Thread by @placentadoc

After #December6 some reflections on how gender-based violence has impacted my own life *trigger warning*

Age 8: when a boy yelled to another “get her” & I was shoved to the ground, my lip bloodied, my mouth full of dirt.

My crime? Being “the smartest girl in school”

At 14 it was obscene “candygrams” from boys in my class with phrases I didn’t understand. My father stormed into the principal’s office & ordered him to read them himself.

Candygrams got cancelled. I got blamed for ruining everyone’s fun because I “couldn’t take a joke”

At 15 it was the group of boys in the back of my biology class who “just wanted to know if [my] tits were real” or whether I was stuffing my bra.
I was also frequently greeted with a chorus of dog barking whenever I walked down the hall.

At 21 there was the musician who (on the night we met) took me for a “romantic” walk, & while kissing me for the first time grabbed me by the ponytail so hard it made my eyes tear. He said, “I like it rough.”

I assumed this was normal dating behaviour for men in their 30s.

At 22, while playing pool with friends, a man pulled his penis out of his pants & laid it on the table “to distract” me.

His friends thought it was hilarious. As a medical student, I was unshaken by nudity & didn’t realize at the time this was actually an assault.

At 25, I married a man who told me on our wedding night, “I own you now.” I still can’t/won’t talk about a lot of what happened.

Even after a divorce & a cross-country move, I lived in terror of him until he died.

At 36: a man followed me while I was walking home, demanding to know if I had a boyfriend. When I didn’t answer him, he grabbed me by the arm & tried to pull me backwards. I thought of reporting it to the police but felt silly for being upset.

I was pregnant at the time.

These are just a few vignettes from my own relatively protected & privileged life. There are many more.

Ask any woman & she will have a litany of these stories to tell, often casually, even jokingly.

It’s a defence mechanism.

But I think of what life could have been like had I been permitted to be the “smartest girl in school” without getting beaten up, had I not suffered crippling low self-esteem from being simultaneously insulted for my appearance & sexually harassed

…Had I not been manipulated into thinking that control & fear was part of love.

Maybe it wouldn’t have taken me until I was nearly 40 years old to realize that it wasn’t me who was “the problem.”