After this week’s Kavanaugh hearings, I have begun re-remembering
pieces of a #MeToo moment in the life of my sister, Daun Kendig. Right now, I am
sure of all the pieces, but I am struck by how we have been acquiring
vocabulary for these experiences, how, at the time, we didn’t even have the
words for it.
I think of my sister Daun every day, but especially this week. She was my
best friend from the time she was born, when I was 21 months old, until she
died of cancer at age 49. So I am telling this for her.
Although she was my little sister, our relationship
was more that of twins. I was a bit shorter, and we dressed similarly and even
identically at times and were often taken as twins in public and sometimes
confused when we were in high school, though I was never able to forget she was
prettier, thinner, and more popular. She had a lot more dates than I did.
On one of those dates, with a boy who was then her
steady boyfriend, she went with him one evening to watch TV at his parents’
house, and during that time, he forced himself on her, as we say now. (I think: do people say this?) I don’t
recall what we said then. According to her account, she fought back, but felt
hopelessly pinned. He was a star football player and much bigger than Daun, who
was five foot two and a hundred ten pounds at the time. She felt terrified and helpless and started to yell. Then, as she struggled, she heard his parents’ car pull into
the drive. And he heard the car. He pulled away from her and got up, and she felt relieved and frightened at
the same time.
I don’t know when she told me this. I was away at
college that year, and though we shared a lot of letters—not so many phone
calls, which were so very expensive in 1970—I know she did not write the
account to me, but told me the next time we were together. She also said that she
told my mother, whose response shocked us both. My mother, who was normally
supportive of her four children, said, “Well he is a football player. They are
trained to take what they want.”
That was supposed to explain it all. My mother liked
this football player, liked the idea of my sister’s dating a football player,
and to her dying day, Mom stayed close friends with man and his wife. My
mother’s response is the one part of this story I do not comprehend to this
day. But I hear it these days when I hear people say, “He was only seventeen,”
and “That’s how teenage boys are.”
I do not recall what I said to Daun, but I know I
was much more supportive than my mother. And yet, I didn’t tell her to report
it, to tell his parents, to tell anyone else. Rape was one thing, but this
was—what? We didn’t even have a way to describe it, except in the long,
prolonged descriptions like “he pressured her to do it, even though she didn’t want to
do it.” (We didn’t even say, “He forced himself on her, even when she was
protesting that she didn’t want sex.”)
One difference between my sister and many women of
the time, is that having lived through it, Daun took charge. This is not to say
she “owned it,” as we would say now. I don’t recall that she ever talked to
anyone else about her personal experience. However, she broke up with the boy,
and within a few months, she was in college and on the state university speech
team where she used the opportunity to research, write, and deliver a speech on
rape in the U.S., a topic which was not all that hot in the early 70s, though
coming into its own with the publication of Ms.
magazine, which did cover the topic, and from which, I recall, she got some of
the statistics she used in her speech. As she was preparing the speech, she and
I talked a lot about rape, but it seemed at such a distance then. She had
escaped it, she hadn’t been raped. She was okay, it seemed. She gave the speech a lot.
Lately, I have struggled with the #Me Too Movement.
In counterpoint to Daun’s experience, I have seen women’s abuse of the sexual
harassment claim. I have seen them engage in sex freely to get what they wanted
and then claim abuse if they didn’t get what they wanted. In a recent case, a colleague
in academia recently saw one of his first-year male student’s life destroyed when
a male classmate came forward to say he was being sexually harassed in emails
by the other male. Then a female student came forward, saying the same: she was
receiving sexual harassment in emails from the first man. The deans all
believed her, and when they questioned the supposed perpetrator fairly
aggressively, he dropped out of school. The dean had stated that he would be
punished to the full extent campus policy when they could prove it.
Once the student had dropped out, mid-semester, however,
the police discovered that the IPO that was used for the emails belonged to the
woman, who was harassing herself and the other member of the class, seemingly
for the drama of it all. As nearly as my friend, the class professor, can tell,
once the male student’s innocence was discovered, no one went looking for him. He
never returned to class. And no punishment was levied against the woman, who,
the dean explained “was just joking!!” The male student, was, by the way, from
a working class minority family, whereas the woman had parents in high
places.
So I know the whole dynamic of charges in sexual
abuse is so very wide open to abuse on both sides.
I have continued, awkwardly, to try to define what
happened to my sister. Back then we called it “almost raped,” but that didn’t
seem an apt term. It seemed either you were raped, or you weren’t, and what was
then referred to as “almost raped” seemed almost like a contradiction. The term
“sexually harassed” and “physically abused” were years from coming into being,
in our lives.
Then, this week, on Facebook, of all places, someone
added some perspective for me. A male friend posted: “To me, the force of the
word ‘rape’ should be never be neutered in a context where it's not defined as
a crime. If you're talking about two hormonal teenagers going at it, and then
one of them stops and the other wants to keep going, but then stops as well . .
. I get that--that's not ‘attempted rape.’ To me, any version of the word ‘rape’
is the same as any version of ‘murder.’ There's no ‘mild’ rape or ‘mild’
murder.”
His friend replied, “Dude if I come at you with a
gun threatening to shoot you, I’ll be tried for assault with a deadly weapon
and for attempted murder…. If a boy man handles your daughter and it’s only
through happenstance that she gets away, that’s an attempted rape.”
“It’s only happenstance that she gets away,” struck
me as the phrase I’d been needing to understand what had happened to Daun. My
sister trapped in the basement, the parents’ car pulling in the drive. Ford on
the bed, a male leaping and everyone falling off. Making a run for it. Happenstance.
However, the analogy is not perfect. Not everyone who points a gun is tried for assault, for murder. Not every teenage sexual fumbling is attempted rape. But if she is trying to get away, and it's only happenstance that she does, she needs to know that is attempted rape.
