Explainers everywhere are working overtime to preserve patriarchal values. One popular strategy that continues to crop up states that, “rape is different from other crimes because it’s a ‘he said/she said’ situation.” This faulty line of reasoning reveals three things: an assumption that in disputes between men and women, men must be given the benefit of the doubt; an assumption that all rapists are men and all victims women; and glaring ignorance about how the U.S. justice system actually operates.

The justice system runs on testimonial evidence, which is exactly what “he said/she said” is. What makes a “he said/she said situation” different from any other dispute between witnesses? In a word: Nothing.

Whether it’s a small claims case between neighbors over dog poop, or a death penalty case of murder in the first degree, witnesses will give testimony, and each side’s testimony will usually oppose the other side’s testimony. If everyone agreed, there would be no reason to be in court to begin with.

Inevitably, some of these disputed cases will pit “he said” testimony against “she said” testimony. We hear the “he said/she said situation” line exclusively in sexual assault cases because men have been accustomed through history to the benefit of the doubt (if not outright commendation) in heterosexual rape cases.

Cases are decided every day based solely on witness testimony. The “lack of corroborating evidence” for testimony — cited by Senator Susan Collins and others during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings as a potential violation of Kavanaugh’s rights — doesn’t mean a denial of due process, the fair procedures that the  all citizens are entitled to, nor does it void a presumption of innocence.

To be clear, testimony by a competent witness is sufficient evidence on its own.

The legal definition of “competent” has evolved over the last one hundred fifty years to mean, simply, being able to perceive and communicate what happened. The “he said/she said” line is likely a holdover from when certain groups of people were classified as incompetent witnesses by virtue of their status. In ancient Athens, for example, women were excluded from courts entirely. And in the 21st century, Jewish law in Orthodox and Conservative communities still holds that women are not competent witnesses in most cases.

To be clear, testimony by a competent witness is sufficient evidence on its own.
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Excluding people of color from testifying was a common practice in the States, and it was legal until passage in 1868 of the 14th Amendment. Why? As one court held, it was because of “their crude and monstrous superstitions, which rendered them incapable of feeling or appreciating the obligation of an oath, as felt and appreciated in a Christian community; and it was not, therefore, deemed safe to receive them as witnesses, even against one another.”

Under similar rationale, atheists of any color were also deemed incompetent to testify, beginning  in the States during colonial times and extending in many jurisdictions through the mid-nineteenth century. Denying people the right to testify, or questioning the credibility of a particular demographic, has always been a way for courts to strengthen social hierarchies like institutional racism and sexism.

The 'he said/she said' line is likely a holdover from when certain groups of people were classified as incompetent witnesses by virtue of their status.
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While women and people of color are now, legally, competent to testify, barriers against them persist. Leigh Gilmore, author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives and a distinguished visiting professor at Wellesley College, writes that sexual and racial violence are seen by some as “belonging to a separate ordered of judgment.” Moreover, gender and race stereotypes are “sticky judgments,” so ubiquitous that we can’t see them, so prevalent that they seem “neutral.”

When asked to share some thoughts about how doubting women’s testimony creates a benefit for men in the justice system, she says,  

“[G]ender bias makes doubting women feel rational and virtuous rather than unjust. ‘He said’ carries more weight than what ‘she said’ because women’s testimony is demeaned and discredited in ways that men’s testimony isn’t. . . .We have vividly seen with the #MeToo movement the effects of this bias: the lack of transparent and fair processes for women to report sexual violence, the blaming of victims for bringing forward accusations of sexual assault both “too soon” and risking men’s reputations and also “too late,” which disregards all the mechanisms for silencing and shaming victims.”

In this view, witnesses from the dominant group get the benefit of the doubt. Even though it’s a legal truism that “most facts are proved by testimony,” and that even in cases where physical evidence exists, “the human recital — viva voce — is often crucial to the establishment of its authenticity or significance,” testimony from members of marginalized groups in the States and elsewhere has often been cast as unreliable, or simply excluded from consideration.

As a former trial attorney, I’ve seen how the he said/she said dynamic is replicated in cases involving parties from opposite ends of a hierarchy. It could be “white cop says/black kid says,” or “boss says/employee says,” or “priest says/choirboy says,” or “corporate polluter says/environmental group says.” In any case, the member of the dominant class gets the benefit of the doubt. Dr. Gilmore connects this bullshit phenomenon to the “reasonable man” standard in U.S. law:

Take the legal fiction of the ‘reasonable man’ whose motives and actions juries are instructed to consider as the standard for deciding, for example, cases of self-defense. When women claim self-defense in cases where they kill a man, often a violent intimate partner whom they know is intent upon inflicting violence on them — an act that meets the self-defense standard — juries often fail to apply self-defense accurately because they doubt women were justified in using force to defend themselves for two reasons: the assumption that the woman overreacted or that the man’s life, to be blunt, is worth more. We see this in rape cases in lenient sentencing for men like Brock Turner whose father was outraged that his son would be punished for raping an unconscious woman, an act he described as ‘a steep price to pay for twenty minutes of action.’

Just imagine reactions to someone claiming that a prison term was a “steep price to pay” for a woman who took only twenty minutes to torture a man. Flipping the script on cultural assumptions is one way of highlighting their injustice. Dr. Gilmore expects a backlash.

Gender and race stereotypes are 'sticky judgments,' so ubiquitous that we can’t see them, so prevalent that they seem 'neutral.'
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Bias is woven into all the processes for judging what women and people of color say about their lives; so is the unfair privilege that powerful men receive in all aspects of life. In the leveling of this imbalance, men will likely feel aggrieved by the loss of this unearned and undeserved testimonial credit, as will all of those habituated to thinking that male elites deserve this credit.

Victims of racist and sexual assaults will continue to risk further abuse in police stations, courtrooms, congressional hearings, and the media until we explode all versions of “he said/she said” dynamics. And that means a constant, close examination of how media and justice systems treat women and people of color when they come forward to testify.

Growing up, TV convinced me that rejection wasn’t only hurtful, but also inherently cruel. From baby shows whose hosts routinely tore down the fourth wall and begged for companionship to very special episodes of Disney Channel sitcoms wherein the protagonist has no choice but to befriend a marginalized character in order to save them, the insidious message was clear: “No” was almost always the wrong answer. In a typical kid’s show, a protagonist’s bedrock relationships were impossible to leave or be ousted from because of their lives’ strict adherence to “The Status Quo is God,” a trope that dictates everything in an episode reverts back to how it originally was at the beginning before the credits can roll.

I graduated to the fraught world of teen dramas and anime in middle school. When I’d finished Gilmore Girls and Fruits Basket, I became infatuated with the many iterations of Degrassi that populated the airwaves in the mid 2000s. Though the storylines and language that made my beloved fictitious worlds whole became more mature and dynamic, their misrepresentations of rejection only grew worse. In the world of adult and adult-ish media, the refusal of attention wasn’t a solvable child-friendly problem-of-the-week. It was the absolute worst thing in existence, the ultimate form of humiliation. For the hero, being turned down was an intense personal smite, a societal defect, or both.

Writers often framed permanent rejections—the ones that couldn’t be overcome—as misunderstandings by using instances of the protagonist being accepted as proof. A denial of admission from any dream school became not a matter of luck but the fault of gatekeepers who could never understand the hero’s true talent. Same for an aloof heart-throb: the hero was too good to be rejected by them, so of course there would be some better, more accepting love interest in plain view for the jilted once the jilter realized their mistake.

Both on television and in real life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back. A strong boy never turned down a challenge; he either finished it, or hid his defeat, lest he be thought of as weak. As the boys in my life became more demanding, I became shy and cloying. I forced myself to kiss family members on the cheek when I was mad at them or didn’t like the texture of their skin, fearing that if didn’t and they died, they’d die feeling alone. I always said thank you, even when I didn’t mean it, even when people didn’t deserve it.  

Only after I switched out passivity for critical introspection did I learn that “no” wasn’t a mean word. I was just as entitled to use it as anyone else. But media continues to misconstrue its fundamental purpose and, by extension, consent. Consent advocates in all media spaces need to teach people, especially men and boys pressured by the immense weight of their need be invulnerable, that rejection is not an inherent wrong but objective instrument that can be separated from situational subtext.

We’re social creatures by nature. Early humans survived harsh environments by depending on small enclaves of other humans in order to meet survival and reproductive needs. Consequently, social rejection in any form then was often a literal death sentence. Human language uses the idea of hurt to describe both physical and emotional pains.

In a 2011 report, University of Michigan psychology professor Ethan Koss found that this conflation was the result of not just culture but also biology, upon discovering that rejection and physical pain share a common somatosensory representation. Using a MRI to monitor brain activity, Koss had test subjects whose partners broke up with them perform two separate tasks: the first, stare at a picture of their former significant other and the second, receive a “noxious thermal stimulation.” In both tests, the same regions of each subject’s brain lit up on the MRI. A broken romance hurt only slightly less than an actual burn.

It’s natural that rejection hurts, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be oppressive. What makes humans humans isn’t only our ability to feel but rather our ability to process our own emotions rationally, especially in an era where being denied companionship doesn’t signify literal death.

Both on television and in real-life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back.
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Not all rejection is personal. Institutional prejudices influence who we accept and who we reject.

I first became aware of this after my introduction to sexual racism. OkCupid’s popular five year study revealed that heterosexual Black women and Asian men statistically received the least amount of attention from all men and all women respectively. I found the results disheartening, but even worse was the discourse surrounding them. People in my life both on and offline likened personal preference to the act of disregarding a whole race of people as potential romantic partners. Even those condemning the senseless vapidity behind online dating culture didn’t seem to understand that the study wasn’t about silly preferences at all, but the outright discrimination and social conditioning that weaponized rejection.

I wanted to be desired and I wanted to fight the very idea of it. I couldn’t force racists who I didn’t even like to like me. I became apathetic to the concept of attraction as a natural construct. I didn’t care if anti-Black men didn’t want to date me. I cared because many of them were in positions of power that allow them to determine the metrics of desirability, a valuable social currency. I cared because once in middle school, a white acquaintance of mine had told me they liked the hyper-realistic sketch I’d done of myself because my features looked beautiful on the white watercolor paper.

Because no one believed the victims of serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw since they were Black women, and thus historically viewed as un-rapeable. And because Tinder dates wouldn’t stop fetishizing me for my Blackness, and when I told one of them to stop he said, “What? Did you want me to say I think you’re ugly? Is that what you want?”

For as long as I can remember, the white spaces I inhabited have operated as echo chambers for heterosexual men to routinely remind me of their God-given right to say that not liking me sexually was the same as not liking a man. It was especially ironic when the same people complained about superficial women who didn’t want to sleep with them. I felt their contempt everywhere, in articles that use pseudoscience to argue how Asians are inherently cute and Black people masculine, on websites dedicated to pretty women that completely exclude black and brown women. I felt it even in explicitly black media when black artists like Donald Glover declared their fetishistic infatuation for women of other races and existential boredom for those in their own communities.

In her recent essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?”, Amia Srinivasan, a British-Indian philosopher, argues against the racial policing of sex and romance.

[…] [w]hereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively, you just can’t do the same with sex. What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.

Srinivasan criticizes how feminist consent advocates make overly simplistic one-to-one comparison between sex, a human trait, and some personal object, creating a false discord between moral consciousness and consent that allows sexually regressive subreddits to thrive. Traditional consent politics, she argues, objectifies the people it tries to protect, reinforcing the idea of sexuality as a valuable currency rather than a non-transferable essence of being. For instance, the Rebecca Solnit essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me” compares sex to a sandwich. “Tea and Consent,” a British-produced PSA, compares sex to tea. Sex is viewed as a good that can literally be consumed.

We need to acknowledge when rejection is based in problematic beliefs. According to Srinivasan, before teaching, sex educators should first familiarize themselves with radical self-love movements, groups unified by the idea that we all have a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our problematic and often racist biases in all parts of our lives. But that doesn’t mean all rejection is based in institutionally-influenced prejudice. At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.

I had to mute the television during Gossip Girl when Chuck Bass, a tragic rich boy, tries to attack Jenny Humphrey. I was afraid my mom would see and make me turn it off.

He lures Jenny away from a party and up to an abandoned rooftop, where he pins her down. The scene is visceral. She struggles against him until her brother Dan saves her, punching Chuck in the face. I assumed the attempted rape would become a central part of the narrative, reshaping the characters involved.

Chuck’s punishment is as brief as it is indirect. In a subsequent episode, he and his classmates fight for a coveted usher position with Dartmouth College. Of course, already being an established villain from his first non-rapey appearance on screen, Chuck is rejected again, this time from being an usher. His cockiness makes his comeuppance more enjoyable for audiences even though it is only a passive form of poetic justice, a simultaneous erasure and acknowledgement of the severity of his most recent crime. As the series progresses, Jenny and all the other central characters quickly, wordlessly, forget Chuck’s violent nature, absolving him from the unglamorous role of rapist and proving that the show can’t handle the permanency of rejection.

At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.
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At best, rejection is portrayed as a weapon for smiting the Chucks of the world, and at worst it is the ultimate punishment. The latter is especially the case if the supposed victim is a man pursuing a woman. John Hughes’ 1986 film Pretty In Pink created an indignant subculture of fans who believed Ducky, an affable nerd, deserved the affections of his closest friend Andie instead of quintessential ’80s heartthrob Blane. In the Salon piece “The trouble with Duckie: How Pretty in Pink’s most lovable character gave a generation of teenage boys the wrong idea,” critic Jon Cyer invalidates the misplaced indignation behind “Duckiegate” by comparing Duckie to the more recent “nice guy” archetype, a man who believes the women he desires should reciprocate his male niceness with offers of romance or sex.

Duckie defenders fail to see Andie’s decision to continue her friendship with Duckie after he insults her as a valid form of acceptance—all because of the pervasive idea that in order to truly love someone, we have to accept their sexual advances. The “friendzone” has come to mean something just as bad as indifference or contempt because, to them, rejection in every form is equally bad. They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.

Duckiegate is a part of an age-old paranoia that a woman’s autonomy exists to oppress vulnerable men. If you type “false rape” into Reddit, the search results are too numerous to count. On the controversial subreddit r/MensRights, two of some of the most popular discussion threads suggest false rape allegations are rampant and that extremist MRAs known as Incels are right in their belief that women are sexual gatekeepers who resent Duckie-esque “beta-males.” The group is an infamous star in the misogynistic and often racist constellation of online spaces colloquially known as the “manosphere.” What they all share in common is their obsession with how society punishes men who aren’t Blane-esque “Chad Thundercocks” by denying them sexual intimacy and, by extension, power, supposedly leaving them vulnerable to the judgmental perceptions of women.

They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.
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While the manosphere loathes women, it doesn’t defend the Chads who prey on them. Some of the most popular comments and posts on r/MensRights about Brock Turner, an ex-Stanford jock who sexually assaulted a woman in 2015, condemn the wealthy alpha male (comment: “[Turner] isn’t being honest about what [the police report] said”). Same for convicted Steubenville rapists and former football stars Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the latter of whom is Black (post: “I think that as a community we should mention the Steubenville rape trials. We always talk about false rape allegations, but it’s just as important that we acknowledge real accusations”). Compare this to the site’s sympathetic view of Peter Naussenger, the middle class, white, nerdy man who fellow Columbia alum Emma Sulkowicz accused of sexual assault while the two were in college together.

Knowing that society believes punishment and rejection to be the same, MRAs view the ostracization of Chads as righteous and Duckies as offensive. To them, Chads not only deserve to not be loved by women but also hated by them. The internet Duckies believe they’re oppressed because they think their rejection/ostracization is undeserved. 4chan is famous for drawing national attention to the victim blaming that embroiled the Steubenville case, going as far as to demonstrate IRL wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and to send death and rape threats to Sulkowicz for indirectly ousting her alleged rapist through performance art.

During a workshop on dating violence in college, everyone in the classroom had to come up with a characteristic of a healthy relationship. The room was quiet. We’d already filled up more than half the whiteboard with traits of an unhealthy one (“gaslighting,” “physical violence,” “intolerance,” etc.). After a minute passed, a trickle of suggestions came, but they were all vague, and could apply to any type of relationship, good or bad. Hugs, hand holding, saying I love you—these were things even convicted wife killers had done.

It reminded me of that one cheesy ’80s song “What Is Love?” where the singer basically just repeats the title and “baby don’t hurt me.” I said nothing. If I were asked to do the exercise now, I would say rejection was the ultimate sign of a solid partnership. Regardless of who’s being problematic for what, acknowledging when a romance is or might turn sour is the definition of emotional strength.

However, going back in time won’t be enough to change societal views on rejection. Improving our communities would mean forcing people, especially men, to not only embrace the idea of consent but to also reevaluate the intrinsic violence of desirability, using their own experiences with people’s problematic preferences as an empathetic guide. Men are literally killing women for rejecting them. Until men learn it’s okay to be rejected, no one will be safe. And that’s going to take a cultural shift to turn “no” from an attack to just another word.

“I do, but I’d rather hear about what you remember,” I said, turning down the heady beats of the Wu-Tang Clan I’d been introducing him to. (“Auntie! he’d exclaimed, “This is so much better than Drake!”)

Folded up beside me like a blue heron, or an oil rig, my nephew is a coltish six feet tall, and nearly all legs; he took a long time to respond.

“I remember the dinosaur stickers on my bed,” he finally said, softly. When I followed his gaze out the window, I saw the cranes of the Oakland Port, looking themselves like ancient, industrial beasts. I saw the externalized thought, the making-adult of a childhood memory, the attempt to make contact. He startled me by continuing, “—before I knew they were dinosaurs. When you’re that little, you have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.”

Long after I dropped him off, his revelation boomed inside me.  

You have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.

I see evidence of this everywhere: sensing danger before it’s visibly apparent, reading a room, attraction (to another body, to an object that shines just right). Those of us who are able-bodied walk around without really thinking about walking around. We’re repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.

Where, I marveled, did he learn that?

My nephew was talking about linguistics, mostly, and motor skills. He was talking about world-building concepts, like space and time. Things you learn through a kind of osmosis. However, my own first responses—how to sense danger, how to read a room, how to tell if I’m attracted to someone or something or not (and immediately after, if I think the attraction is a good idea or a potentially harmful one)—shows a lot about me as a person. That I learned at a young age how to intuit threat, and how to defuse, defend, or otherwise navigate it.

Today I woke up and I noticed this: a tomato plant in my backyard has grown around a brick.

As the tomatoes start showing their bashful faces, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this muscle memory. A few weeks ago, someone threw a brick through my front window in Oakland. Yesterday, a man made a gun of his hands and pretended to shoot me with it. Down the street, MacArthur Bart is still sewed up with yellow police tape, and Nia Wilson has officially been gone for a week. Down the other side of the street, tent cities bloom and die, bloom and die. Civilians and cops circle one another warily.

Humans are repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.
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And it’s the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which reminds us that this systemic racism, this cyclical grief, is not even remotely new.

Even if we didn’t cognitively know that to be true, we feel it. The muscle memory of collective trauma prompts us to slide into unconscious action and movement during times like these. We check in with each other more. We shut down ICE facilities. We write, we draw, we archive, we connect.

“There are many ways to show up for a revolution,” my very wise friend Ste once told me. “Jesus and Gloria Anzaldua feed people. Holding a sign is just one way.”

Do you ever feel uncomfortable with how comfortable we can go from zero to 60, and quickly? As if our lives depended upon it (they do). This response is an infinitely helpful one, of course, but it implies a world that is rife with disaster and destruction, one in which an emergency kit must always be at the ready.

I recognize that not everyone feels this way. In fact, it seems to me that the majority of the burden of showing up, educating, and emotional labor falls on marginalized communities, even within liberal and artistic spaces. I understand that the disenfranchised have a more robust understanding of how to handle crisis—for obvious reasons—but our collective inability to have difficult conversations and engage in difficult labor is what landed us with the president and administration we have now.

#MeToo is perhaps a relevant and ongoing example I can point to. While I feel grateful and slain by those in my community (and those in positions of power outside my community) who came forward and told their own harrowing stories, a little part of myself felt distraught: why is it the responsibility of victims to shock the world into caring? Why doesn’t the world just believe people when they claim they’ve been abused? And, even more upsetting, why hasn’t the movement gone farther? What will it take to end rape culture in our country?

Still, some changes are palpable. Holding people publicly accountable is pretty effective. As I enter into the film and television industry—I’m currently taking my first screenwriting course—I can detect the ways in which Hollywood is trying to change its tune.

Nia Wilson’s killer has been apprehended, and folks are still unsure if it was racially motivated, and doesn’t that say something about the ways in which the baseline holds up? That white men can still get away with being assumed not racist until proven otherwise, even when they kill people of color in front of dozens of onlookers?

I feel proud of Oakland for showing up. I also feel sad for Oakland.

I feel proud because I love a city that knows how to handle itself with aplomb in a crisis. I feel sad because the hard truth is that the marginalized and traumatized are always taxed and overburdened with responding—with grace and empathy—to ride or die situations. Individually, and systemically.

We’re seeing an appalling display of what unchecked privilege and power can do. Everyday, hundreds of examples: a man going on a spree with a knife on public transportation, our president taunting entire nations over Twitter, Oakland cops taking advantage of underage women.

For all our unconscious super power—for all our psychological spidey-sense of self-protection against impending violence—how do we know when we are in a Reckoning? I’m so ready for the meek to inherit the Earth. I’m so ready for those who instinctively have a realistic understanding of the danger and beauty and tenuousness and finiteness of our world to have some power in deciding how to run it.

My nephew is right, but is also too young (I think, but what do I know?) to fully understand the additional layer of this fraught knowledge, the one that comes with time and experience and, unfortunately, getting roughed up a bit: the things we have no memory of learning as individuals, the things we hold to be the dearest of knowledge—these are very, very different than the things we collectively know as a society.

The overlap in the Venn diagram of understanding what is wrong with the world on an individual versus a systemic level—well. It’s tiny. As a society we don’t share that baseline. And that’s terrifying.

Walking through the streets of my city and seeing it fall all around me really does make me feel like my basement should be stocked with water and canned beans. And it is (thanks to my Virgo sweetheart).

But I’m mostly stocked up with myself: my muscle memory of how to move in a world that feels like a war-zone. I’m stocked up with my phone tree, my books, my plants that grow around evidence of industrialization. I’m stocked up with my capacity for listening, with my compassion, with my chosen family. I’m stocked up with you.

Keep fighting. I love you.

Content warning: sexual violence

The other day I walked to work in a rage, for no reason exactly, except for every reason. And as I walked, I prayed for someone to say it to me. I scowled and stomped. One foot, two foot, up then down, hard and harder: Say it. Say it. Say it.

Will some motherfucker please just say it?

Tell me to smile.

And oh, how magnificent I would have blazed. The bus would’ve stopped mid turn; women pushing strollers would’ve cheered; some man would’ve called me a crazy bitch and I would have laughed. Yes, I am. Today I sure am.

But the street left me in peace. And I remembered a woman I know, pregnant and past the assigned due date, anxious, not wanting to be induced. Since I couldn’t fight, I thought I’d try and be of use, and called her. Listened. Then, she went off to finish a painting, and I walked into my school to teach Horror Writing to teenagers.

What is the thing you fear? That one thing. Write it down on the page, your eyes only.

Now, come up with an image for that thing. Write it down.

Anyone want to share?

Oh, how magnificent I would have blazed.
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A white room with white walls that morphs into a long white tunnel with no end. A doppelganger that is you, but not you. A locked door, without escape. Someone in your home, waiting for you when you arrive.

Now, what is the idea behind the thing? What are you really scared of?

I name mine: fear of enclosed spaces; a sealed wooden box like a coffin; fear of the loss of control.

The students nod. They write down the fear behind the fear in their notebooks. For their eyes only. In an oft-cited quote of Stephen King’s, there are three types of horror: the gross-out, the horror (aka the supernatural), and the terror — that feeling that the unknown has been made manifest; that those secret, intuited fears are in fact a reality.

The Dropped Trump Case Reminds Us That No Rape Is ‘Believable’
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One of the women who has come forward, and retreated, with charges against our president says she was 13 when he raped her. She says that at a party he tied her up (he would have had to use ropes, maybe belts, perhaps his tie) and forced his penis into her vagina over and over again until his pleasure at this act — this tied up, terrified, naked child — peaked into an orgasm and he ejaculated. I suppose he then untied her. She has said she’s repeatedly dropped the suit because of death threats, to her and her family.

Before you get all righteous and Democratic about the fact such an individual is our president, remember how very many allow it, participate, are not outraged. And think of this: When articles of impeachment were introduced in the House in December, the House, Republicans and Democrats united, voted to table the article, effectively sidelining it, 364–58.

At lunch, the female-identifying students gather in the library for our weekly affinity group. They fill me in, how last Friday, S. went to the deli and a man on the street tried to talk to her. She ignored him, and crossed the street. He followed behind her. He said, “Are you going to ignore me? I’ll punch your fucking face in.” She ran, and he chased. She made it safely into school, but said later that the fear would not leave her body.

A billboard flown across the horizon line of the beach this past summer; a headless woman in a bikini. Get this body. Now.

I was at a party yesterday, an afternoon gathering, and my two-and-a-half-year-old child wanted to nurse. There were soft couches and chairs in that room, it was un-crowded, I could have (I used to) sat on one of those couches and nursed and kept chatting and nibbling cookies. Instead, I was ashamed, and went with my son to the playroom and sat on the floor surrounded by plastic toys. It was fluorescent lit, low ceilinged, with no windows. I nursed alone with my back against the wall.

Already, I’m hearing it, disguised as inquiry. Has this gone too far? How powerful should an accusation be? How much weight should we give one woman’s word? What if they just mean it as banter? What place does flirting have in the workplace?

It’s the same as asking what she was wearing.

On the radio, a call-in for an intergenerational response to the wave of accusations, which is a disguised opportunity for older men to talk about how much they don’t understand what’s going on; that the standards have changed “so much,” and blah blah blah blah.

It’s happening again, the same again and again — the phenomenon of speaking out is the phenomenon being examined. Not the relentless physical and verbal assaults. Not what it means to live in bodies we call “girl” and “woman.” Not the fear that guides me away from the wooded path in the park, pushing my stroller towards more populated places, the hypothetical protection of more people present.

We are not talking about flirting. We know what flirting is.

It’s happening again, the same again and again.
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Do you know the story of Cassandra? In an attempt to seduce her, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. Foreknowledge of the future. But when she refused him, he spit in her mouth, cursing her; though she would always know and speak the truth of what was to come, no one would ever believe her.

I remember being a kid with my mom in the park on a sleepy city summer day, pushing our bikes up the big hill, too tired to ride them, and these teenagers, these young boys, walking by and slapping my mother on the ass. I remember the strange slow-motion stillness that followed as we all continued to walk the steep hill, the boys laughing, and how there was nothing my mother or I could do about it. It was like the taste of fluoride at the dentist, the way it made my teeth hurt, the doing nothing, the disrespect of my all-powerful mother, the assigning of status.

Have you stood and looked at the array of magazines at a newsstand recently? I mean, really looked? Do that. Notice.

I am on the couch being intimate with my partner, who has a penis, and unbidden into my pleasure flashes a series of images — cinematic, not memories — of rape, assault, violence. I’m not talking here, deliberately, about the give and take of sexual play, of dominance, of submission. This is not about that. I’m talking about images grafted into my brain against my will.

#MeToo Has Made Me See Anyone Is Capable Of Sexual Abuse — Including Me
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Forget the Bechdel test, try this one: Refuse to take in any images or scenes of a woman being beaten, arrested, tortured, raped, or killed. See what’s left.

(Hint: not a whole lot.)

Shall we review some numbers yet again?

1 in 6 women will experience an attempted or completed rape.

The majority of sexual assault takes place in or near the home.

The majority of offenders are people the victims know.

I don’t know any woman who has not been assaulted or threatened.

I don’t know any woman who knows a woman who has not been not assaulted or threatened.

To quote Stephen King exactly this time: “And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute.”

1 in 3 men would rape if they could get away with it.

1 in 16 men are rapists.

I know more than 16 men.

“Wake up,” I said in a text message to my son yesterday. “We need to talk about Aziz Ansari.”

My son is on break from college and is visiting his dad in Singapore. But I knew he would be following the news and debates about Ansari closely.

We love Aziz Ansari, my son and I. My son pointed me to Master of None no sooner than it was released on Netflix. “It’s OK, not great, but we should watch it,” he said. Of course we should. Ansari is funny, we had already established. And he’s somewhat like us — of Indian ethnicity (Take that, Hollywood). Also, he is of Indian Muslim origin (take that, Hindu fundamentalists). And he’s woke.

We both were disenchanted partway through season two. I told my son I didn’t like that Aziz only dated white women. My son accused me of double standards because I didn’t turn a similar critique on Mindy Kaling. “It’s different,” I said. He sighed. Our conversations on the nuances of feminist representations are not often easy.

So, when he called me back today, he really didn’t want to talk about the whole business with Ansari. “It’s cringe-worthy,” he said.

But mothers of 22-year-old sons must persist through the cringe.

Dear America, Our Boys Are Hurting
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We had talked about the #metoo movement before. Like many other women, I was highly triggered on the couple of days that followed the birth of the hashtag and the deluge of women’s disturbing stories from across the world. I put my own story out there, then called my son just to hear his voice. I was rewarded with more — his words.

He spoke with a clear and profound outrage at the sexual abuse of women by men across the board. Why spare even Gandhi, we said. And we agreed we would #believeher no matter who the next accused person was (unless, of course, it was our hero Noam Chomsky, we joked; we’d have a hard time dealing with that). Raised in patriarchal India and adrift in the rising toxic masculinity of America, I found comfort, even healing, in the voice of my son, an Indian American male, the feminist I raised on my own here as a single mom.

With Ansari, though, the conversation with my boy gets complicated. We are talking about something beyond sexual assault, abuse, or harassment. We are having a conversation that isn’t even really about Ansari.

What we need to talk about are the cultural conversations rising up around the Ansari incident. What we need to talk about is training men to read women the way women have been trained to read men.

What my son must know — and what I addressed directly with him— is that none of this is as difficult as the men around him might be saying it is. It’s actually quite easy. Girls are raised into womanhood with a thorough understanding of men’s motivations and cues. Through warnings and whispers, through fables and giggles, we are tutored rigorously on what men will want — in the best, non-violent iterations, they will want your body, they will want your loyalty, they will want your food, they will want you to smile and cheer them on and tell them they make you happy. For generations, we have been lined up during training sessions and then sent forth to laugh heartily at their jokes, raise their children, starve our bodies into attractiveness, and fake our orgasms.

Sure, we have also driven change. We have re-calibrated ourselves for the “woke” boys — chase your own dreams, be a fun companion, ooh over their cooking, aah over their shared childcare, smile and cheer them on and tell them they make you happy. Also, girl, don’t push it.

Women have been trained. Now let’s finally, if it’s all right with everyone, train boys to know what’s going on with girls and women.

The first conversation I had with my son about the possibility of him in a sexual encounter was when he was in sixth or seventh grade. He asked me when boys and girls were ready to have sex. I said: “You may be ready before the girl is. She will have a lot of pressure — from society, from culture, from her friends, from boys — to be sexual. But keep in mind that she may or may not really be ready. She may feel bad after. She may want to cry. If you can be her friend through all of this, and you know you both are sure, go for it.”

Let’s finally train boys to know what’s going on with girls and women.
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So, yes, son, let’s cringe our way through the new part of this conversation. But this time, perhaps, it’s best I listen. “We don’t need hot takes,” my son said. “We need room-temperature, equilibrated, long term, studied, structural changes. For one, we need pornography that isn’t violent towards women. Men like Ansari are raised on such porn. Men who believe the #metoo campaign is a ‘witch hunt’ terrify me because this implies they have a great degree of entitlement and believe that the average-looking guy, the Ansaris of the world, are being unfairly humiliated. We need to watch out for their backlash.”

But we don’t need to believe my son. Let’s head on over to India, Ansari’s own motherland, and listen to what its young women are saying. I have just returned to the U.S. from a trip to Mumbai after four years away. I was invited to speak to a class at my alma mater in the Social Communications Media Department at Sophia Polytechnic about my recently-published co-edited volume of essays on South Asian feminism. After my address on my own trajectory as a feminist scholar and about transnational feminism, a young woman asked me what I thought of some of the more uncomfortable aspects of the #metoo movement, which has found its own massive expression on Indian social media. I told her we needed to embrace the discomfort. Then I asked her what she thought. Feminists in India are divided on the publication on Facebook of a list of academics whom a student accused of sexual assault and harassment. “I have studied with some of these professors,” the student at Sophia’s said to me.

I braced myself for some rape-apologist remark. Instead, she said, “And just because I did not face harassment from these professors doesn’t mean that another female student is lying about her bad experience.”

So You’ve Sexually Harassed Or Abused Someone: What Now?
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Your kind of feminist solidarity is what my generation dreamed about, I said to the young woman.

Padmini Ray Murray, a feminist scholar who heads the digital humanities program at the Srishti Institute of Arts, Humanities and Design in Bangalore, expressed a similar push for the next level of feminist solidarity, in a Facebook post:

“For those of you dismissing the Aziz incident as a ‘bad lay’ — it is sad that our experiences have socialised us to consider flagrant disrespect in sexual negotiations as something we can just chalk down to a below par experience. Aziz, in this account, disregarded ‘Grace’s’ wishes to be respected, both her wishes and her body. Is this sexual violence of the magnitude of the monstrous behaviour of a Weinstein? Probably not. Should it be considered a part of toxic masculinity that allows for rape culture to flourish? Absolutely.”

Some men in my generation feel duped. Ranjit Arab, a friend and an editor at an academic press, called me as he reeled under the revelations of women who came out with their experiences of sexual assault. “Everything we were taught was wrong. I feel cheated, angry.” He was taught to be assertive, take charge in the mating and seduction ritual. The message was clear: Make the first move, be persistent, don’t back down. All of this, he could see now, was part of toxic masculinity.

As the articles in defense of Aziz Ansari have said, women have agency. Yes, we do. But we don’t just show up in our encounters with men with an Uber app on our phones and that glorious word, “No.” We show up awash in the rules and ruse of patriarchy and its son, rape culture. As comedian and writer Kate Willett posted on her social media page:

“Good flirting…is paying such deep attention to another person’s emotions and body language that you create more intimacy with them. It’s a two-way, playful, fun exchange that makes everyone feel good. Sexual harassment is the opposite. It’s devoid of empathy, and it’s about forcing your will upon another person without having any regard for their desire. You’re comparing a paint brush to a wrecking ball.”

Sure, yes, our culture is transmuting. #Metoo, in all its iterations, all its humiliations, and all its chaos, is part of the transmutation. But there’s so much more to talk about — more deeply and with more nuance — with our sons and daughters and friends and partners.

And so, here’s what I told my son: What the Ansari incident is bringing up for women is that some women gave up their power and silently endured humiliating sex because of self-doubt. Some, like me, guarded themselves to such a degree to avoid sexual encounters of this kind that we lost out on the joys of flirtation, of mutual seduction, of the pleasures of our own sensuality. We policed ourselves because we knew no one would come to our feeble call. We only partook when we’d checked all our boxes that said, “Safe.” All of this is rooted in toxic masculinity. All of this is rooted in rape culture.

I’m having this conversation because it’s the conversation that must be had, cringing be damned. And if my son should protest any of it (and he won’t) and ask why men should bother (he won’t), I still get to be mom and say, “Because I said so.”

I was just commenting a few weeks ago about how at least once a month a woman will reach out to me to let me know that a man I’ve worked with, socialized with, or even considered a friend, is an abuser. These aren’t tales of one incident, it’s almost always a pattern of abuse quietly shared by multiple women who are scared of being publicly known. Occasionally these are stories from women who made their accusations VERY publicly known—but they were quickly and violently shouted down by their own community and, almost immediately, the accusations were forgotten by everyone except for the women who had been abused and cast out.

These aren’t famous people. These abusers are local artists, activists, teachers. But many have found themselves in places of even minor prestige or power and used that power to abuse women—and keep them silent about it. Even in a group as small as two — say, in a marriage — certain men will use their power to abuse women (and many men and non-binary people as well, who are often silenced with the added shame of the “feminized” nature of sexual assault).

And along with all the ways in which women are constantly reminded of how unsafe and powerless they are when someone in their circle is revealed as an abuser, we now also have a spate of very high-profile and widely admired menwho are being outed as serial abusers.

Weinstein, Tambor, Hoffman, Louis CK, Seagal, Piven, Spacey—maybe it would save time to just start keeping lists of men we admire (I’m aware that not many have admired Steven Seagal in a while, but the point stands) whoaren’t sexual predators, and then slowly cross their names off as every news story breaks until we all explode from rage and frustration and disappointment.

Maybe it would save time to just start keeping lists of men we admire who AREN’T sexual predators.
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This is, I’m 120% sure, just the tip of the iceberg. For every victim who takes the monumental risk to come forward and is actually heard, there are almost certainly countless others who can’t or aren’t.

I hear time and time again from men who want me to make it clear when talking about rape culture that not all men are rapists. I hear time and time again from men who want me to believe that it’s only a few sick monsters committing all the rapes, and also that maybe women are all lying and there are no rapes. These are often the same men who also try to say in the same breath that “boys will be boys” and that men can’t control their desires as long as women continue to stubbornly exist in their corporeal form.

And no, as a mother of two boys I cannot believe that every man is a sexual predator and that every little boy is destined to become one. I would not be able to get out of bed in the mornings. But as a survivor of multiple sexual assaults, as one of the 20% of all women in the U.S. who report being victims of sexual assault (and this is not including sexual harassment and other waysin which women are made to feel unsafe in their bodies), as a citizen of a country that elected a man who proudly admitted on tape to sexually assaulting women as president, I will say this: This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists.

This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists.
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This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist, hetero-cisnormative) trash. Not just in little pockets. Not just in dark alleys and frat parties. It’s fucking rotten through and through and has been forabsofuckinglutelyever.

I have not yet figured out how to drive all men into the sea. I’ve considered maybe taking a boat to the middle of the ocean to start shouting about the wage gap to see how many men would try to swim over to tell me that it doesn’t exist. But I’m very fond of a few men (including the two I gave birth to — nepotism, I know) and I also get really seasick on boats.

So if we can’t drive all men into the ocean and start over, do we just throw up our hands? Do we just excuse this rampant abuse as “locker-room talk” and “locker-room groping” and “locker-room rape” and “locker-room forced witnessing of masturbation”? Do we continue to insist that we do not have a toxic masculinity problem and these are just isolated cases of sick individuals who are abusing women and let everyone else off the hook?

I absolutely cannot give all the answers. I do not have all the answers. Women more capable than I have died trying to find a way to fix this.

But I do know this: Every single sexual abuser is 100% responsible for their actions and there is nobody else to blame than the person who is choosing to violate another person.

And I also know this: This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.

Both of these things are 100% true at the same time, and if we want to battle rape culture—if we want to finally end the brutality that so many women have faced for pretty much the entirety of history—we have to start addressing both of these realities at once.

Every single sexual abuser is 100% responsible for their actions and there is nobody else to blame than the person who is choosing to violate another person.
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We have to face up to the fact that from the moment we get that sonogram and a doctor points to an imperceptible squiggly thing and says that it’s a penis, we start indoctrinating our assigned male children with massive amounts of toxic masculinity. We hand them toy guns and tell them not to cry and define their success through life by how well they can dominate others. We make countless movies where their only “romantic” goal is to find a way to get a woman who does not want them to sleep with them anyway. We show them image after image of men in nice suits, cigar in hand, a dead-eyed beauty draped on each arm and say, “This is what you should strive for. This is victory.”

But as a society, we don’t want to take responsibility for the abuse we create, enable, and strengthen. Because most of that responsibility lies with men and so many of them are very invested in keeping things the way they are — especially because they haven’t quite reached their life’s goal to be successful enough to be able to violate the consent of the most beautiful of the trophies we also know as women without consequence. Yes, everyone contributes to the patriarchy in some way — even women—but about half of us have had no say in the rules of the game, have never had a chance at winning, and have been given just as little say in whether or not we will play. For many cis, straight men, to fight the patriarchy is to risk discomfort. For the rest of us, it’s to risk your livelihood, your health, even your life.

Why Demanding That Rape Victims Report Assault Isn’t Helpful
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As a society, we also don’t place responsibility on the individual men who are, even with their societal conditioning and enabling, still choosing with their own minds and bodies and patriarchal power to violate the consent of others in a myriad of ways. Approximately 3% of rape victims will ever see their rapist spend a day in jail. And while 1 in 5 female college students reports being the victim of sexual assault, we have a president who is actively working to make sure that the choice to rape a classmate will not endanger a rapist’s chance at graduation.

We instead place the entire responsibility for the damage done to women… on women. Soon-to-be women who wear spaghetti-strap tops to school, distracting young boys with their scandalous shoulders. Women who let a man buy her a steak dinner but then are rude enough to not suck his dick for dessert. Women who get drunk at parties. Women who go to parties. Women who wear bikinis. Women who wear burqas. Women who choose to sleep with other people who aren’t that dude. Women who slept with that dude once but then didn’t want to anymore.

Every day I’m trying to counter the flood of messaging my sons are receiving from television, music, movies, books, friends, and our own government that says that they have a right to a woman’s body. Every day I’m trying to counter the flood of messaging that my sons are receiving that says that overcoming a woman’s objections is romantic. Every day I’m trying to counter the flood of messaging that tells them that their manhood is defined by how many women they can have sex with. Every day I remind them that they are so much kinder, better, and just… more than these violently aggressive yet mewling combinations of bravado and entitlement that they see depicted as the pinnacle of “manhood.” And every day I’m reminding them that they are responsible for their actions, and that if they disrespect women, abuse women, violate the consent of women — I will be one of the first people in line to make sure that they are held accountable.

And every day I don’t know if it’s enough. Every day it feels like it isn’t.

But I have to try because I have no other choice. We, as a society, have no other choice. And if you’ve had the luxury to think that this is not an issue that you need to address because you aren’t “one of those guys” I suggest you pay attention to how hard so many of us women are fighting to save ourselves, our sisters, our daughters, and our sons. And get to work.

Or get in the sea.

Whether you keep up with celebrity affairs or not, you can’t really ignore the Kardashians — and you definitely can’t avoid knowing what people think about them. When Kim Kardashian posted a nude selfie on Twitter this week, there was a smattering of “you go girl” support, but also a wave of criticism about her immodesty or her pathological need for attention. The response from the public and from other celebrities said a lot about what we think of Kim Kardashian, but even more about what we think of women’s bodies and sexuality. In a culture where we see billboard-sized images of boobs on the daily, why is it this nude picture that makes everyone clutch their pearls?

When a woman is depicted in a sexualized way, with no depth beyond her appearance in order to sell beer, cars, or sandwiches, we call it advertising. We see it everywhere in public space and in media, and hardly anyone ever objects.

When overtly sexual or nude photos and videos of women are posted online or nude photos are printed in magazines, we call it porn. We don’t see it everywhere in the public space, but we’re aware of its ubiquity, and as a culture we look the other way. We say, “Boys will be boys.” Looking at porn is as all-American as sneaking a look at your father’s Playboy. Yet being a porn star is considered incredibly shameful for a young woman.

It’s okay to look at porn. It’s okay to consume images of women’s bodies. It’s not okay to offer up your body to be seen.

When a woman is feeling good about the way she looks, we punish her.
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The women in porn are almost always presented as passive to the male gaze, unyielding, with no complication of a personality, no danger to the male ego of possibly hearing the word “no,” existing only for the pleasure of men’s eyes. The women in advertising are often cut up into body parts — just a midriff, just a pair of legs — or turned into objects. Those are the times a woman’s form and sexuality are acceptable. But if you are a woman just feeling yourself and expressing your sexuality, presenting yourself the way you feel like at any given moment, or leveraging your own power or sexual energy, you are condemned and disrespected, maybe even threatened, assaulted, or killed.

When a woman is feeling good about the way she looks — empowered, beautiful, or confident in her appearance — and expresses this feeling by taking a photo of herself, clothed or nude, and sharing it online, we punish her. We call her names like “slut,” “trash,” “attention-starved,” “a bad mother,” “a bad role model.” If her photos are stolen, we say she deserved it. The message is that it’s okay to commodify a woman’s body, it’s okay to co-opt female sexuality, as long as the woman in question is passive in it and it’s for someone else’s commercial gain or the express use of men’s sexual titillation and gratification.

You can look at a woman’s body, but she can’t show it. You can enjoy our bodies, but we can’t.
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It’s telling that when women are demeaned for expressing their sexuality they are called whores, hoes, hookers, and prostitutes — words used as slurs for sex workers. The idea that sex work is not inherently immoral or shameful, and that sex workers should have the same rights and value as all women, is so radical that mainstream feminism still has a hard time accepting it. But the use of these slurs shows that our culture’s scorn of sex workers is, at heart, a basic feminist issue. We love to commodify women, but hate and fear women who commodify themselves.

Women are set up to lose. Whether it’s someone claiming a sex worker can’t be raped, calling Kim Kardashian names, or sending a middle school-aged girl home for wearing shorts said to be distracting to boys — it’s all connected, and none of it is really about sex. It’s about controlling women and girls, about eroding their rights, power, agency, and autonomy. Our bodies and sexuality have been made into a catch-22: You can look at a woman’s body, but she can’t show it. You can enjoy our bodies, but we can’t.

Women are told since they are little girls to cover up, to be modest, because men have no self-control and no ultimate responsibility for their own desires for sex and domination and power over women. Women are taught to take on the responsibility for men’s behavior, because women are too enticing. Boys are not taught to respect all women. Instead, girls are taught the very confusing and conflicting messages that their value is in their physical appearance, but that it can also justifiably provoke someone to hurt them.

Modesty doesn’t keep women safe, and it isn’t intended to keep them safe.
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Modesty, in this case, is presented as though it’s a form of protection, a defense against men’s impulsiveness. But anyone who’s been sexually harassed on the street while wearing a puffy winter coat — and that’s pretty much all of us — can tell you that covering up won’t protect you from the violent expression of male desire. And in fact, the whole concept of “modesty” doesn’t just fail to protect women — it’s actively harmful. It perpetuates the idea that women are not to be respected if they “show too much skin,” or because of what they wear, or how much makeup they have on. It perpetuates the idea that men have a right to sexualize women without their input or consent. Modesty doesn’t keep women safe, and it isn’t really intended to keep them safe. It’s intended to reserve for men the right to decide when a woman’s body is displayed and who gets to look at it.

Our culture treats women’s bodies as if they only have worth when they are serving someone other than themselves: men’s gaze, commercialism, the concepts of sexual innocence or “purity” that uphold religious ideas. When a woman’s choice comes into it, that’s when it’s a problem. Only then. That is when she is devalued.

THIS IS RAPE CULTURE. A culture that upholds a norm of women’s bodies being used, but demeans her self-ownership and choice. The double standard is nauseating.

A woman who chooses to post a nude photo, who clearly understands exactly what she is doing, who is expressing herself and feeling liberated, is someone who is actively rejecting rape culture. She is choosing not to attempt to conform to the standards that are presented to her, knowing there is no winning that game anyway. A woman’s body is a battleground. People are fighting for ownership of it. Nipples become a problem. Bare asses become political. When you claim your own body and decide to do the thing that you feel best doing, whether that is to cover it all up or take it all off, any of those choices need to be okay for women to make for themselves. That is true freedom and true choice. Women’s bodies are not the problem. How we respond to women’s bodies is the problem.

An empowered woman is dangerous because a woman who can say yes is also a woman who can say no.