been transported from the redwood beauty of Fort Bragg and my friends there to the ugliness of palm trees and flat orchards in Live Oak. I was obsessed with Nancy Drew at the time. And I mean OG, Mary Sue, perfect, All-American, rich, racist Nancy Drew. I thought she was the baddest bitch around, and I wanted to be just like her. The book was tucked safely under my arm, guarded from the harsh mid-August sun, the roughness of the hard laminated library cover chafing my skin a bit. I was wearing tight blue jeans and my too-small yellow tank top. I could see my breasts moving a little under it, and every once in a while, I looked down at them, transfixed by my own body, the suddenness of its weight on me. It felt like a thing that was not yet mine. I didn’t feel pretty most of the time, but that day I did. I liked the golden brown of my skin in the sunlight, the mole on my left breast catching the light. Some might say I was asking for it.
A man pulled up in an old blue car next to me. The man rolled down his window. I thought he might ask for directions or try to talk to me, which men had done before. Last year, in Fort Bragg, our older male neighbor spoke to me through our fence. He had thin gray hair and beady blue eyes. He reminded me of my grandpa, except he made me feel weird. Not unsafe per se, just weird. He said I could come hang out with him at his house whenever I wanted. I told Mom, and for reasons I didn’t understand, she was pissed. She went over and yelled at him. He never talked to me again.
Men loved to talk to me. This was good, I thought. Male attention was good, even if it made me uncomfortable. Last year, when I was barely ten, my mom’s male friend asked me, “What do you think sex is?” When I tried to change the subject, he added, “No, really, I want to know what you think it is.” He laughed as I fumbled my way through some response about kissing and rolling around in your underwear. “That’s what little girls always think. You’ll know the truth soon.”
I thought this man might try something similar. I shifted my book. I looked down at my converse, littered with drawings from my friends in Fort Bragg. I missed home. I hated it here. It was too hot and too dry and too desolate and Mom slept too much and we had no food except top ramen and the Nutrisystem that Nana had sent us. We didn’t have money in Fort Bragg either, but at least I had my friends.
The man looked at me, his gaze hot as the sun on my face. I expected his voice to come soft, quiet, for him to start a conversation. I didn’t want it, but that’s what I thought might happen. Instead, he yelled, so loud that my eardrums pounded and I jumped a little, then flushed, embarrassed at my own fear.
“Ay, Mamacita,” he said. “Nice ass! Can I get your number, baby?”
I looked up. My skin was warm. He looked old enough to be my dad, if not older, considering I had a young dad, just barely twenty-nine with a twelve-year-old daughter in whom’s life he was only vaguely involved. The man’s dark eyes had wrinkles around them. His arms were tattooed, gripping his steering wheel. His fingernails were dirty. I felt sick, but I kept walking. Nancy stared at me from under my arm. I wanted to tell him to fuck off. Use the word I’d just learned last year, which still felt so new and powerful on my tongue. But I just watched my Converse continue to move across the concrete, soles of my feet slapping the hot pavement. My feet didn’t look like my own. Nothing felt like my own. My breasts, my apparently nice ass, my hips, my stomach, my hair. Nothing. The man’s eyes lingered longer, taking me in, hungry and desperate, and I swore I could feel them all over me, touching, prodding like I was a science experiment. Then he sped off, tires squealing, his laugh echoing down the street. Some kids from school, also walking home, looked at me. Some giggled awkwardly. No one said anything.
Some of the older girls, the ones in eighth or ninth grade, looked at me knowingly. Their apathetic eyes seemed older than they were. Welcome, they seemed to say. Every woman that I knew had something. My great great grandmother had married a man who was twenty-two when she was only fourteen, giving birth to his kids by fifteen. No one in our family talked about the age gap except to say, Things were different back then. That’s Okies for you. But lately my grandma had taken to talking about how much she truly hated her husband as her mind began to go. Everyone in my family said she was irrationally angry due to Alzheimer's, but I felt the truth behind her words. Last year, Mom had sat with me on my bed in Fort Bragg and told me about how she was molested by her babysitter’s husband when she was only five. That’s why I’m so protective of you, she said, her red-rimmed eyes only half-there. Some of my friends had already begun warning me of men, of their knowing eyes and bold mouths. This left me simultaneously attracted to boys in my classes but also terrified of them. Every woman had something, and I wasn’t ready to confront my somethings yet. I just wanted to be a kid.
I don’t remember getting home, but I do remember that when I got home I took a long shower, scrubbing that man’s gaze off my skin. I remember when I went to bed that night, I turned my book so I could only see the pale yellow back cover. So I couldn’t feel Nancy’s pale blue eyes judging me.
“I hate being a woman.”
-
“I know,” she said. “It’s no fun.”
//
“I hate being a woman.” - “I know,” she said. “It’s no fun.” //
Later the same year that I got catcalled, I got my first period. It was a month before my twelfth birthday. I was at school, forced to go by my mom even though I told her I felt sick. She said that I’d missed too much school already and I could call my great grandma if I was feeling too sick. I left my second period class with stomach pains, thinking that I just had to shit, and I did, but when I went to flush in the bathroom, I saw it. The blood. Running down my inner thighs, dripping into the toilet, staining my underwear. It was everywhere.
I knew what a period was, of course. Mom had given me the talk about them years ago, since she got hers really young, at only nine-years-old. Me and my friends became obsessed with getting ours, desperate for some version of the womanhood that it bestowed upon us. I wanted it to come. I was one of the last of my friend group to get it, and I was excited for it. But I didn’t expect this. This heaviness in my gut, my breasts, my thighs, my whole being. And I knew that there was blood involved, of course, but this much? It was staining my pink underwear, dripping down my thighs onto the tile floor of the bathroom when I stood up to pull up my pants. On top of that, I felt a strange combination of nausea and the pain that comes just before needing to take a shit, a heaviness in my gut that I wanted to purge.
I snuck out of the bathroom and grabbed some of the free pads from our dispenser, scurrying back to the stall and tucking them in my underwear. I went back to class. My head ached. My stomach burned. Finally, at lunch, I gave in and called my great grandma, who came to pick me up and drove me to her house. She gave me ibuprofen and chamomile tea with a small smile on her lips, tottering the line between making fun of me and being sympathetic.
“I can’t believe I wanted this,” I groaned, contorting my body into strange shapes that somehow felt good in her bed, feeling like my entire stomach might fall out into my panties. “I hate being a woman.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s no fun.”
I took a nap, traumatized by the whole thing. When I woke up, Mom took me home and showed me how to properly use a pad and told me how often to change them out. Then she demonstrated a tampon with a glass of water for when I was ready. My face burned the whole time. I was humiliated.
My great grandma still brings this day up when I complain about my bad periods, reminding me that they were always this bad. Bad periods run in my family. My grandma had fibroids and endometriosis so bad that she had to get a full hysterectomy at twenty-five. Me, my mom, and sister all have been diagnosed with PMDD, a condition of severe PMS that affects 3-8% of women, although the number could be more because women’s medical conditions are notoriously poorly funded and researched, and doctors tend to have biases against female pain, believing us to be hysterical at worst and over-dramatic at best.
Sometimes, people tell me that I talk about my period too much. Apparently, it’s a sensitive subject. But why? It affects over half of the human population and occurs monthly for over half of a woman’s life. Why is it taboo to talk about these issues in public? I’ve spent much of my life ashamed of my heavy periods. I refuse to continue to do that. When I moved into my first adult apartment, a few months into living with him, my male roommate told me, “I’ve never heard a girl talk about her period so much.” He has three sisters. A mother. A girlfriend, who he plans to marry and have children with someday. Why do we shelter the men in our lives from these truths about the female condition, all while listening to them make jokes about their balls and dick as if it’s the funniest shit in the world? I’m not interested in playing nice anymore. After all, when has the world ever played nice with women?
//
//
// //
“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” And so it continues, on and on. ”
I grew older. The catcalling continued, becoming banal, routine. The periods continued, heavier some months, lighter others. Harder some years, easier others. My tits got bigger, then smaller by sheer force, then bigger again. The same happened to my ass. My thighs. Everything shrank for a long time, beaten into submission, then expanded as I slowly began eating again. Maybe my eating disorder was a way of taking my body back, protecting myself. Maybe it was a way of conforming, becoming tiny, pale, white. All I know is that my body has never felt like my own. Always, there is a sense of someone watching, either distantly or up close. The voyeurism of it all is like a softcore porn movie. Even alone in my room I can feel it. This body is never my own. I am never my own. Margaret Atwood said it best when she wrote, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” And so it continues, on and on.
When I was eighteen, I had my first job at Subway. I had a married co-worker that asked all of the female staff members out on dates. More than once. He told me that he liked watching hentai. When he found out that I was a virgin, he said that he could give me good head the first time, if I wanted. When I complained to the managers, they shrugged and told me that he was weird but harmless. All of us laughed at him, called him ugly and annoying behind his back. Laughter is the only remedy when every woman has something.
When I was nineteen, I worked at Round Table. Our boss sexually harassed every girl that worked there. One time, he came up behind me and sniffed my neck. He smiled and said, “You smell really good today. Wear that perfume more often.” He said it like it was a command. I never wore the perfume again. He told me that I was prettier when I smiled and that I was very exotic looking. When my little sister, who was thirteen at the time, came into the store, he told me she was “pretty for a little black girl.” I had to go stand in the walk-in freezer for a few moments, taking deep breaths, and digging my nails into my wrists. I wanted to punch him. I wish I had.
When a few female servers teamed up to take him down and HR came in to investigate, our co-managers—both women—told us that we had to lie or we would be fired on the spot. I wish I had walked, but when you’re nineteen and broke, minimum wage for thirty hours a week is hard to pass up. So, like almost all of my other female coworkers, I played the long game and just applied to other jobs until I could finally leave. I smiled while my boss called me pretty. I pretended not to see when he came up behind me and blatantly watched my ass while I switched out our salad bar. Was I asking for it, in my tight black jeans, leaning over to dump cans of garbanzo beans that smelled like farts into small plastic trays?
At the same job, I was asked out repeatedly by a male co-worker. The last time he asked, “I thought you liked me. You’re always laughing at my jokes. And you don't even have a boyfriend.”
I didn’t tell him that:
his jokes were not fucking funny, I just didn’t want to be rude
I didn't need a boyfriend to know that I didn't want to date his wack ass. I had to start being cold just to get him to leave me alone.
A female coworker told me to “go easier on him,” verifying that he was a “nice guy.”
All of the female servers also repeatedly had our asses pinched by an older male patron. We used to laugh when we saw him enter the store. “Here comes the ass pincher,” we’d say. This is what it is to be a woman and to be alive, a choice between anger or humor. We chose humor. I wish we would’ve chopped his hand off.
//
Laughter is the only remedy when every woman has something
// Laughter is the only remedy when every woman has something
When I was twelve, I told my mom that I thought that maybe I had been molested as a kid, but I couldn’t remember it. I had been too curious too young, and I had told my friends some things that they didn’t know, things that I wasn’t even sure how I knew. Then during puberty, I began to have flashbacks to someone touching me, and I became so terrified that I couldn’t even look at my own vagina without feeling sick. I had confusing memories of two separate men—one of dad’s friends and my mom’s ex-boyfriend—touching me. Mom laughed off my concern about repressed memories, but they lingered.
When I was twenty, Mom had a manic episode during which she told me on a long car ride to Mendocino that she’d always been worried something happened with my dad’s friend, who stayed with us for a while when I was four. She said that she didn’t like the way he looked at me, and she’d left him alone with me once. When she came back, we were both acting weird. It was confirmation enough. My hands shook on the steering wheel, and I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to pull over and vomit because everything suddenly made sense and didn’t make sense at the same time, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t process it. I buried it somewhere that I couldn’t see. I’ve always been good at shutting down on impact, the byproduct of too many emotional accidents that I’ve never recovered from. I've learned some trauma is best kept in the sunken place.
I still try not to look at that memory unless I have to, like when the gynecologist shoves her fingers into me a little too hard and I have a sensory memory of someone else doing that, which sends my hand flying to my mouth to suppress a scream and leaves me in a shaking panic attack in the parking lot of a Planned Parenthood for the next hour.
Later, once her meds have been stabilized again, my mom tells me that she doesn’t remember telling me about her fears and that she is sorry she did. Like so many other women in my family— a generational curse perhaps, although perhaps in this case the curse is just being born a woman—she was molested, too. To be a woman is to be inflicted with this generational curse of violence—a curse every woman I know has to varying degrees. “I never wanted you to live with the shame and confusion that I did,” she says. Now I live with that confusion. It’s a confusion that every woman will experience at some point. The double consciousness of being the person that you know are and the object that people see. I still don’t know whether it was Sal or my dad’s friend or both or someone else entirely. My childhood was always so transient, people coming and going all the time. All I know is I worry that the same thing may have happened to my sister with one of my mom’s other boyfriends, and I’m scared to ask. All I know is that double consciousness. All I know is that sometimes I still feel the vestiges of slimy fingers inside of me. All I know is that I have to be comfortable with not knowing.
The double consciousness of being the person that you know are and the object that people see
//
The double consciousness of being the person that you know are and the object that people see //
In the Winter quarter of the first year of my MFA, my great grandpa died two days before the quarter began. I went home and took care of my grandpa and great grandma. I helped them plan funeral arrangements. I made my grandpa dinner while he sat and watched TV, staring straight ahead without seeing. Grief permeated every corner of the house, the way it had when my step-grandpa died a few years ago, or when his wife died a decade ago. It clung to the old, matted couch. Greased my hair. I wanted to go back to Davis, and I felt guilty for wanting to leave. I knew that one day I would also lose him, and I was sick with knowing. Sick with grief, both present and future. I felt more human than ever. My chest ached. I consoled myself by doing homework and reading and writing, and on a less healthy note, swiping through dating apps. That was how I met him.
We went on our first date in Davis, eating at Red 88, which he found “mid.” He showed me his meme library and we talked about philosophy, literature, and politics. He proudly called himself a feminist. We talked about socialism and republicans voting against their own interests and anti-blackness in POC communities. I was thoroughly impressed by his intelligence, the way the conversation flowed easily. I didn’t feel the need to dumb myself down with him like I often did with other men. I wasn’t sure how attracted I was to him initially. He had a cute dimpled smile and a round cherubic face and pretty brown eyes, but he was also short and squat and his hands were too stubby. But after our conversation, I found myself leaning toward him, attracted. After dinner, we walked around Davis. We went to Bizarro World and read through old erotic novels, turning to page sixty-nine and seeing who could find the steamiest sex scenes until we gave up. Page sixty-nine was too early in the novels for fucking, it was still all pining and longing. We went to Sophia’s and drank until they started closing around us, and he walked me to my car.
The next date, I had car issues, so he drove me to Sac, and we played mini golf. He was funny. He kept up with my sarcasm better than most people. When we got home, he dropped me off at my house. We sat in the car talking for a little while before he asked if he could kiss me. I said yes, grateful he asked for consent first. I agreed. He was a good kisser, and kissing turned to making out, lips on my neck, then back on my mouth, hands bunching at my hips.
“This is what it is to be a woman, to be confused, to have a body that isn’t completely your own. I want to take back the vestiges of my body that he holds in his thick palms, but I can’t. All I can do is write, typing until it makes sense. It will never make sense. ”
This was going well, I thought. We were going to make out for a while, and then I was going to go home and go to bed satisfied. Then he put my hand on his dick. I was a little off-put, but I understood that maybe he’d misread the situation. I pulled away. Immediately, he put it back, moved it up and down with his hand, and groaned into my mouth. I left it there, a little shocked, fingers stiff and clammy. He was still kissing me, and the kiss was good, but I didn’t want this and I didn’t know how to stop it without hurting his feelings.
He pulled away. My hand was still on his dick.
“Can I come inside?” He asked.
No, I thought. But my cells were screaming with anxiety, and I didn’t want to be alone, and maybe I was misunderstanding the situation, maybe he just wanted to make out, some heavy petting. Stupid, so fucking stupid.
“Yeah,” I said.
I fumbled with my keys at the door, and we went up to my room. I took a piss, and when I came back, he was laying on my bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. I settled next to him, and he gripped my face, kissed me a little too hard, bit my lip so hard it felt like it was drawing blood. I pulled away with a start. He took this as a good sign. He took off his pants, dick pink and erect, staring at me. His shirt was still on. I was still fully clothed. I wished he was. I kissed him so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at it. It made me sick, staring at this dick that I didn’t want out in my bedroom right now.
We kissed for a while, but he kept moving my head suggestively toward his crotch, trying to get me to go down on him. I finally jerked him off, hoping it would appease him. It didn’t. I felt bad. I’d done this before with other men. I’d been eager to touch them, have them touch me, even let them inside of me. Men that I knew about as well as I knew him. And I liked him. He was smart and cute. But I didn’t want this. Not tonight. Maybe eventually, maybe not, but either way, not tonight. I didn’t want to fuck. I didn’t want to give him head. I didn’t want to see his dick. I just wanted to make out. But I’d invited him in. I’d invited this in. His hands felt good on my skin, and he was a good kisser, but that was all I wanted. How did I say that? What was I thinking, inviting him inside? I was so dumb. He took off my shirt and unclasped my bra. I felt sweaty despite the cold, and I climbed on top of him, put my breasts in his face, let him finger me, the steps to a well-known game. I hoped that it was enough for him. It was not.
I don’t remember how it happened, but finally, after he gestured toward it enough times, I relented and put his dick in my mouth. He grabbed fistfulls of my hair in rough hands and pushed me down. My eyes watered, but I didn’t move away. I’ve blocked a lot of it out, but I remember that it made me feel sick, looking at his dick, that I didn’t enjoy giving him head, that the raw “fuckkkk” from the back of his throat did not sound as sexy as it should have, as it was meant to be. I remember that I wanted to bite. His hands, pushing me down, scared me. The rawness of what we were doing, how unsafe it felt, how much power he had to do whatever he wanted to me at that moment, scared me. Finally, he pulled his hands away, and I came up for air. I looked at him.
His large dark eyes were wide. He asked if I was okay. I lied and said I was. We cuddled for a second, but our limbs were stiff and awkward. We didn’t look at each other. He stood. He dressed quickly, saying he had to work the next day. We shook hands at my front door. I’d be lying if I said that I immediately felt victimized, or even thought of the blowjob again for a while. The next morning, I thought of the fun parts of the night. His lips on mine, littering my neck, his hands on my breasts. I didn’t think about the blowjob. I put it out of my mind. I saw him again. I liked him. We kissed again. Later, it was hard to reconcile the fun parts of the night with the non-consensual parts of it, so I tried my best to forget about the non-consensual parts. I didn’t give up talking to him until he forgot my birthday and I called him on it, ending things.
It wasn’t until I was recounting the night’s events to a friend at a bar and she paused, took a sip of her drink, looking at me over the rim of her glass. “Babe,” she said. “That doesn’t sound completely consensual.” I wanted to justify myself, defend him, as though his actions were a moral failing on my fault. After all, hadn’t I kept talking to him? What did that say about me? Was it really assault? Some would call it “regret sex.” They’d say I was being dramatic since things ended poorly, playing victim. An Andrew Tate-Joe Rogan-Ben Shapiro mash-up of a man played in my head, some self-important white man puffing on a cigar. Women love to play the fucking victim, they said. Maybe they were right. Maybe I was just a woman scorned, making shit up.
But replaying the night’s events, I realized that if a friend told me the same thing, I’d have similar concerns. And I was there. I knew what happened. I knew how it felt, being face-fucked by someone whose dick I didn’t want in my mouth. Still, it took until my next therapy session to say it aloud.
“I guess it wasn’t consensual.” My mouth caught on the words, heavy and hard in my throat. “But I feel weird saying that. I kept talking to him. Why did I do that?”
“It’s hard to accept,” she said, nodding sympathetically. “Many victims continue to talk to their assaulter. It’s a way of taking back power.”
Rationally, I knew that. I had seen friends do the same thing with abusers, but it didn’t feel right for me to fall prey to the same thing somehow. Wasn’t I smarter than that? But every woman has something. We all know that on some level, yet we all think we’re the exception. We all believe these things happen to other people, until they don’t. I gaslit myself every time I thought about that night, turning my mind in some other direction. I washed my sheets, and I pretended that he was never in them. I still have a hard time saying the words “sexual assault” or “rape” in relation to this situation. Still blanched when other people call it that. I still feel sick to my stomach when I think of it. I was hungry when I began writing this section, but my hunger has turned to a stone in my stomach. I don’t want people debating about whether or not this was assault. I want to control the narrative. The only problem is I haven’t decided what that narrative is, and all I can say as I see them written out in stark reality is this: Fuck men. I can’t be more eloquent. This is what it is to be a woman, to be confused, to have a body that isn’t completely your own. I want to take back the vestiges of my body that he holds in his thick palms, but I can’t. All I can do is write, typing until it makes sense. It will never make sense.
//
//
// //
During Spring 2024, I began talking to a man that I met on Hinge. He was pale white with a mop of dark hair and large dark eyes with bags under them. He was granola as fuck, most of his pictures of him in big sun hats on hiking trips, surrounded by green, a clear stoner with a love of hiking and taking shrooms. Not my normal type, but his first message was funny enough and he had a cute dog and nice smile, so I bit back. We went on a couple of dates before one night he drove me home, and, feeling bold from sips of red wine at the Davis wine bar, I invited him in for more wine. He hadn’t kissed me yet, and I wanted him to kiss me. He came in and I poured him cheap red wine and showed him my room, awkwardly pointing at the stuff hanging on my walls. I turned on music on my speaker, and we wound up making out.
He wasn’t the best kisser, but he was fine with my awkwardness, the stiffness of my body. I explained my situation with the man a few months ago, which was my last sexual experience. His reaction confused me. He asked why I’d even given that man head if I didn’t want to, but then said I didn’t have to count it if it wasn’t consensual. I didn’t know how to react. But then we were kissing and I didn’t have to think at all. He got me undressed and touched me, laying on his side and running thick palms down my side, asking if I was ticklish when I shook. I wasn’t. He got me undressed before I even touched him below the belt, and he gave me head without me asking. I was impressed by things that I knew shouldn’t be impressive. He didn’t choke or hit me without asking, the way some men had. He didn’t try to make me go down on him. He made sure I really wanted to do it when I offered.
The next weekend, when his dog died, he invited me over to console him. I figured we’d cuddle and watch movies, but he was all over me as soon as I walked in the door, throwing a blanket over us on the couch and tracing the inside of my thigh with his index finger until he dipped his hand into my shorts. I wasn’t expecting it, but I also wasn’t mad at the situation. When we were lying in the afterglow, my head on his chest, I told him that I finished like three times, which was nice of me to admit, I thought, a stroke to his ego. I didn’t know why I felt the need to stroke men’s egos when I was with them, but I did. Call it daddy issues. Call it trauma. Call it being a woman.
“Just three?” he said. “More like five or six, I think.”
“Um, no?” I said, like it was a question. I was laughing because what the fuck? How would he know better than me? When I looked up at him, expecting him to laugh along, his face was drawn.
“Mmm,” he said. “I think so.”
I rolled my eyes. He pinched my hip. “Either way, it was a good time,” he conceded. I let it go, the way I always am. I rolled over on top of him again, put my mouth against his, mostly to shut him up. This was all I wanted from him, anyway.
The next week, after he told me that he’d gotten his dogs ashes and was sad, I sent what I thought was a kind message letting him know that he could call or text me anytime, and I had some free time the next day if he wanted to hang out, since he was going to the Bay to see family that weekend. He apparently took this to mean that I was in love with him and sent me a text telling me that I was too invested in him and he barely knew me. I had to laugh, thinking of how he’d invited me to his house and texted me late at night about his dead dog. I couldn’t be mad. Of course he’d tell me how I felt, projecting his feelings onto me. He knew everything so much better than me, right?
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According to the Instagram post that I read, sitting on my phone in the early morning, the site proudly states that they feature ebony hoodrats, ghetto double penetration, and yellow discipline. He’d described it himself in a podcast: he jacks off to women, “getting, like, brutalized.”
He later doubled down on his racism, misogyny, and objectification of Black bodies claiming, “you’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt.” That’s how this story goes: commodifying women, normalizing the objectification and brutalization of Black women, and gaslighting us in the process.
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On April 6, 2023, Stereogum brought a deleted podcast interview to light, highlighting multiple derogatory and racist comments made by the whole cast. On May 29, 2023, The New Yorker published an article where he doubled down on it. Amongst other things.
This man was the first white man that I ever kissed, and at the time, I made jokes about how I wished the first white kiss had been Matty Healy, lead singer of The 1975, a band with which I had a high school obsession and a long-held crush on the lead singer. This joke has since aged like milk, considering that Matty Healy recently got called out for saying that he masturbates to a porn site called “Ghetto Gaggers,” whose tagline is Black Women, White Men, Rough Sex.
When I was in the white man’s house, talking about sexual fantasies and consent, a conversation that I was glad that he had brought up, he told me that despite having mostly dated white girls, he liked to watch porn with Black and brown girls. He said that he was an ass man and we “had better asses.” I initially blanched, then I reminded myself that he meant this as a compliment.
So disappointing. Always so fucking disappointing.
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Every woman I know has something. My mom was repeatedly molested by her babysitter’s husband. When she told my grandpa about the molestation and he pressed charges, the man’s wife protected him, even after his daughters said he’d done the same to them. He spent six months in jail before getting out for good behavior. He now goes to church with my great-grandmother, who says that he has found God.
Every woman I know has something. My grandmother tells me about her brother’s friend sneaking into her room when she was fourteen years old and raping her. “I was watching the blood run down my legs,” she says. “And I couldn’t believe that I lost my virginity that way. I still don’t really believe it.” I tell her that she didn’t lose anything. I tell her that if she wants to believe in virginity, she can also believe that she lost it whenever she wants. She doesn’t understand.
EVERY WOMAN I KNOW HAS SOMETHING.
EVERY WOMAN I KNOW HAS SOMETHING.
EVERY WOMAN I KNOW HAS SOMETHING.
EVERY WOMAN I KNOW HAS SOMETHING.
EVERY WOMAN I KNOW HAS SOMETHING.
EVERY WOMAN I KNOW HAS SOMETHING.
Every woman I know has something. When I was nine, my childhood best friend called me on the phone crying and screaming. I could hear her stepdad grunting and calling her names in the background, along with the creaking of a bed. We never spoke about it. When we were eighteen, my other childhood best friend confessed to me that she was molested repeatedly by her sibling as a child. After eight years of keeping it secret, I was the first person she ever told. It has been nearly fifteen years, and she still has nightmares.
Every woman I know has something. My friend, Ariana, had an older boyfriend freshman year of high school. They got really high one night, and then they made out. He started to touch her over her panties, which was familiar territory. They’d been doing this most Friday nights for a month now. They'd never gotten further than that before, though. But that night, he took off his underwear, moved her panties to the side, and tried to penetrate her. She said no. He did it anyway, and afterward, he held her and told her how good it was before making her clean the blood-spotted sheets. They dated for a year after that. “I don’t think he raped me, though,” she tells me at a party, sipping vodka and orange juice from a styrofoam cup. "He loved me. We were gonna do it at some point, anyway." I don’t even know how to begin to tell her that it was rape. Who the fuck am I to say that the man she sees as her first love was a rapist?
Every woman I know has something. My friend, Lauren, was raped by her father her whole childhood. Her mom covered for him because he worked at Chico State and paid for their trips to Spain. He was sentenced on child pornography charges. He got out of jail after less than a year and lived only a few miles from her. She had to fight tooth and nail for a restraining order.
Every woman I know has something. My friend, Isabella, was raped by her uncle in a bathroom during her quince. When she told her mom later, they blamed it on the dress she was wearing. “Welcome to womanhood,” she says sardonically when she tells me this, laughing the kind of laugh that suppresses a cry. My friend, Maria, tells me about how her older sister’s first boyfriend, who was twenty at the time, made him give her a handjob when she was thirteen, all while her sister slept next to them on the couch. She says it casually, shrugging like it's unfortunate but can't be helped. That's just how men are.
My friend, Julia, tells me that her pastor took her out to the Oklahoma woods and made her do the same thing, and how her hands were so chapped by the end that they were rubbed raw and red for a whole day. When she told her parents, they asked her what she was wearing and told her to read her Bible and pray to God for forgiveness.