Folks, we are living in strange times. Actually, all times have been strange since the very beginning, but the fact that we are living in these times make this our strange reality.

Let me take you back to the 1960s. I graduated from high school in 1966. The times they were a-changing. It was about twenty short years since a horrific war. Some of us went home after school to a Betty Crocker existence. Some went home to an empty house and wore keys on strings around our necks because our mothers had to work. Some of us went on to college. Those of us who wanted to go but didn’t have the funds went to a city university. We commuted on subways; we nodded off over text books in the A Train. Some of us married young because that was the way out in those days if you wanted to leave home. People ate TV Dinners and waxed rhapsodic over the turkey and friend chicken. We watched family programs where fathers came home from work in suits and mothers were always well-coiffed, wearing aprons over their shirtwaists. Life had the illusion of security.

I was an innocent kid, naive to a degree and kept a lot to myself. As I got older, I got wiser, but that didn’t change the zeitgeist much. Read on.

I married at nineteen; it was my way out of the house. It was 1967, two weeks before final exams. And because I took off time from classes, one of my profs lowered my grade. I confronted him. I won.

I was in college full-time having graduated high school a term early. I took care of a household and all that went with it. In the summers I worked part time for Lark Luggage in the Empire State Building, where I stuffed envelopes for mailings and dragged 6-foot long mail sacks into the elevator and descended seventy-six floors to the post office in the building. Wearing a dress. I never complained. After a few days of work I got a pay check for thirty-four dollars.  I attended summer classes to get ahead. I graduated from college a term early. But my emotional smarts were undeveloped, in fact, the marriage, though it lasted seven years, was a mistake. Maybe I should just call it a “poor choice.” My husband was ill in many ways and died at the age of twenty-eight. We had met when I was fifteen and he was seventeen.

I won’t go into too many details but suffice it to say, the times were crazy and so was he. I knew enough to get into the relationship but didn’t know how to get out. Thankfully the Universe had mercy on me. I didn’t have to make any decisions.

Let me share some vignettes with you as a stream of consciousness. The way we were. Please indulge me.

• During the time of my first marriage I was kissed fully on the mouth. Not by my husband. I was probably twenty years old. No, I do not remember the name of the person; the location of where it occurred though was The Bronx, where we were living. I was in a somewhat compromised position.  I didn’t know how to react, I was stunned. I do remember that I laughed nervously and managed to say something like, “Aren’t you nice.”

What were the circumstances?

I had just had my first gynecological examination. It was the last one I ever had with a male doctor.

• While I was living in The Bronx and working in Manhattan, I would trudge off to the Dyre Avenue line, the number 5 train, early in the mornings and was usually lucky enough to get a seat. It was the early 1970s. Subways were so rife with graffiti and dirt one couldn’t see out the windows. About a half hour into the trip we’d be chugging through the South Bronx on elevated tracks. It was an area which, in those days was a fire-bombed, rat-infested, drug-infused war zone. Do I remember the day? No. I know it was cold because people were wearing coats. Somewhere in that war-zone a penis was waved in front of my face. It was attached to a man who was staring at me, who looked dazed. His coat was open and black. And as the crowds moved in, his penis landed on the back of the woman’s coat who was standing as a buffer between us. This was not the first time this would happen.

 

• Here’s another one. It was before I was married and I had just begun CCNY. I had to take the A train up to Harlem and depending on where my classes were, I’d join the rank and file and hike up 125th Street or 145th Street. Between 59th Street and 125th Street the train ran express like a demon up the tracks, rattling and swaying and on one particular day, while I was sitting alone on a 2-seater bench with my head facing a dirty window, with a perfect view of nothing, a man, who could have sat anywhere in this near-empty car sat next to me with a camel colored jacket over his arm. There I was, a kid, alone, with little independent travel experience, with little street experience. His hand was hidden by the jacket. He was a big man and I was crowded and paralyzed as his fingers became an animal that landed on my leg. It took me time, what felt like hours, to extricate myself and move to another seat, to get over to a group of students, just feet away and yet it seemed like miles. I can still sense that pressure on my leg.

●The 1980s.
I was walking from the X-51 Express Bus at about 7:15 am in midtown Manhattan. Around 34th Street. This is a major shopping area, business area. Macy’s, for example is the landmark, here. But at this early hour the area is virtually deserted. As usual, I walked,  from the bus, crossed the wide street and situated myself parallel to Macy’s for the hike to 7th Avenue and then down to pick up my buttered bran muffin and coffee and on to my job at The High School of Fashion Industries. As I was about to begin my daily regimen, as I was beginning my walk west on 34th Street, a busload of convicts arrived nearby and the men were released from an NYPD van, possibly from Riker’s Island.

I was wearing a raincoat, a hat. I was carrying my usual purse, a tote bag with my shoes and papers, as always, loaded down, possibly even another bag (why I have a frozen shoulder today). I see myself in slow motion, walking past one of many  recessed storefronts, this one with a gate on the door within, an area that I could have conceivably been pulled into, but I can’t bear to think about it. I was lucky. I was only grabbed from behind.

I was stunned. There was no one around me and the grabber passed me quickly but seeing him walk away left me with self-doubt: he was the ONLY one around. It HAD to be HIM. I remember screaming at him, cursing him and what did it matter? He got away with it. I told my story at a lunch table with men and women teachers. I recall that the men laughed.

●I was on sabbatical from that school in 1986 and was attending classes and had off hours. One day I was walking down my fairly busy street, returning  home around noon and realized I had been followed into the building by a young man, perhaps high school age, with light hair and a light coat. What to do? The lobby was empty. I went to the mail room. He waited at the elevator. Before I knew it this young man was exposed, waving his penis at me like a flag. I figured screaming might be a good idea and yet even with my dramatic efforts no one came. Not one person from a seventeen story building came. But my screaming scared him. It even scared me. And it rallied something deep within me so that when he turned to flee, my 5 foot 2 1/2 ” self jumped him from behind, smashed him and grabbed his back, pummeled him for every event that had ever happened to me. He was tall but I was fierce. I was beginning to get my voice. And that voice went upstairs and called the police and I proudly told the officer what had transpired and what I had done. The officer was not thrilled that I had jumped on the back of a flasher and told me I shouldn’t do that again.

●Sometime in the 1990s while working in a school closer to home, having just given birth to my son, I seemed to have a chronic sinus and ear issue. I made an appointment with an ENT group of physicians and was taken by Dr. Katz who thought he was so cute! “Ah, Mrs. Sans Souci! So what brings you in today!? What is going on? What is going on with Mrs. Souci!?” I explained that my sinus issues were chronic and this time I had ear pain.

I got a lecture:

“You are probably blowing your nose wrong.” Dr. Katz went on to elaborate that I must have been blowing junk into my ear and infecting myself. He expounded with this example:

“If there was a bowl of jello and if I were to put my penis into the bowl of jello I would get [a penis] infection.” I can’t recall what I said, if I said anything. I was too taken aback by the bizarreness of the remark and the shock I felt by the impropriety of it, the ridiculousness of it. Another “doctor’ had joined the ranks of my desertion. I wrote him up on Angie’s List as being someone to be avoided at all costs. Let him shove his penis into his own ear.

• I had returned to work after the birth of my son. I was evaluating children on a team for special ed services, and like many “teams,” there was no space for us and we were assigned to share a 2×2 book closet to do our work. This was common. Schools were always overcrowded and there was little work space. Even children were taught in that book closet. There were shelves of dusty books which one of my teammates had hung a colorful sheet over.

Mr. G., the principal, thought he was entitled enough to don his running shorts during the school day and take a jog. He would           just leave the building and run. Then he would return in his sweaty shorts and wander the building. He wandered into my closet-       office, one day, while I was sitting at a child’s school desk and writing a report. Mr. G walked past me and pulled a sheet aside           and said “These are my books.” He had no reason coming into the room and no business there in his gym shorts.

I knew what was coming. A pass, and it wasn’t going to happen. I went on the offensive.

I stood up from my diminished position, walked over to him, looked him in the eye and said, “that’s nice, so Mr. G, so WHAT’S            WITH THE SHORTS?”

OK! So, now the balance of power had changed. I had years of practice of quiet and victimization and this sweaty ass wasn’t              going to get the better of me particularly now since I was the mother of an infant. HE didn’t know what to say. HE didn’t know          what to do. And so he bolted for the door and said, “I’ll be back!” And I said, “Don’t bother.”

It felt freaking good.

• Just a few years ago, I might add, my female gynecologist made a political remark about my president, who wasn’t her president. Yessiree, Bob, politics was invading my crotch again and it surely didn’t belong there. I had to set her straight.

The lines of appropriateness were being blurred daily and it was not the world I wanted to live in.

We can thank the stars everyday that we don’t live in a country that is at war, where the typical tactic of rape is employed. Sexual assault is committed to dehumanize, remove power, destroy individuals and countries, by denigrating the victim. I can say more about my own experiences but I will stop here.

I was reading someone’s facebook page last night and the post expressed confusion at why Dr. Christine Ford didn’t report her assault until this time, after all, the writer had indicated that she had been the victim of a (non-sexual) crime and she reported it immediately.  A male commented on the post, that HE had been sexually victimized as a young man and he took refuge from the pain and shame through self-medication with drink and drugs. He was the first male who had spoken up. He was one of us. The victims are no longer all women. He said he was too ashamed to say anything. And that is because we have been blaming the victim. Rape victims in some countries become the shame of their families and can’t return home. They are ousted through NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN.

But here’s the thing: all the shit that is now hitting the fan should be making us aware of an issue, a problem, a societal flaw that needs to be addressed. Victims need to speak out so they can unload the burden of the victimization. So that they can reclaim their power. So that they can put the blame where it belongs.

And we should be listening, attentively, addressing and correcting the way we got this way.

We should never blame the victim.