Names and identifying details have been changed.
Over
the years, I have called it an “inappropriate relationship.” I have
called it “an incident with an older man.” Most frequently, I have
called it “the thing that happened that summer.” As in — remember the
thing that happened that summer?
I never called it sexual abuse,
because it felt like an overly dramatic Oprah-ization of what happened.
The word “abuse” seems to imply victimization and has always made me
uncomfortable in this instance. Until now, I have been far too
politicized to admit the chief reason I never called it sexual abuse in
spite of the fact that it would be considered as much from both a
criminal and a clinical perspective. The real reason is because I
believed I asked for it.
The summer I turned 12, I went to
sleepaway camp. I shaved my legs for the first time, dumped Sun-In in my
hair and tanned with baby oil. I had my first boyfriend — a skinny,
freckly arrogant kid a year my senior who took me for two paddle boat
rides and then broke up with me, declaring me a prude and, I was sure,
ruining my romantic life forever.
I turned from real life to
fantasy, and eschewed the hazardous boys my own age in favor of a secret
crush on Nathan, the 20-year-old swimming counselor. Nathan was
sarcastic and slouchy and unusually stylish for a camp full of spoiled
East Coast Jewish kids. His dyed black hair spilled over one eye and he
wore his shorts low on his hips. Trumping all, he was from New York
City, mecca of all things wild and wonderful. I spent countless hours
imagining myself into a future in which I strolled through Washington
Square Park with Nathan, preferably on a fall day in between college
classes.
Nathan didn’t quite fit in and there were all kinds of
rumors circulating about him. He was bisexual; he was friendly with
Morrissey; he was a model for the United Colors of Benetton. I, too,
felt like an outsider, never able to summon the same gung-ho camp spirit
as the other girls. I imagined Nathan understood me in some fundamental
way, he just didn’t know it yet.
One morning in the chilly lake,
Nathan swam up behind me to correct my stroke and an electrical charge
passed between us that was unlike anything I had ever felt before. My
whole chest seemed to tighten around it. I was flooded with the
exquisite realization that I was not alone in my desire. After that, my
crush flowered into something more raw and persistent. I plotted and
preened and placed myself in his eyeline at every possible moment. I
gave myself asthma attacks and stomachaches with the anxiety of it all.
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This
went on for weeks before I finally found the courage to seek him out
alone. I was asking for it, to be sure, but what exactly was I asking
for? I wanted to kiss him; I thought about it constantly. But
ultimately, I was asking to be loved, without grasping the possible
manifestations that love might take.
The night I snuck out to see
him, I slept carefully on my hair, set my alarm clock under my pillow
and stationed my white Keds at the ready by my bedside. It was a long
walk across camp and the darkness outside my flashlight beam seemed
alive and threatening. I was covered in a cold sweat when I arrived.
Nathan’s bunk smelled like feet and mold and was strewn with the
detritus of the 8-year-old boys for whom he was a counselor. I tread
silently, aware that the stakes were very different than those of any of
my previous transgressions.
I found his bed and stood over him,
trembling with adrenaline. What if he sent me away? What if he didn’t?
Finally, I reached out and touched his bare shoulder. When he opened his
eyes, he didn’t seem surprised at all. A bright moon hung in the frame
of the window behind him and he was only a silhouette when he cradled my
face in his hands and leaned in to kiss me. I closed my eyes and tried
to memorize it, figuring that it was my first real kiss and I would want
to remember it someday. When his breath started to get ragged, he
whispered in my ear, “Do you even know how I feel when I have to look at
you running around in your shorts all day long. You’re so pretty and I
can’t even tell anyone. Do you even know what you do to me?”
I didn’t know what to say. Of course I didn’t know. How could I have known?
Over
the next couple of weeks I went see him every night until I was
exhausted and confused. I wanted it to stop and I wanted it never to
stop. Eventually we were caught and he got fired. I found myself
crumpled in a chair in front of the camp director’s desk, bombarded with
impossible questions like, “What were you thinking?”
I answered, “I love him.”
The director responded, “You’re 12 years old, you don’t know what love is.”
Which
is foolish, of course. I’m a grown woman now and I can say without
reservation that I did. I loved him truly and with all the audacity of
youth, which is to say with absolutely no sense of consequences.
I
don’t remember it with anger. I still remember the initial
deliciousness of getting what I wanted, of feeling truly desired for the
first time, and in such a transgressive and erotically charged way. And
yet, upon closer inspection, I’m not sure I asked for “it” exactly. I
was just asking for my longing to be answered, for the suffering to be
relieved. I asked with all of the need and chaos of a burgeoning
sexuality I did not yet understand.
At the website of the
Department of Health and Human Services, one of the qualifiers for the
clinical definition of sexual abuse is a “knowledge differential.” It
states, “An act is considered abusive when one party (the offender) has a
more sophisticated understanding of the significance and implication of
the sexual encounter.” This is certainly true about my “inappropriate
relationship,” my “incident with an older guy.”
Whether or not I
feel comfortable identifying as a victim, I acknowledge the profound and
lasting impact that my relationship with Nathan had on my life. My
first kiss was not about pleasure but about power and for a long time
those two things became indistinguishable. I learned to trade sex for
affection. This was a dangerous lesson for a young girl, and I believe
one that ultimately kept me from deriving much authentic pleasure from
my body for a long time. And while it would be too reductive to say that
this led me to spend a number of years as a sex worker, I do believe
that it was an ingredient in the mix.
Furthermore, when it all
came to light, I learned that my parents and others in authority
positions concurred that the incident had been, at least partially, my
fault. I learned what kind of girl I was: I was a boundary-pusher, a
rule-breaker, a girl who was always in trouble. This was what happened
to girls like me. When the incident at camp somehow managed to make it
to the gossip mill at my school, I immediately went from a girl who had
never been kissed to a notorious slut.
I wonder what I would have
learned from not getting what I asked for. Would I have learned that
there are other things about me as valuable and compelling as my
sexuality? Would I have learned that some men are trustworthy? Would I
have had more options than the ones available to “that kind of girl”?
I
recently spent an afternoon at the beach with a friend and her
12-year-old daughter. I noted the sharp lines of the daughter’s body
(perfection, by our media’s standards), so like my own at that age. She
was dazzling and precious and still unaware of the ruckus she was
causing among the male onlookers. I realized that regardless of what
this girl asked for, if someone eight years her senior touched her, I
would unreservedly call it sexual abuse. In that case my politics and my
emotions would have no quarrel at all.
So that is what I will
call it. Feelings around abusive dynamics are often complex and
ambiguous, but that doesn’t lessen the impact in the lives of the
victims. I was abused. And I liked it, some of the time. I loved him,
certainly. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have lived with it
for the rest of my life and I couldn’t possibly have foreseen the extent
of the reverberations. That is meant to be the job of the adults in the
equation.
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