When we talk about sexual harassment, we need to talk about sex and power but also, fear of rape. When a powerful man in a supervisory role locks the door behind you, corners you in an empty room, surprises you with unwanted exposure or a sexual request, you feel shame, you calculate how much you will suffer professionally, and also, you feel afraid. Not just fear of retaliation, but the primal alarm bells of danger. While your brain knows this man is probably not going to rape and kill you while his assistant waits outside, your gut knows that he could. That primal fear shapes our reaction in the moment but more importantly how we process what happened. When this fear is unacknowledged, the victim starts to doubt what she experienced and becomes an accomplice in the conspiracy of harassment.
My first #metoo moment happened when I was in seventh grade. I was in the middle of a crowded school assembly, yet for reasons I can’t remember, I was socially isolated from my friends and familiar faces. In the middle of the crowd, an eighth grade boy fondled me to the chorus of encouragement from his friends and the deafening silence of the other witnesses. Though I was surrounded by the entire school, including the staff, socially, I was a defenseless gazelle separated from my herd. I felt shame and embarrassment, but mostly, I felt afraid. My gut ran rang the alarm of a primal truth: I alone could never defend myself from a stronger boy.
The fear that I felt entirely shaped my reaction and what I came to learn from the experience. When the assembly was dismissed, and as I scrambled over my classmates to freedom, I yelled an absurd and vulgar description of what I would do him if he touched me again. I ran to a sympathetic teacher on the edge of gymnasium and sputtered out what had happened. Alarmed by how upset I was, she promised to handle it for me immediately. Days later, I learned from her that when the principal met with the boy, he revealed that he had simply touched me playfully and that in response, I had yelled a vulgar threat. The teacher relayed all this to me matter of factly, but I read her sense of betrayal. I had acted like something really bad happened to me, but she came to believe it was a case of unwelcome flirting. She did assure me there was a bright side – I would not be getting in trouble for what I said – and she added that we are human beings and sometimes we overreact. Oooof.
When an experience causes fear, we process it differently from other experiences. We revisit the experience so that we learn the lessons that will keep us safe next time; but we do it in a fractured way, absorbing it in manageable chunks. Sometimes we revisit our trauma in repetitive, obtrusive thoughts. Sometimes we walk though a door opened by someone else’s story. But almost always, it’s disorganized and over a considerable period of time.
Because I felt the primal sense of fear, I processed my seventh grade experience in the fractured distorted way we process frightening experiences. I thought about the incident a lot in the days and months and years after it happened; but also, not at all. In little fits and starts I put the puzzle together and I came to believe that I overreacted to a harmless encounter. Eventually, the experience came to feel like a dream.
I learned the wrong lessons from my experience in seventh grade, but I carried them into early adulthood. Hanging on to the very belief system that enables more harassment. When I was a law student, I became the object of unwanted attention of a very senior attorney at the agency where I had an internship. He tagged along to a lunch with me and my supervising attorneys and made a comment about me that prompted one of them to open a report with HR. “It’s not okay how he talks about you, we just need your statement,” he urged. But I could not help my case. I literally had no recollection of anything he said at the lunch. The case was dropped. A few weeks later this same senior attorney summoned me to his office to give me a new work project. As I approached, his secretary leaped to her feet, “I’m going to be right outside this door the entire time you’re in there, okay.” I entered his large corner office with that primal alarm sounding in my ears but my response was to proceed with my senses dulled For the life of me, I cannot tell you what happened once I closed the door behind me. I remember that internship well including the senior attorney’s benign behavior, but this his harassing behavior is like a dream just beyond my reach. I couldn’t report his conduct if I wanted to.
I think the detachment with which I met the second harasser is because the people with whom I shared my first harassment never acknowledged my fear. My brain knew that on that day in seventh grade, I was not in actual danger of being raped and killed by a fellow student in the middle of the all school assembly; but my gut did not. My gut produced a very real and necessary response to a perceived physical threat. The fact that my reaction was not contextualized and instead deemed an overreaction by the adults around me caused me to doubt myself and walk into future harassment with my eyes wide shut.
I am so encouraged by the national conversation that is happening about sexual harassment and the concrete steps women are taking to make lasting change. It’s like we are collectively shaking off the dreamlike state with which we walk from one harassment to another. But as we do our collective processing, let’s remember that fear, not just fear of retaliation, but actual fear of violence, is an unavoidable byproduct when any male, even a respected colleague, corners and sexually harasses a female, or we won’t wake up.