What I Have Had to Unlearn: Reflections on Early #MeToo Moments By Cynthia Holder Rich

September 21, 2018September 30, 2018 Cynthia Holder Rich

#MeToo is back in the news, courtesy of a story shared about Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Coverage of the story brings me back to my own stories. I am not unique. I don’t know anyone—any woman—my age who doesn’t have stories to tell—or not to tell, depending on a host of circumstances and history and current sense of risk. The public sharing of a story of teenage assault has me reflecting on some of my stories – those from my freshman year at university. As a young woman living for the first time away from home, I learned many things. I have worked for decades to unlearn some of what I learned that year.

STORY ONE: I attended a church-related school, which had rules prohibiting what was called “cohabitation”. I was assigned to a dorm room with a roommate. The room was small and would be understood as spartan compared to many dorm rooms today. There were two built-in beds, two built-in desks, a shared closet and one window.

Within days of the first day of class, my roommate had a boyfriend, a junior, and the two of them spent nights together having noisy sex in our room. I complained to my roommate, who said she didn’t care if I was in the room and it was up to me to put up with it, as she would if the situation was reversed.

I complained to the RA, who was sympathetic but responded with “what can I do?”. After a number of conversations with the RA and the dean of students, I was finally given a single room in another dorm – but not before I was brought in by my RA and told that “making trouble” was not a good way to start my college career. People wouldn’t like me and I would lose friends if I kept this up, she advised. She encouraged me to “grow up” and realize that I now lived in a community of adults, people who had sex, and I needed to understand that this was part of being mature.

LEARNINGS AND UNLEARNINGS

I had to unlearn the idea that keeping quiet about things that were wrong was required to make friends, to come to learn that “making trouble” is not the same as standing up for one’s rights.
I had to unlearn the idea that ”mature” relationships become sexual very quickly, in order to learn that maturity and having sex are not the same thing; and while mature individuals can have sexual relationships in ways that are not only mature but also healthy, telling someone to be more adult about sex is a tired pick-up line and a way to shame people in subordinate positions.
All three of the young women in my story—me, my roommate, and the RA—were raised to take part in patterns that didn’t serve us or the people around us well. We were formed and informed in ways that crafted our sense of our roles as women in society, both in relationships with other women and in relationships with men. I am still working on unlearning these early lessons.

STORY TWO: That fall, joy of joys, I started dating a guy. I had dated in high school but not really had a boyfriend, and finally having one felt great. He was funny, and smart, and quirky, and weird. We liked a lot of the same things, and we laughed a lot together. It was fun – for a number of weeks.

Then, as time went on, he became possessive. Our dorm floor had a common phone. Long before cellphones or internet communications, I would come home from class with 16-20 phone messages pinned into the corkboard on the door – asking, “Where are you?” and saying “Call as soon as you’re home from class.” One night he got angry when I didn’t have an immediate answer for where I had been on a particular day, and I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. He grabbed me and then grabbed my purse and took out my keys, throwing the purse at me and yelling as he ran away to have fun trying to get into my dorm room.

I succeeded in getting into my dorm room, but was penalized at my workplace for not having opened the next day on time, as I didn’t have the keys. My keys were shoved under my door after a friend intervened.

LEARNINGS AND UNLEARNINGS

Although friends knew that this was happening, the young man was not penalized for his behavior. It was understood as creepy but not wrong. I learned that women had to put up with a certain level of creepy behavior—a level that was undefined—because that’s just how guys are.
I have come to learn that people who become possessive in relationships often have learned that this is what it means to love or to be close to another person. I hope my first boyfriend came to learn other ways of being close before he damaged others more deeply or was damaged himself.
I have worked hard to learn that threats and scorn from people in one’s life is not normal nor acceptable, nor is using one’s superior body strength or size to dominate others. These are not “just how things are”, and no one, male or female, should have to live with this kind of behavior.

STORY THREE: I turned 18 in the short span of years that the federal government and the states agreed with the argument that if one could be drafted into military service at 18, one should also be allowed to legally drink. Social life was awash in alcohol during my years at university. Refreshments at university and fraternity parties and dances always included many kegs of beer. This had many effects.

Late one evening at the university winter dance, I was crossing the floor to greet a friend when someone I knew to be on the football team approached me. I stopped to talk to him and was surprised to have a number of other football players join the conversation—and then to have all of them, at least five but perhaps more, surround me and feel me up and down, pushing, shoving, pinching, and touching as intimately as possible while leaving clothes in place—while laughing. It happened very quickly, and I was so shocked that I didn’t react. And then it was over. They all wandered away, slapping each other on the back and laughing. I stood for a few moments, alone in the middle of the floor. And I stumbled to the side of the hall and sat down.

A month later, as part of my application to become a Resident Assistant in my sophomore year, I was interviewed by a member of the student services staff. The staff member told me in the interview that he had seen this happen, and that he had been impressed with how I had handled myself and the situation. “People who do well on the RA staff need to keep calm in situations where other people would get upset”, he told me. He complimented me on my ability to keep calm.

LEARNINGS AND UNLEARNINGS

I learned from a male adult in authority that keeping calm during sexual assault was laudable. I learned that adults in authority could not be relied upon to protect me when I was in danger. I have had to work very hard to unlearn this, to be different for the young people and colleagues in my life, and to learn to speak up and speak out. This has come in handy when other #MeToo moments have occurred in my professional life.
I have often wondered what impact the free and easy access to lots of alcohol had that night. Many young people were at the dance, and some probably saw what happened. For those who assaulted me and for those who witnessed, being drunk did not help anyone respond appropriately. I rarely drink, and memories of that night have given me a life-long aversion and a sense of being at risk when people are drinking excessively.
I have never forgotten what happened. The aroma of that cafeteria—the lingering smell of fried food combined with stale cigarette smoke, human sweat and beer—drags me right back to that night, and I hear Donna Summer singing and see the sparkling disco ball making light patterns on the walls. I believe I am normal and not abnormal. Most who are assaulted remember what happened, and they should be believed.
I did not report this event to anyone at the time. It took entering a relationship with a life partner to feel safe enough to bring this painful event to the surface. I didn’t believe that anyone would believe me, nor that anyone would care. After all, I wasn’t raped. I knew others who were, and when they reported, they were often not believed. If they didn’t get a sympathetic hearing—how could I? How important is assault that doesn’t reach the level of rape or other, more serious forms of sexual violence? I had to learn that assault, any assault, is serious. And I had to learn to forgive myself for doing whatever I had done wrong (do you hear the messages that we tell ourselves? That our society tells us about ourselves?) to have this scary, injurious event, which I have never forgotten, happen to me.

Now, long after my young adult years, I have become comfortable with trouble-making, with speaking up, with speaking out. I became stronger through the learning and unlearning that happened in my first university year. Even so, this was hard to write. And, when abuse came my way later in life, these early lessons proved helpful. It turns out that Romans 8:28 is really, really true, for which I am overwhelmingly grateful to God.

But.

But why are these kinds of events so common, so well-known, so close to the surface in conversations among women? Why is what some have called the wound that never heals something that happens to so, so, so many of us? What is wrong with we humans that so many stories have been told and so many others are too scary and dangerous to tell? I know how much I was hurt by what happened to me. Many others have much more horrific—and TRUE—tales to tell. How do we get this to stop? If Jenna Barnett is correct, “the only way out of the #MeToo Era is by entering a new age where we don’t have to say those two words anymore.”

As the stories in the news make clear, that new age has not yet begun. This truth makes me weep, and rage, and work toward the advent of this new age. May it come soon.

Cynthia Holder Rich is the founding Director of ecclesio.com. Having served as a professor and pastor in many contexts in the US and overseas, she currently serves as a Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology, Tumaini University Makumira, Arusha, Tanzania.