So I was cruising along sometimes having good romantic experiences, and sometimes engaging in dates that made me squirm, but managing to write about all of it, when suddenly, last March, I stopped. I was writing about consent and drawing careful boundaries, and aware of the fact—on paper—that LGBTQ folks have just as much, if not higher incidences of assault and abuse than the cis-/straight public. But I was also forty, and had worked in DV for a long time, and felt like I had some sort of magical bubble around me that would protect me from putting myself in a dangerous situation. And then I was wrong and I didn’t know how to process it, and I didn’t know how to write about it, and I stopped.
I’m not ready to write about this, but I’m ready to write about other things, and yet I feel like it’s impossible to just catapult over what happened, as if it’s not precisely what I’d been writing about.
So, here goes: I met a woman at Dr. Frankie’s speed dating, and we became friends. Let’s call her Cat. She was brash and bold and she too had just gotten out of a relationship with a man but dating women, so she was not doing any of that sidelong judging of me that some lesbians were doing whenever I mentioned the gender of my ex. Are you sure this isn’t a phase? How do we know you won’t go back to men?
That’s a subject for another day.
The point is, I liked Cat, and I was really excited to expand my circle of friends. She asked if I wanted to come to her birthday party with all her lesbian friends, to be held at the Milkway where there were going to be roller derby players roller skating around the bar, and a leg wrestling pit? With a description like that I had no choice.
I talked to my friend, the one who knew Cat’s best friend, and we picked Cat up for her birthday party. We’d known each other just a few weeks, and we’d already been moved up to a place of honor. In typical situations this would have pointed to her deep loneliness, but when you are going through divorce, and shifting your sexuality, and you are desperate enough to go to speed dating to try and meet a date, the world is different. Inviting your new divorcing lesbian friends to your birthday and asking them to come as your guests of honor seems right. I really thought she was doing us a favor so that when we arrived we’d know someone in the room.
The bar was loud, as bars are, but not just from talking—which is the kind of loud I’m used to at night. This was a club. I think. I’m not that cool. There was music, and a dance floor, and women roller skating around in their full derby-ness, and in fact, Cat had not been exaggerating, there was a leg wrestling pit.
I was not interested in Cat, but I was also aware that she was into me, and it was her birthday, and I did the mental gymnastics I’d done as a teenager, trying to determine beforehand whether or not I’d make out with her a little if she wanted to. She wanted a girlfriend so badly. It’s all she talked about in our texts. Unlike me, she had specifically left her husband so that she could date women. She felt it was a great injustice that she was not getting laid regularly after discovering who she actually wanted to be sleeping with. I didn’t want to date her, or sleep with her, but just a little noncommittal kissing seemed like the type of fun I was supposed to be having during my newfound freedom. It was her birthday after all.
We were dancing back by the leg wrestling, and the blacklights were flashing and some kind of music I’m not cool enough to identify came on. Cat shimmied up to me with her drunk eyes hanging at desirous-half mast, same look I’d seen so many times from men. She shouted at me over the music, but I couldn’t hear, and she moved in close, placing her mouth by my ear, but really placing her body against mine.
That kiss. It was not the magical kiss of movies where you know you’ve finally met the one. It was wet and aggressive, and she pushed me back against the wall, not in a sexy-we-need-balance way, but more try-and-run-now way. Then her hand fumbled around until it was between my legs, there, on the back of the dance floor, in front of everyone, despite the darkness. I felt exposed and abandoned. No one noticed, and yet I felt so on display.
“Whoa. We’re in public,” I said, grabbing her wrist. But I didn’t mean to invite her to move somewhere more private. I acted awkward as if I didn’t know how to reengage, like I was too shy, all the while I wishing that I could sacrifice my early-twenties-self to these types of interactions so that now, right here on this dance floor, at forty years old, I would have known what to do. I said I needed another drink, and she followed me to the bar. While we were waiting for our orders she smashed her face up against mine again again, jamming her tongue against my teeth.
There was a part of me thinking, Enjoy this very out of character moment. Kiss this woman in a bar and don’t give a fuck. And part of me thought, This is danger. You do not like this. You are a grown woman and you do not like this, and you know enough to stop.
I stopped.
I’ve taught self defense. I’ve taught it to hundreds of girls and woman to say No, to Use Your Voice, to Set Boundaries. I am so programmed to break free from restraint that when my son grabs my wrists to stall bedtime and beg me not to leave his room at night I have to consciously remind my body not to instinctively break free from his grasp by using a move I’ve now performed thousands of times.
I tried to make a pact with myself to think about consent, and to practice it, and to catalogue my failures.
But I couldn’t process what happened.
Later when we were dropping Cat off she pinned my friend against the car and started kissing her, and I froze–safely in the passenger seat of the car–unsure how to decode whether or not my friend was enjoying it, and whether or not I should intervene. My body sensed danger, but some old teenage fears about ruining people’s good time and always being a wet blanket surged inside of me.
My brain could devise no better plan than to turn up the music. To shock them into a pause. If my friend needed an excuse to stop, yelling at me would be a good one. But the kissing didn’t stop and I assumed she liked it.
When they stopped, my friend got in the car, and waved goodbye to Cat, who was pouting about going up to sleep in her bed alone on her birthday.
My friend was pissed, felt completely assaulted, and I sat there dumbfounded, not knowing why I hadn’t done more to intervene.
I didn’t know if you liked it, I pleaded. You weren’t stopping.
I’m not mad at you, she said.
But actually, thinking back, I’m not sure why not. I literally teach bystander intervention.
It’s hard to intervene in socially awkward situations where sex is concerned, people. It is fucking hard. And while I was trying to determine the landscape of a new sexual code—one between women only—I somehow fell back into my high school fears. I didn’t want to be the killjoy. I made the assumption that I was weaker than my friend, and she could have halted if she’d wanted to.
I was wrong.
In the days after this, the months, we continued to be in contact with Cat. We told her directly what she’d done, how she’d made us feel. She claimed drunkenness, and we tried really hard to understand. She seemed broken and lost and we didn’t want to abandon her in her time of post-divorce rediscovery.
I tried to continue being friends with her because I didn’t want to be friends with all the people who knew me as a couple with my ex. I wanted people who were also afloat. I wanted to be allowed to make mistakes and not condemn people for their own.
But over and over again I kept thinking, why am I still talking to her?
If she had been a man, I would have felt assaulted.
If she had been a man, my alarm bells would have blared when I saw her eyes go desirous-half mast.
I would have been keeping my body in an unwelcoming stance. I would have found an excuse much sooner.
If she had been a man, I never would have thought, Just kiss the lady for her birthday.
I am working hard not to give men what they want from me.
I am working to not give people what I do not wish to give.
Even when she pushed me against the wall, I had known I could overpower her if necessary. It was purely the social paralysis that kept me pinned.
I told girls and women in self-defense, It’s the people you know who are the hardest to defend against. Because your brain is going: No, they like me, We are friends, They can’t be attacking me, I am overreacting.
And once you know you’re in danger, your brain says: Be gentle, You know them. You do not want to hurt someone you know
I say to the women and girls, If you start kissing someone, that is not an invitation to have sex.
If you are having sex, that does not mean you don’t have the right to stop.
I say, you can be naked swinging from a chandelier, and if you say stop, it stops.
Which I did. And it did.
And at no point was I scared. And yet I knew, that based on the facts, and on rational thoughts, if she were a man I would feel completely violated.
I tell my brain, It’s the exact same thing.
And my brain replies: But she has her own vagina, she has more of a right to yours.
But I could not settle the deep churning inside of me.
For months I told friends the story. I wanted them to help me make it right. I tried telling it like it was sad, or sometimes I told it funny.
They would say, that doesn’t sound good. You shouldn’t be friends with her anymore.
And I would say, No, no, she’s harmless. I was never scared. Because otherwise, I would have to feel shame.
The truth is I felt guilty abandoning her. She needed friends, she needed a network. She was desperate and inappropriate. And I knew I was letting that override my own needs.
I returned her calls. Went out for drinks. Acted excited about her new girlfriend. I dismissed her bad behavior as a miscalculation, for which she didn’t deserve to lose all her friends.
The most salient image from that night not the lights of the club, or the pulsing music, or the roller derby leg wrestling, which was wild and amazing in its own right. It’s an ariel view of myself, hunched in the passenger seat of the car, refusing to get out to say goodbye to a woman on her birthday. The metal frame, the glass windows, the power locks. Those were shields between the two of us.
I didn’t know how to process this for so long, and so I stopped. I stopped writing, because this undid me. I wanted to be strong and fierce and say, Consent, consent, consent.
Well, people, this was a fail. Not in the moment, the moment wasn’t my fault. But the aftermath, where I remained her friend. Where I told the story as if maybe it was funny. Where I didn’t get out of the car and intervene when she had pinned my friend the way she pinned me.
I failed and I shut down.
But quitting is not my way. I’m back to try again.
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