Consent

by Donna Freitas

  She got down on the grass with me. “What’s wrong, what can I do, can I get you some water?”

  I shook my head. He was still standing on the corner, not looking at me, but not going anywhere. I couldn’t swallow, I couldn’t speak. Worst of all, I was humiliated. I was so, so mortified. How could I possibly explain what I was doing, and eventually what I had done, when I saw those colleagues again? I was acting like a maniac in the middle of a professional meeting. More and more people were streaming out of the hotel doors and onto the street on their way to lunch, passing by us, glancing at the two dressed-up women sitting in the grass, complete with conference badges dangling from our necks. Some of these people knew who I was, knew who she was. I don’t know what they were thinking, but it couldn’t have been good.

  Meanwhile, he finally moved on. He made his way down the street and around the corner until he disappeared from view.

  “Oh my God,” I was saying to the woman with me in the grass, “oh my God, I’m so embarrassed, I’m so embarrassed.” I was still panting, I thought I might pass out. “I don’t think I can move.”

  My friend was kind, she didn’t ask too many questions, didn’t pry, other than about my well-being, about helping me find my way back to a sense of calm and safety. We ended up going to lunch, just the two of us, and she talked and talked about all sorts of things, anything other than what had happened. The conference presentations, the feminist theory we were both teaching in our work, some projects she was planning on doing, on writing. She got me water and made me drink it, then got me a glass of wine from the waitress without asking me if I wanted or needed one. She got herself one, too, and the two of us drank them down before we returned to the hotel for the afternoon sessions.

  “I’m not sure I can go back there,” I told her.

  I was so angry at myself. I hadn’t known he was attending the conference. I hadn’t looked, hadn’t checked the roster of participants before I got on the plane, which wasn’t like me. This was what I got, wasn’t it? I let my guard down, didn’t do my homework, and this was my punishment.

  “I’ll be right with you,” my friend said. “You just tell me if you need to go and we’ll go somewhere together.”

  People can be so kind.

  People like my all-male colleagues at my first teaching job could be so cruel, that is also true. But plenty of people are generous and understanding. That much I’ve learned from dealing with this strange affliction I’ve never quite known how to tell anyone about. I was grateful for this woman’s unquestioning willingness to be by my side and help if necessary, without requiring an explanation.

  The rest of the conference was a miserable trial. I couldn’t get ahold of myself. I couldn’t banish him from the forefront of my mind and go back to enjoying being there. The conference was too small for that. In the lobby of the hotel, where everyone was milling about between panel sessions and keynotes, I was now on high alert, glancing around frantically, scared he’d pop up again when I least expected him, certain he’d be watching me from across the room or from behind a plant. I couldn’t come down from my panic. It was a ledge, and I was chained to it for the duration.

  I was so defeated. I was so angry at myself, I was a failure all over again. I’d wanted to forget, to stop caring, to overcome the jumble of emotions that would assault me whenever I allowed myself to think of him, when I tried to reckon with his presence in my brain and body, and still I couldn’t. And maybe I never would. I was angry at him, too, I was enraged by his existence, my hatred for him bubbling to the surface of my being. But I was forced to reckon with the reality that he still made me fearful and repulsed, that I was still a scared little girl in the face of the situation I’d gotten myself into, that he’d put me into. At that Miami conference I was right back where I was in graduate school, as though everything were happening all over again.

  Why, why, why was I still so afraid of him? Why couldn’t I see him for what he was—a pathetic, physically harmless mouse of a man? Why did he cause me to react this way after so many years had passed? Why couldn’t I be stronger, more courageous, the brave young woman I often understood myself to be, that others did, too? Why did I let him get to me so totally? Why? Why me? Why did he pick me?

  And that is the question that I couldn’t seem to shake, that I would always come back to—that I still come back to—why me? What did I do to make him pick me?

  I’d gone to the conference as myself, as the feminist professor who wore heels and lovely long dresses, who was put together and accomplished, and in the span of a single moment she vanished and I became a nervous, confused, insecure girl, who saw the foolhardiness in her attire, in her self-presentation to the world, in her attention-grabbing outfits that were capable of grabbing the wrong attention, that were practically screaming for the wrong attention.

  That was about ten years ago.

  I haven’t seen him since.

  After that Miami conference I stopped going to meetings in my field. I dropped out of my field altogether and moved on to other things, other subjects of inquiry. A different profession entirely. I let go of being the professor I’d always wanted to be. My dream as I’d envisioned it was dead.

  27

  There is a way in which this man broke my heart.

  Maybe he would be happy to know that. Maybe it would make him feel good to realize that he did, indeed, work his way into my heart in such a manner that he could shatter it. But he didn’t break my heart in a romantic sense. He broke the heart in me that had turned itself completely toward the end of becoming a professor, my truest desire. I trusted him to respect this desire, trusted him automatically because of his role as professor, as my mentor. Because of that trust, my consent to just about everything he asked, at first, was total and unwavering. He represented my heart’s desire, and I wanted what he had.

  Consent and trust go hand in hand. To say yes to someone is also to communicate “I trust you.” I trust you, this person to whom I am saying yes, to consider my well-being, my happiness, my pleasure, my vulnerabilities, my value and my worth, my desires, my interest, my likes and dislikes, my boundaries, my limits, the heart in my body that hopes and yearns and dreams.

  We are consenting to people constantly, to our friends and to our loved ones, to acquaintances and to co-workers and even to people minding the cash register at a store. To reduce consent to something relevant only to sexual situations is misguided and wrong. It’s to misunderstand the complexity of consent, its role and constancy in the everyday of our lives.

  Consent is our default mode of operations.

  Our lives are generally tuned to consent, and it hums as we move about the world like soft radio static, a buzz underneath everything we do and all the people with whom we spend our time. This default mode of consent changes only when we get into situations of sexual intimacy (and sometimes not even then), situations of sexual and romantic relevance. Only then do we start constructing walls to block a person from reaching us, often from literally reaching us, physically, bodily. Only then does consent become an act of which we become self-aware because the rest of the time our consent is unconscious. It is “ready-to-hand,” as Heidegger might say.

  I loved Heidegger as an undergraduate. I loved most of all his concepts of “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand,” concepts I’ve gone back to repeatedly over the course of my intellectual life, because they seem to apply to just about everything.

  For Heidegger, things are generally ready-to-hand and become present-at-hand only when we are forced to notice them. Ready-to-hand things are ones we don’t have to worry about because they are performing their everyday functions without fail. For example, a door is typically ready-to-hand. We walk up to a door, we go through it without noticing what we are doing, without thinking much about the door, as though we don’t even see the door. The door becomes present-at-hand only if, when we are trying to get through it, we grasp the handle and it falls off, and we can’t use the door as expected.
We are forced to reckon with the door, to notice its existence, to figure out why it stopped functioning, so we can fix it and return to not worrying about it anymore.

  For Heidegger, our “being” is typically ready-to-hand, too; we don’t think much about the fact of it, about how our being functions and goes about the world. But when our being becomes present-at-hand, suddenly everything we are, that we know, that we believe, our understanding of how to exist, is called into question; suddenly we need to think about the fact of our existence, deal with it, and this can be paralyzing. Much like the door that is broken and stands in our way of moving through space, our being becomes broken, and we must attend to it or else remain stuck, treading water, unable to go anywhere, do anything, or find meaning in our own existence.

  Consent, the concept of it, has become present-at-hand for all of us, recently.

  We’re not sure, anymore, as a society, a culture, what consent is and isn’t, where it belongs and where it doesn’t. Who controls it and who has the most power over it and whether we can get that power back, distribute it more equitably. We need to figure out its function, what’s gone wrong with it, so wrong we can’t stop talking about it, debating what it is and isn’t.

  For me, consent with my professor broke down, like the door handle that stops working. Consent became present-at-hand, it became the only thing I thought about, the substance and heartbeat of my every move and action during those years when he refused to stop seeking me out. Consent no longer was effortless but was my every effort and momentary concern. Consent and its opposite were all I knew. And in the confusion and the loss of it, my being broke down, too.

  We cannot sanitize every comment, every come-on, every gesture in our efforts to stamp out harassment and assault. We cannot sanitize all of our spaces, we cannot make them irrefutably safe from words and acts and behaviors. We are humans, and our emotions and desires make us into complicated creatures. Sometimes we are nervous and awkward. We misjudge and we make mistakes and we dream of things that will not happen, of people we want to be with who will not want to be with us. We muster our courage and go for someone who seems unattainable to see if, by some miracle, it turns out they like us back, and this is not a crime.

  But we can certainly do a better job of teaching people how to understand romantic feelings, how to read signals, how to back off when someone says no, how not to keep pursuing someone when they have rejected us, about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in certain contexts, in professional and educational circumstances. We must become better thinkers—critical thinkers—about this aspect of our lives, better communicators on every level with respect to consent and non-consent. We may not want consent to be present-at-hand forever, but we should not want consent to go back to being invisible, so invisible that we don’t notice its function, that we don’t care or refuse to care or even see when it has been ignored, disregarded, when this disregard has caused someone else to suffer, to become traumatized, when it has changed her life forever.

  And yet I also know, deep down to my core, that when I began to say to my professor, clearly and loudly and forcefully, no, he blocked out my no. He became an Olympic champion at refusing to hear my no. I said no at every turn, I said it in so many different ways, I tried every no I could think of—nos using words, nos using actions, nos of silence, of avoidance, of not showing up when I said I would. Kindly nos, mean-spirited nos, angry and frustrated and exasperated nos, careful, sweet, and understanding nos, nos with a great deal of explanation and justification, nos that I would use for a man who was hitting on me at a bar. But it didn’t matter how or under what circumstances I said these nos. He was unable, or refused, to hear and accept them.

  I do not believe that a Title IX training at his university, or the kind of trainings people are devising at colleges all over and at businesses and stores and every possible place of employment to combat harassment and assault, would have changed him or stopped him from what he did to me. I just don’t believe it. I don’t think that a national conversation about consent would have made this man realize what he was doing to me. I don’t believe that any effort would have prevented him from being unable to hear or respect the word no, unable to read any signals from the person who’d become the object of his desire. I think people like him will always work to justify and rationalize what they’re doing, no matter what it is or how awful the effect. I think some people are beyond our reach to educate, that he was beyond reach. I believe that some people are beyond hearing, beyond listening, beyond teaching. To teach him, to make him understand, would require far greater change than we can possibly expect from all of our trainings and our national conversations. That kind of conversation doesn’t exist, not yet, and maybe not ever. It might require a miracle, or magic. There always will be people like him, and that is one of the unfortunate facts of reality. And an enduring, unfortunate fact of my reality is that I happened to run into someone like him, and he happened to turn his gaze on me and refused to look elsewhere once he had.

  What we can change, what we must, are the people around him, people like Tootsie, people like that awful provost, the attitude of a university, a workplace, a corporation, that works to protect the bosses, the company, the college’s reputation, the football team’s reputation, over and above and beyond any concern whatsoever for the person whose consent was disregarded so completely and totally that she will suffer for the rest of her life.

  Looking back, I would have been so grateful for anyone and anything that could have protected me from what I endured. I wish someone could have prevented what happened to me.

  Maybe I’d be different, happier, less anxious, less existentially dark, had I not spent years dodging a professor’s convoluted overtures. Maybe I’d have a better professional life, maybe things would have been less rocky and today I would be a traditional, tenured professor instead of a nontenured, nontraditional one. But then, maybe I never would have lived that glorious intellectual awakening at Georgetown if I had been prevented from being the way that I was with my other professors, if I had been warned against becoming close to them, or if they had been trained not to take an interest in my life, dissuaded from communicating to me that I mattered, that I was more than just another student to them, convinced by their institutions that letting me know such things could put all of us in jeopardy. Maybe I never would have discovered the academic joy that has defined and inspired me to do things I never dreamed of doing as a kid, read Hegel and Heidegger and Nietzsche and Kant and Gadamer and believed myself completely capable of such achievements, become a writer of books, of novels, a person who stands up in front of a room of thousands of people and talks about her research.

  I am certain, so certain, that the behavior of most of us, the bits of effort on our parts to reach out, to get to know each other, our students, the children in our lives, the co-workers who are new and inspiring, the ways we try to help and connect, professionally or personally—efforts I have made myself with my own students over the years—are vastly different from a series of three thousand efforts and comments and invitations from one professor to one single student, a student who is pleading, “No more, please, no more.” Enough comments and compliments and efforts to pry and possess that they piled all the way to the ceiling of my Georgetown apartment, surpassing the roof and climbing toward the sky like droplets of water, rising to the heavens to form heavy clouds overhead.

  28

  I have always loved going home.

  Rhode Island, it’s in my bones, it calls to me, wraps its sandy, briny arms around me and holds me close, whispers to me in its vulgar accent, and I relax. I love it with all my heart, I love its twice-convicted felon, the former mayor of Providence, that it’s always up-and-coming yet never quite seems to arrive. Rhode Island flows through me like the ocean that borders every nook and cranny, every edge of it. Its people are my people, or at least the people I grew up with are, a mix of working-class kids with a few summer residents thrown in, most of w
hom were working class, too, because it used to be that way in Rhode Island—you could “summer” down in Narragansett if you lived in the city by renting, or buying if you were lucky, a falling-down beach shack.

  Rhode Island, its beaches, those kids, my parents raising me there, gave me the kind of childhood that people get nostalgic about in movies and television series, full of roaming the woods, building forts, combing construction sites for discoveries, and most of all, endless days on the sand building dribble castles, collecting sea glass, searching tide pools for hermit crabs and other treasures we would carefully place in our pails so we could pretend they were our pets for a while, until our mothers made us return them to the sea. My summer nights were filled with flashlight tag, kick the can, capture the flag, and ghost in the graveyard.

  Leaving home for college, leaving Rhode Island, this place where I was happy, was difficult, but I also couldn’t wait. My brain, my mind, yanked me away, my questions pulling me elsewhere. But my heart and my body also wished to root themselves forever where I’d grown up.

  The only other person I was close to who also left Rhode Island for college was my childhood best friend. We’d met in second grade, and by high school we were inseparable. We were valedictorian and salutatorian of our class, and we gave our speech together onstage at graduation. The Providence Journal came to interview us, the best friends who were number one and number two. It is one of my favorite memories.

  But I think she, like me, could feel how this marked us among our friends. We were still theirs, we were a part of things, the hanging out, the parties in the sand dunes, the going off to hockey games and dances, but we were also not theirs, too. We were smart in a way that would take us places, that would take us elsewhere, whereas most of our friends weren’t going anywhere—and they didn’t, certainly not out of state. The price of our intellects and the pursuit of an education was them, or at least the ways we were with them before she and I left.