Consent

by Donna Freitas

  Once they have our tongues they don’t even seal them in a bag, to try to stem the mess. They’ve grown so used to this procedure that by now they’re immune. Instead, they carry our tongues back into the room they’ve reserved for female body parts, a room with special locks, with soundproofing to drown out all the things the tongues say to each other at night, in the dark, when everyone else goes home, a cacophony of disembodied voices. But they never stop bleeding. They bleed and bleed for years, so much that more people must be hired to make sure nothing seeps into view. No one wants a public scandal, after all.

  Women’s tongues are dangerous when they let us keep them. Institutions, workplaces, companies have long known this, which is why they take them from us, why they require that we forfeit them, why they’ll pay us so much for them, these blood diamonds mined from our bodies. It’s good to see that women are breaking into these locked-away places and taking our tongues back.

  I am still getting used to mine again.

  It is thick and strange in my mouth.

  “You know I was stalked, once, in graduate school.”

  I remember dropping this line into a conversation with a colleague, Mary, who is now one of my best friends. I said it like this information was no big deal, barely a shrug, even as my blood pressure spiked as it always does when I bring up this topic.

  Mary and I had only recently met. We were sitting at a table on the sidewalk in Manhattan on a sunny August day, chatting happily over dishes of pesto spaghetti at my favorite Italian place. We’d hit it off at a conference and decided to hang out when we returned home, the first of what would become many lunches, countless get-togethers, and which now amount to over a decade of friendship. She was seven months pregnant at the time, her cheeks rosy and flushed in the heat. I remember how her stomach was round and bursting from her tiny frame. We were both in summer dresses, sleeveless, clingy, as bare as a person can get and still go out in public. On Mary the effect was dramatic, and on our walk to the restaurant she garnered more than a few stares from passersby and plenty of sympathetic smiles from other women.

  Mary stopped eating after I told her this and looked up. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Isn’t that weird?” This came out of my mouth as a statement, even though I’d phrased it as a question. Before she could respond I rushed back in to ask her, “So what was grad school like for you?”

  She hesitated before answering—of course she did, because how is a person supposed to respond to such an unexpected confession, immediately followed by an abrupt shift in subject? But she let the conversation move forward from there to plenty of more benign topics, putting some distance between what I’d confided and the now of our lunch, padding my comment with other talk like white noise until we almost couldn’t hear what I’d said ringing in the air any longer. We slurped our bright green spaghetti and laughed and joked and gossiped, and my blood pressure slowed to a more normal rate.

  I cringe even now, many years later, at how I must have sounded that day. The way I told her what had happened to me was so clumsy, everything about it awkward and stumbling and uncomfortable. I’d forced it up from my darkest self and lobbed it onto the table for her inspection without warning or preamble. I was experimenting with “integrating” this fact of my past into my present because of my therapist’s advice. She kept urging me to talk about what happened during grad school with other people, with friends, with anyone, so I might better incorporate it into my life and relationships as a way of healing the trauma it caused to my body and brain.

  But I’ve yet to find a way to speak about it that is not clumsy.

  How does one become graceful, exactly, when speaking about the ugliest parts of her history? The parts that stir the most shame and blame, the confessions capable of stopping a conversation in its tracks and rendering the other person speechless? Of turning an afternoon of delicious food and newfound intimacy into something off-putting and strange?

  “I remember when you told me that,” Mary said to me the other day. “And how you told me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to laugh it off as a way of staving off the burn that crept into my cheeks. “I can’t believe I did that to you, so soon after we met.”

  Mary has big brown eyes, honest and sincere, soft and quiet. “Donna,” she said. “Don’t apologize. It made me feel honored.”

  “Honored?” This was not the word I expected her to use.

  “That you felt you could trust me with something so personal, so quickly. It made me realize that you and I were going to be good friends. Real friends.”

  “Oh,” I said, taking this in, trying to let its delicate and beautiful kindness permeate my skin. “I’m still sorry, though,” I added. “I’ll always be so sorry.”

  In multiple ways, I am two people.

  I am a writer and an academic, I am creative and scholarly. I am a longtime, well-published novelist, and a grown woman with a PhD whose research about sex on campus is widely taught, who has been speaking about this research and sexual assault at universities and colleges across the nation for over a decade. At the same time, I am a person, vulnerable and ashamed about something I lived during my early to mid-twenties, embarrassed by the fault I see in myself for what transpired, at the role I played in all of it, in allowing it to go on for as long as it did. I am someone whose career has flourished in certain regards, and I’m also a person whose career has languished and suffered because of what happened with my mentor. I know that I should be capable of telling myself what I tell college students who’ve been assaulted and harassed like I was:

  It’s not your fault. Don’t blame yourself.

  And yet, I am unable to convince myself of this. I am unable to convince that young woman I was and will always be, to a degree, that the statement “It’s not your fault” is entirely true in my case. I remain two people, two women who share the same body, same heart, same mind, same soul. This split woman has lived parallel lives, one in public as a confident, authoritative person, capable as a researcher, speaker, and writer on many subjects, including Title IX and assault. The other woman remains hidden, a person insecure and ashamed, whose professional life is irreparably marked by this man, forever changed by his inability to control himself, to abstain from inappropriate behavior, by the manner in which his gaze became fixated on me and I could not turn it away.

  I am a survivor, but I also am, and always will be, a victim. I can’t speak for others who share this dual identity, but I can say for myself that, while I wish to be the proud person who exclusively occupies the title of survivor, I still claim the territory of the shivering, cowering victim. To say that I am not also her even after two decades have passed would be to lie. Because of my work, because of feminism, because of certain friends who have supported me over the years, I am well aware of the correct things I am supposed to say out loud to others and tell myself in my darkest moments: That everything was his fault. That he did what he did to me. That I should not blame myself. I have rehearsed these lines, practiced them like I would for a role in a play, yet there are only fleeting moments when I actually believe they are true. The rest are full of doubt and uncertainty.

  So many times I’ve imagined the self I am now sitting down with that younger self I used to be and telling her all the things we tell young women who’ve experienced something like I did. I’ve done this exercise as a means of helping myself, forgiving myself, trying to cope over the years. I’ve done it because colleagues and friends who know this part of my history have suggested I do it, especially after I’ve lapsed into monologues of self-recrimination and blame at dinners and over drinks.

  “If you sat down with one of your students right now,” they’ll say, “and heard her describe a similar story to your own, what would you tell her? Would you ever dream of claiming that she is, even partially, at fault?”

  The answer, of course, is an unequivocal no. I would never tell one of my students this. I would never tell one of my friends or colleagues
this. I would never say such things to anyone who has suffered my particular affliction. I believe in the absolute absence of fault with respect to the experiences of others. I know this completely and without doubt. I am convinced of its reality. So why isn’t it unequivocally true in my case? Why can’t I make a clean leap from shameful victim to proud survivor? How can I resolve these two competing selves?

  Will I ever?

  We live in a culture where the harassment and assault of women and girls take place so regularly, so commonly, so consistently, that we need to take stock of the splitting of the person that occurs during acts of trauma. Of the ways that women must learn to become good actresses and excellent liars so they can endure and live as though nothing terrible has happened to them. Of the personal and professional cost of having to live with two brains, be of two minds, of the secrets a person’s own body can keep from her for years, of the ongoing feeling that somehow she is the one who failed and the damage this does to her sense of self, of her ability to perceive what is true and what is false about who she is and who she is not.

  We have made consent out to be something straightforward, as straightforward as the single word no, but we are lying to ourselves and one another about this. If stopping someone’s behavior were as magical as uttering a two-letter word, then my professor’s behavior would never have gone on as long as it did. The word no meant nothing in my case. I paid dearly for this. I am still paying for it.

  I am not saying that all I have come to do, to achieve, to accomplish since those years in my twenties has been a lie, or even a performance. I am not saying that the confident, successful woman that I am in so many regards isn’t real. She is, I am, real. The lie would be to contend that the other woman I’ve been, that I am still, no longer exists. The lie would be to deny her. To claim that the young woman scarred by this man is fully healed. I will always be her. I will always be both women. Even if my friends, my fellow feminists, wish this were otherwise.

  In this same vein, I have two brains. Each one hides stuff from the other. Like there are parts of my brain that have been redacted. Like the FBI or the CIA or some secret government agency broke into my mind one night and classified my memories of grad school—my memories of him—with a thick, soaking black marker; classified them from me.

  I have always known I have two sets of memories—one, which is exclusively devoted to this man and all that happened with him, and the other, which is exclusively devoted to everything else that happened in my life during grad school and since. One set is dark and ugly and sickening, and the other is bright and happy and thrilling. The darker set is dangerous; it lies in wait, hidden, lurking, until the moment when the happier side of me least expects, has almost forgotten, it is there, and suddenly it lashes out with the force and violence of a knife slashing through everything else that I am, everything that I’ve become, wounding me all over again.

  My brain, my body, have worked hard over the years to keep these two sets of memories separate, not allowing one to pollute the other—and that is the word for it: pollution. I understand this professor as a potentially polluting force, like an insecticide or a putrid, stinking chemical that must be carefully contained. My brain’s job, it seems, has been to seal him tight into one corner, protecting the rest of it from any further contamination.

  When I try to remember that time in my life, using my brain is like using an Etch A Sketch. When you move the slide across the dull gray screen, it erases whatever had been there so you can start over with a new image. I have one of those slides in my mind, but when I slide it across my memories, on one side there is him and on the other there is everyone and everything else. On one side my life happens and has gone on as though I am completely normal, untouched by this man, successful and happy, but on the other, the girl I see is a pathetic, fearful mess, and she will always remain so.

  You can view a person through so many different lenses, from so many angles. It depresses me that this ugly part of my history is my lens, my angle, the window through which I am choosing to view all the different aspects of my life, my friends, my family, my faith, my aspirations and hopes and dreams. Then again, writing this is a method of capture, of pinning something down. And I’d like to capture this man so I can understand and contemplate him now, from such a distance, who he was and is and how he happened to me. I’d like to turn him into a helpless butterfly pinned to the wall, waiting there for me to study him. I was his reluctant butterfly for far too long, and he held me in his gaze, watched me squirm, and didn’t care that I wanted to be free of him.

  I’ve had many years to reflect on what happened during graduate school—how it happened, why it continued for so long. So, I am using my own experience as a case study of sorts, because sadly, there is plenty to study, and however ironically or fittingly, conversations about harassment, assault, and consent have become one of the central aspects of my professional identity. And then, if I learned anything from what I lived, it’s that consent is infinitely complex and ongoing, especially when two people are already in a relationship with each other.

  There were, quite literally, a range of stages of consent in my case, which gradually shifted to stages of non-consent. Consent is such a tricky, slippery thing, one that can be there one minute and gone the next, that can be murky and vague, that can be given yet given in fear or out of perceived obligation. Because of the difference in power between me and my professor, between me and my mentor, I behaved in a way that shames me and makes me long to go back and do everything differently. And yet it’s so much easier to wish I’d acted differently in hindsight now that I am older, now that I know so much more about harassment and how institutions handle it (or don’t), now that I am more outside of what was happening.

  But when it happens to you and you are young and powerless, and the person who is making it happen holds your dream in his hands, fragile and beautiful and glowing with hope, there is a lot you will do to try to ensure that he doesn’t use those hands to crush it.

  One last thing, on the subject of dreams.

  People often judge the settlements that some women get when they come forward with accusations of harassment and assault, especially when the figures grow into the millions. That’s been happening a lot these days, because more and more women are speaking out and our nation is realizing exactly how typical it is for a woman to be subjected to harassment and assault in the workplace, at school, at just about every possible juncture of her life.

  In my mind, no settlement is too big or outrageous. No settlement can ever be enough.

  What price, really, can you put on the loss, the permanent loss, of a woman’s brightest dreams? What cost, truly, is the loss of your future? Your career? Your reputation in the eyes of others?

  Even though I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise, convince myself that this time in my life during graduate school did not determine the course of my future, that it is not at fault for how things turned out for me (or didn’t), I am, once again, a woman split in two. Deep down, underneath all the factors that went into my professional decision-making over the years, the bad luck and bad colleagues, the good and serendipitous moments, the choices I made myself, he is lurking. Like sludge at the bottom of a lake, hidden and slimy underneath pristine water, he is still there. And when I acknowledge this truth, I am also able to hear that voice, barely a whisper, telling me that yes, while there are many, many reasons that I did not fulfill the dream of my future, and even though I fulfilled other dreams I didn’t yet know that I had, he cost me my one true dream, the purest one, the one whose end still hurts the most and always will.

  He broke me in the place I’d once been happiest, where I’d looked inward and had discovered my best self. He took this once-confident, exuberant part of me and turned it into something insecure and anxious, cowering and ashamed, repulsed and sickly. In the process of doing this, he turned everything that had to do with this part of me into a wasteland, full of rubble and hidden mines that I no longe
r knew how to navigate. That I could not navigate, at least not successfully. That I still can’t navigate, if I’m honest.

  I had only wanted to be a college professor. That is all. And I am not one. Not in the way that I’d wanted, that I’d hoped. Not in the way my friends are now. And as much as I hate to admit this and wish it were otherwise, that is on him.

  Part One

  1

  Rhode Island, where I’m from, is a small place.

  That sounds like a joke. It is small in size, yes, but it’s also small like a town, a place where everyone knows one another. It’s easy to play six degrees of separation, and usually the degrees are just one or two. Rhode Island is working class, it’s intimate, it’s Catholic, or it was when I was growing up. It is a state full of immigrants, Italians, Portuguese, and Irish. We go to the public beaches in the summers, they fill up with kids and teenagers and parents, men too old to be surfing but there they are anyway, longboards under their arms, weaving their way through the colorful umbrellas dotting the sand like pinwheels.

  The lots around my family’s house in Narragansett were once wooded places, and my grandmother and I would go blackberry picking for hours, returning only when we’d gathered enough for a pie. There were grapes, blueberries, wild strawberries, too. Depending on the day and the season, my grandmother would be coaxing me into a pair of jeans so my legs wouldn’t get cut on the prickers and we would head out into the warm air, past the random, falling-down stone walls that lined the landscape and into the tall grasses where the strawberry plants were hiding.