One of the only good things that came out of Trump’s candidacy (for me) is my growing realization that women are groped or physically assaulted far more often than I would have thought. I know about catcalling, as I’ve seen it often, but there’s been a spate of women reporting unwanted touching, fondling, or other kinds of physical assaults on their person. Yesterday I asked one woman friend if she’d ever experienced anything like that. She responded that she’d never been “groped” by a stranger, but that one of her supervisors at work asked her to tie his tie for a formal dinner, and then grabbed her breasts when she did so. In the state where this happened, that counts as fourth-degree sexual assault. (She didn’t report it.)
This kind of assault—for that’s what it is—is described by Freedom from Religion Foundation co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor in an email from the FFRF called “Religious hypocrites grope for excuses for Donald Trump groping.” It doesn’t seem to be on the FFRF website, but was reproduced on Hemant Mehta’s site, The Friendly Atheist.
First Annie Laurie took a survey of her co-workers:
Motivated by the headlines, I conducted an informal poll at my workplace. I approached the 11 other women staffers who happened to be in our offices on Monday at the Freedom From Religion Foundation to ask about whether they’d ever experienced the kinds of gropes several women have testified they endured from Donald Trump.
Ten out of the 12 (including myself) have been groped or had similar unwanted experiences.* The two others had experienced sexual street harassment. One, a runner, said the intimidating catcalls and jeers are constant. I suspect this unscientific survey would be borne out as par for the course nationwide.
She then gives several of the women’s accounts, which are grim, and reports two times when she herself was groped. Annie Laurie then calls out the religious right for supporting Trump while defending “family values” and “morals”, and finally points out that the Bible sanctions sexual assault and abuse, and even the Old Testament God turns out to be a groper and an abuser:
The biblical deity repeatedly denounces women as filthy whores (Ezekiel 16:36-45, among ad nauseam references) and sexually vilifies them (see Proverbs throughout). Most shocking, the biblical deity sexually gropes and abuses women himself (Isaiah 3:16) or threatens to (“I myself will lift up your skirts over your face,” Jeremiah 13:26).
I’d like to take an informal poll like Annie Laurie’s, but among the women readers here. So I ask what she did: “Have you ever experienced the kind of groping some women said that they’d endured from Donald Trump?” If you want to give details, feel free to do so, and also weigh in if you haven’t been groped in this way so we can at least get an idea of the proportion of women who have ever been violated. (Yes, I know there’s sampling bias.)
If you’d like to post under a pseudonym but usually don’t, go ahead, as I’ll approve these “new” posts.
I’m asking because my informal poll was only one woman, but she reported a legal assault, and I have a feeling that this kind of stuff is pretty common.
I just remembered this bit, from my first semester in college:
A temporary girl’s dorm was created out of the third floor of a hotel, just off campus. To get to campus, we had to walk through a park.
One day, I stopped to chatter with a squirrel. A man I hadn’t noticed, seated on a bench on the other side of some bushes, called out to me. As I stepped around and saw what he was doing, he reached climax, ejaculating a great distance.
In my innocence, I stood there, mouth opened, in shock, and then walked quickly away to find some police. The campus police made a ridiculous Keystone Cops effort of doing nothing while keeping me from pointing out the exact location and person.
Ten days later, as I walked (no longer alone!) with two other classmates, that same man called to me from that same bench. The other young women brushed it off, so I ran to find a real police officer.
The man was arrested, and I showed up in court, the day he went to trial. No one had contacted me, I wasn’t used as a witness, and he was given a $25 fine for indecent exposure.
I asked the police officer, afterward. He responded that some people deliberately get arrested, as winter is coming on, so they can have “three hots and a cot” while their families get additional government funding for food and shelter.
“Three hots and a cot”, he had to explain, meant three hot meals a day and a roof over his head with a place to sleep.
I didn’t believe such was the motivation of the man involved, but it did awaken me to an extreme level of poverty no one talked about.
It took days, after seeing the email for this post, to actually read the post and then some comments. I knew why: It would dredge up memories, bad ones, even terrifying ones. What I’ve recounted, so far, is nothing compared to what’s coming.
After my own college date-rape, I learned of the rapes of many women I knew, especially stranger rapes. Two, in particular, come to mind.
One woman was so tiny, she was easily mistaken for being ten to thirteen years old. She never told her boyfriend, who became her husband, as he, too, was diminutive, and he’d have been so protective and angry, he’d have risked his own life to find and attack the rapist.
Her rapist was a large, fat man who cornered her in an alley. Alleys were frequently used as shortcuts to get places, but not after this, not for her and neither for me.
The other was a woman who deliberately matured before coming to college a few short years after high school. She returned from a date to her ground floor apartment, took the very unusual step of sleeping in a nightgown rather than nude, and left the windows open for cool summer breezes. We didn’t have much air conditioning, back then.
The notorious Fan Rapist climbed through the window, knife in hand, climbed on top of her, and forced her to wake (over alcohol and pot). Foggy-minded, she waved him away and tried to turn over and go back to sleep. In the process, she accidently grabbed his knife, slicing through her hand, between thumb and index finger. Apparently, that woke her.
He forced her to keep her eyes closed and give him oral sex (by which she was able to open her eyes enough to see skin color). She surmised that this went on for so long a time because he was unable to climax.
At the emergency room, afterward, the intake clerk, finding out the injury was due to rape, tried to send her to another branch of the ER system. My friend said she unwrapped her bleeding hand and thrust the open wound in the clerk’s face. Then, she was able to get the treatment she more emergently required.
Later, telling me this, she said she was no stranger to sex, when she was raped, so that wasn’t the horrifying part, nor even the knife wound, as the tendons and such were repaired well. It was the utter destruction of her sense of safety at home, the one place each of us expects to feel it. She couldn’t sleep in her own bed, anymore, and had to move from that apartment.
These were two of the strongest women. We have to be strong, and we have to share our strengths, no matter how weak we feel at the time, because it matters. My own violent rape experience came later, and it was because these women had taught me, that I got through it.
This isn’t the same as sexual assault, although I do think this attitude might breed this kind of behavior in adults – As a shy kid, I was bullied relentlessly, mainly by boys. If I dared do anything to defend myself and was caught (or told on), I’d get punished. Meanwhile, the bullies who provoked me into misbehaving or talking back never even got spoken to. They got off the hook. I’d always be the one who got in trouble, not them. If I complained about the harassment and bullying, I’d be told, “They’re just boys being boys. Ignore them.” or “They’re picking on you because they like you! Just ignore them!” Always ignore them…that’s all. Somehow that will fix things. They’re not doing anything wrong – it’s all my fault for not being able to ignore them. Meanwhile, the boys get conditioned into believing this kind of behavior is ok.
Catcalling/Street harassment – I grew up in a rural, boring town where nothing ever happened and no one locks their doors and if some teenagers went around stealing random things in some unlocked cars, it would be in the local news for a week. I also went to college in a pretty rural area where not much went on, but every roommate I ever had grew up near the city. I never really learned “street smarts”. I remember my roomies would have a fit if I was out walking alone at night, and I would just roll my eyes at them. I just wanted to live my life and not give into fear. (I still want that) I’d occasionally get catcalled by drunk bros, but it was rare enough that I just simply found it annoying whenever it happened and was able to shrug it off. It wasn’t until I moved to a proper city about 8 years ago that my attitude and comfort has changed. I face so much street harassment now, that I no longer feel comfortable going anywhere without my husband. I can’t even go to the grocery store alone without some weird dude or tweaker making comments about my looks, trying to chat me up in some way, or deciding to follow two steps behind me until I get to my destination. It’s freaking annoying. I get magically left alone and ignored whenever I’m with my husband, so I rarely run errands or go out anywhere without him. It really bothers me that I have to rely on a man to feel comfortable – it makes me feel like I’m giving into my gender, giving into oppression, and am weak. I am the reserved type, do not fit the definition of “hot”, and wear frumpy clothes from LL Bean – it really pisses me off when people assume women who get harassed on the street are somehow asking for it or doing something that makes them prone to harassment. No, we get harassed for simply existing. It doesn’t matter what we look like, what we wear, or what we’re doing.
Groping by strangers – I consider myself lucky having only been a victim of this once, in a large crowd of people at a festival. I shoved the guy hard and told him to fuck off and that was the end of it. I found my husband, kept by him the rest of the time, and went about the rest of my day. Unfortunately, most women I know have far more numerous and interesting tales than me.
Sexual assault or rape – Never, but I’ve been a victim of sexual coercion multiple times. Even though I know I shouldn’t and I know there are many women (and even men) who have similar experiences as me, and the last incident was over a decade ago, I remain ashamed about it, humiliated, full of self-blame, and still feel too uncomfortable to talk about it in detail, even anonymously. I can’t even talk about it with my husband.
I doubt it matters, but I’m wondering what city you live in.
Oakland, although the worst harassment I get is typically when I’m in Berkeley or San Francisco.
“No, we get harassed for simply existing.”
I also used to think it was something in the way I acted that drew unwanted catcalls on the street. So after being harassed the last time, I took up residence across the street for 1r minutes and watched this same man do the *exact same thing*, word-for-word to every woman who walked by him. It was like it was his job.
Which also reminds me of my only trip to New York around 1970, with two other women martial artists. Walking to our hotel, I got unexpectedly, violently ill and threw up on the street by a curb. A guy tried to pick me up, even then.
Amen sister! I can’t remember if I related this before but once when I was 20, I worked at a park that had a fence along a highway. It was raining and I was picking up garbage in a big yellow rain suite (pants and jacket) with the hood up. Guys actually honked the horn (more than one car) and cat-called me. How could they even know I was female in that get up?
If you ever have guppies in a tank, you need to keep at least 3 females to every 1 male or the males will harass the females literally to death trying to mate with them. I totally identify with female guppies based on some of these truly bizarre experiences.
I didn’t know that about guppies! (My chilids aren’t like that.)
Female guppies have a hard time of it – they sneeze & 100 babies pop out. Then they aren’t even finished being pregnant because another brood can still be in there! Imagine putting all those fry through college?! 😀
Guppies! Imagine a Hitchcock film entitled that.
The Puffington Host, which I never used to read until encouraged to do so recently, has an article with the headline: Tippi Hedren Claims Alfred Hitchcock Sexually Assaulted Her While Filming ‘The Birds’The actress opened up about the alleged assaults in her new memoir.
It’s worth reading
On 31 October 2016 at 09:45, Why Evolution Is True wrote:
> Diana MacPherson commented: “Female guppies have a hard time of it – they > sneeze & 100 babies pop out. Then they aren’t even finished being pregnant > because another brood can still be in there! Imagine putting all those fry > through college?! :D” >
Saw a movie recently about Tippi and her ordeals with Hitchcock. I think it was called The Girl.
Guppies! Imagine a Hitchcock film entitled that.
The Puffington Host, which I never used to read until encouraged to do so recently, has an article with the headline:
“Tippi Hedren Claims Alfred Hitchcock Sexually Assaulted Her While Filming ‘The Birds’
“The actress opened up about the alleged assaults in her new memoir.”
It’s worth reading. I had heard before about Hitchcock’s treatment of actresses. He was a revolting man.
Oh dear. Hitchcock is the male guppy of the human world.
guppies? yikes!
It is a credit to this website, Jerry and the readers that so many, women and men, have fell comfortable enough to share their stories.
We all have seen that Dr. Coyne does enforce his roolz, and would not allow bullying. I literally cannot think of any other site I would have done so.
Exactly true, SA Gould, Dr Coyne’s roolz’ enforcement AND his nom de plume – permission.
Pillar of the community as one of its few physician – specialists that Abuser is and in precise Trump – braggadocio manner, the Spouse, now gone from me, if he recognized himself within my posting statements, would in seconds’ time initiate libelous litigation against me.
And? He would prevail.
I, a community nobody, would soooo lose. Again.
Legion True
As a video producer, I was shooting a surgeon who’d developed pioneering laser fertility treatments. He groped all the nurses and female staff regularly, who were told to put up with it since he was famous and brought in so much hospital revenue. My boss warned me of it and actually asked me to endure it; I said I would not. So when he grabbed my behind in front of everyone, I got in his face and said “Don’t you ever do anything like that again.” He laughingly put his hands up and mocking went “Whoaaaa!”
.
(sigh)
Well done!
Man, that must have been a nasty shoot.