fickle | Sexual Assault Awareness Month: Saying No.

Last night, I was talking with an friend of mine about what her definition of rape is versus harassment is, and one of the things she brought up is how much she hates it when girls don’t say no or don’t protest clearly but then claim it was rape the next day.

So I thought that since it’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I’d write about a case in my life when I wanted to say no, didn’t manage to, but I really wish I had.

This was going to be an entry about how when I was seventeen, I once failed to say no/clearly show that I didn't want a guy sexually touching me. Then I reread the journal entries that I'd written at the time and realized that I hadn't ever said the actual word 'no', but I had signified discomfort in a lot of ways and tried to get away from him.

Here's an excerpt from one of the journal entries in question. he started stroking my arm. repeatedly. hoever, numa does that as well so I ignored it.

then he pulled my chair closer and trapped me in his arms. so I got up on the pretext of looking for a brush, because maybe he's just the touchy-feely type and I didn't want to overreact.

then he kept sliding his arm around my waist, so I kept wriggling to dislodge it, and complaining that it tickled since I was getting a little worried by this point in time.

then he moved it there and half-cupped one of my brests, and which point I moved to get up, and kicked him. hard.

he ignored it.

of course, I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. what if he was just keeping his hand on my waist and it went upwards because I was trying to get away from him tactfully? than I'd have attacked him for no reason.

I hate this.

where do you draw the line?

I left it like that and continued drawing while stnading up because regardless of what you may think of my artistic abilities, I do like drawing and he can help me improve my skills immensely. so I kept drawing.

at which point he started kissing my shoulder.

that would be where it becomes blatantly obvious that I do (finally) have a right to complain and stop him, so I pushed him away, and said that I have to go.

so there

question is: would I have been within my rights to stop him earlier?

Originally, I had remembered this as him touching my breast and me backing away from him. I hadn't remembered that I had fought back. I didn't remember that I kicked him, and I didn't remember that he continued with his advances afterwards.

That's not what's important here. The question is, why didn't I just say no instead of trying to physically get away from him and discourage him without having to actually talk about what was happening?

The answer's in the question itself. I didn't want to talk about what was happening.

Part of the Asian culture that I was raised in involves victim-blaming. If I had told him to stop it, I would've had to admit that he was doing something wrong, and then I would've had to examine my own behavior to see how I had caused it. If I kick him, leave the room, and then quit art class? I'm still not actually addressing the fact that hey, he's touching me, he's doing things to my body that I don't want, he is behaving like a jerk.

The next day, I had my boyfriend come into the classroom with me and sit with me. While my boyfriend was in the room, the 'friend' slid his hand onto my thigh (I was wearing shorts) and tried to feel me up.

I didn't tell my boyfriend what was happening. I just stood up.

And then I quit art.

I couldn't tell my parents why because they would've blamed me. I was the one who had chosen to take special after-school lessons, and my mother honestly believes that short skirts cause rape. My mother was rubbed up against by a guy on a bus for the entire ride home when she was a teenager, and she remained absolutely quiet and made no fuss until she got home, and then she started crying.

The Sri Lankan culture does not hold with 'making scenes'. I couldn't tell him no, because then I'd have to acknowledge what was happening. I'd have to make a scene. And that's simply not done. Even though I grew up in Europe, I still grew up inside a Sri Lankan household where if a man is taking liberties with you, it's because you've somehow signified you're open to them.

Who knows? Maybe I didn't kick him hard enough. Maybe I should've kicked him in the balls to show that I meant no.

Or maybe I should've just swallowed down a lifetime of being told to be a good, quiet little Asian who doesn't make waves and called him on it.

I was too scared to. Apart from my indoctrination into silence, I didn't know what would happen next. What if he denied anything was happening? What if he told everyone else that I'd accused him of molesting me and then laughed at the idea that he'd do anything like that with me? What if my parents found out about it?

So I kicked him, I pushed him away, I brought my boyfriend to show him that I was taken and not interested, and finally, when none of that worked, I quit art class.

But I never actually voiced the word 'no', or faced up to what was happening to me.

Strange as it may seem to some of the Western readers on my flist, I'm using this post to promote Sexual Assault Awareness concerning yourself.

It is YOUR body. You have a right to decide what other people do with it. If someone is making you uncomfortable, tell them 'Stop'. They are the ones in the wrong, not you. Facing that something bad is happening to you is infinitely preferable to trying to dodge around it, because as long as you can't stand your ground, they're going to keep pushing until they've backed you into a corner.

The last time someone groped me, I yelled at them to 'FUCK OFF OR I'LL BREAK YOUR HAND'. The man in question quickly sloped away.

No matter how shy you might be, how uncertain and scared, or how tied to a culture that keeps you very firmly passive, your body is still yours. And you are never the bad guy for telling someone that what they're doing to you is wrong. Never.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Actually, your response to the original post (http://wildcard.deadjournal.com/65621.html) at the time was:

*sneaks up*

LOL

*sniggers*

That was because I protested to Numa going 'LOL' at me over it, so I guess you were LOLing to be smart?

You didn't tell me what to do, but we didn't really address it or talk about it at the time. Numa commented first with her tough-chick "If it had been me, I would've done" and then teased me being being fondled by a little boy LOL, to paraphrase her loosely. So I protested that, but felt awkward doing so because it seemed like I was blowing it up to be more than it was or was making a scene when one wasn't necessary.

You commented after her, so I snarked at you and continued to try to act tough about it because again, didn't want to seem like I was hysterical or crying wolf.

It's kinda weird to look back on the people we were, huh?

If I wrote an entry now with the last line "I'm going to take a wash now, I feel all scratchy and itchy and dirty." after talking about having been molested and anyone replied with 'LOL' instead of sympathy, I'd be incredibly pissed off with them for making light of it.

At the same time, I don't think that you'd be the kind of person to do that now. I can't really believe that you did at the time either.

I think both of you didn't take it seriously because Lauri was younger than me by two years and I could've fought him physically. Except I didn't. So maybe your assumption was that if I really had been upset, I would've fought back instead of trying to duck away, so I couldn't have been that traumatized by it?

Those are just wild guesses because I can't look into your heads, obviously, but at the time, I took it as if you didn't think anything really bad had happened and I shouldn't act like it was a big deal. Or that I should've been tougher and prevented it so it was just a natural consequence. Whichever.

Thank you for your apology, though. It's ... weirdly reassuring to be told all these years afterwards that no, you do actually get that it was a horrible thing to go through and I wasn't overreacting the first time I wrote about it.

In this post, I actually had a paragraph about your reaction and Numa's and how I'd screened that post so only you and Numa could read it, and how that affected me talking about it afterwards, but I took that out because, well, I love you guys and talking smack about you in front of 375+ people really isn't my style.

I'm glad you're my friend. You might have let me down then but you've been there for me for so much else. ♥

I was smacked enough when I read that you thought a_white_rain was more of a 'real friend' than us, thank you. I've been thinking about that all day and I think I'm the saddest I've been about us since I 'dumped you'.

Reading back over the entry, I think I partly know why I didn't take it seriously: It has Dasanti melodrama written all over it! Your tone sets it somewhere above the mark of 'gah, boys suck, rant rant' but not even close to 'I am very shaken and upset about this'. I know enough about the kind of person I was back then that if you had come up to me and let me know how much it had upset you, I would have taken it a lot more seriously. You made light of it, then numa made light of it even more, then I trotted obediently off after you two.

But that's still a far-cry from who I am now, because if you came up to me now making light about sexual harassment I would take it seriously regardless. So...gah, again, I'm very sorry for letting you get away with that. And for not throwing him off the roof.

It took me a bit to reply to this because I got overwhelmed with guilt. Which isn't surprising, considering who I am.

I swear, I in no way meant that comment to imply that you and Numa aren't infinitely precious to me or that I don't consider you real friends. You're the Eternal Three; we fit together. But in this instance, yeah, I think that WR was a better friend to me because her initial reaction to hearing about this was outrage and support instead of telling me what I should've done and being amused.

I guess that back then, I should've pushed more and made it clearer that I was upset that you guys weren't upset (I keep looking at my comment to Numa and wondering how much more serious it would've sounded if I'd taken out the ":P"), but I was scared to make it sound that serious. Even to you guys. Especially if there was a chance you'd still not take it seriously.

WR, her background and everything I know about her means that I knew that she'd take it seriously and be angry on my behalf. But I also know that's partly because who I am NOW is different to who I was then, and my livejournal is a lot more controlled than my deadjournal ever was. My deadjournal was immediate and emo and just for you guys; my livejournal has a lot of people reading it whose faces I have never seen and whom I only know as text names. So in a sense, my deadjournal is more raw, but it also does come off as more melodramatic because I was a lot more melodramatic back then, embarrassing as that might be to admit.

I am very sorry for hurting your feelings, Kathy. You and Numa's friendship means the world to me. Without having you guys as friends first, there's no way that I could've trusted anyone else enough to be friends with them.

(And yes, the fact that most of this comment deals with us as friends instead of actual sexual abuse is a reflection of my priorities. I'm over what happened with Lauri. It's nowhere near as important as the fact that I intend on having you guys be my friends for the rest of my life, come hell or high water or both at once.)

Ok now I want to cry. I felt guilty about making that comment because it was very self-indulgent and I knew you'd feel guilty.

You were absolutely right to speak the truth about that, and I have no right being jealous when it's true that I should have acted better and been a better friend - and in more ways than just this.

But yeah, right back at you - I adore you with all my heart, and want you in my life forever. Aside from John, you are probably the person I think about most, on a day-to-day why aren't they here basis. And I keep wanting to live with you again as we did in Boston, but at the same time I can't really see when or where that would happen. So living near, perhaps! In all the plethora of paths you and I could take, perhaps somewhere along the way they will converge a little :D

No crying! And no you feeling guilty either, okay? There's enough guilt going around here, we don't need to add to it.

I also wasn't thinking about making you jealous, promise. I just wanted to express my appreciation to her, and to everyone else, who encouraged me to talk about this stuff and face up to it and admit it happened. I've been wibbling back and forth about how much I do not like talking about this stuff at all, let alone in public, so part of what made it possible for me to post was the private conversations I've had with people in the past about this stuff, and knowing that even if I got negative responses, I'd have people there to watch my back.

Which isn't to say that you and Numa aren't trustworthy. You are. ♥ First people I ever trusted, and that's not going to change no matter how what mistakes we make.

And YES. Living together would be awesome! There is a certain part of me that still can't believe we managed to successfully share a room together for an entire summer without some sort of colossal breakdown in the universe's fabric of reality, BUT that part of me is totally kicked into silence by the rest of me that loves you and loves your company and would happily live with you anytime. Or near you. Whichever, whenever. We have a lot of paths we could take, and best of all, we can make our own paths. And when we do that, you can be damn sure I'm going to make mine interlace with yours.

Sexual Assault Awareness Month: Saying No.

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