House Keeping: I spent a lot of time coming up with the concept for the management project for it to bear little fruit. School is my main priority at the moment, and the wake of other film/ writing projects have generally taken up my time. I will continue my management piece at some point, as I have a deep love for the narrative concept I was hoping to build to. However for now, I’d like to switch gears on this space. Because I haven’t done much with it yet, I hope you will forgive me for my cardinal sins. As a peace offering, enjoy a very heavy personal essay ;^)
From a vast majority of my friends on the subject of my dating life, I have been described as “picky”. I’m 21 and it’s only within the last year or so of my life that I have done anything remotely related to casual dating. This is partially due to circumstance (there aren’t a lot of meet cutes’ going on in my hometown, a place where the staff of your local Sobeys contains 90% of your graduating class). This is also partially due to my long running presence in online spheres. I spent the larger half of my adolescence on Tumblr, consuming feminist academic papers. Most of my philosophies on dating have been put through a fine mesh strainer of council from older women, queer friends and the lens of exploring your sexuality under the burgeoning MeToo movement. Hell, I published a whole essay on it. Like most 17-year-olds, and especially well read 17-year old’s who have been told they are mature and intelligent for their age, I felt like I had a pretty solid grasp on the ins and outs of romance and its affiliated politics.
“If someone says their exes are crazy, there’s a good chance they’re the common denominator.”
“If he says he can’t wear a condom, he’s lying”
“If he’s read Infinite Jest, run”
Perhaps the last one is a more personally cultivated bias, but I stand by it. In fact, I still stand by a lot of the points I made when I wrote Bus Stop Witchcraft. The red flag checkpoints I continue to use stemmed from the things I read when I was 17 and felt like I could comprehend and take on the world.
When I was 17, I was also sexually assaulted. I didn’t know until two years after.
My first boyfriend was younger than me, but more experienced. He called himself a feminist, and talked about watching Gilmore Girls with his mom. He was in theatre and didn’t mind wearing makeup- all things that felt refreshing in a sea of guys who had confederate flags on the backs of their trucks. After a few red-faced interactions stolen between the curriculum of our film class, I went to his school play, and we kissed under the buzzing fluorescent lights of the theatre. It was clumsy first romance in the most basic of senses. We spent most of the time we were together existing in the context of school- my parents knew we were together, but they were incredibly strict. For eight months, we spent our time kissing a block away from my house, holding hands when it wasn’t visible to the possible prying eyes of my family, or the vast majority of the town that knew us. I would leave my phone-cum-tracking-device at school and skip class, or lunch to make out on his couch, or more. The 20-minute walk home from school always took an hour. I got accustomed to keeping secrets - one of them being how often our text conversations revolved around sex. We had sex before, but I felt uncomfortable and ill prepared for the prospect of penetrative sex. He persisted, telling me that it was how he felt cared for. How it was important to him. How he didn’t believe that anything outside of penetrative sex was “real sex”. As a queer person, I disagreed, but understood how important it was for him. I cared about him, and I felt like I was letting him down. He wasn’t disagreeing with that sentiment.
One day, after I was tired of resisting what felt like a constant barrage, he asked if we could do it after school and I agreed. I spent the whole day a nervous wreck. I avoided him in the hallways and hid at lunch. I didn’t go to his locker immediately when the last bell rung like usual. Instead, like the guardian angel she has always been, my best friend found me first. She was going to the beach, and I was coming. Because we had plans originally, he came along. I had hoped the group of friends she had accumulated on our excursion would act as a shield between myself, and the prospect of aimed vitriol. It didn’t help. I spent the day listening to underhanded jokes related to my not wanting to have sex with him- prodding comments that only I would get under the context of the originally planned day. I confronted him later about it, and he gave me an apology, but chalked it up to his disappointment. When we were together, he rammed his fingers inside of me without asking, and took my lurch of pain as pleasure. I have had nightmares about it since it happened. A month after the beach, he broke up with me.
My second relationship had a similar tone. We were together for two years. I was close with his mother, and his friends. Every argument we had was about sex. How he wanted more of it. I understood that working through the proverbial haunted fun house of my body (I had begun to process the previous relationship) mixed with my new cocktail of SSRI’s made my sex drive lower. But the compromise never felt like enough. I spent the majority of my first two years in university reading marriage counselling forums about mismatched sex drive. We would talk about how he wanted to fuck me because he loved me, because he wanted to share that kind of emotional intimacy with someone he knew. He said I could always say no. When I did say no, he would stop. He would then rattle off a list of all the things he had been upset about, or that he thought I had been doing wrong within the relationship. He said that it felt like the only time he could do it without risking another, later opportunity to have sex. I learned quickly that saying no had consequences. He told me he wanted to figure this out. He would keep track of how many days it had been since we had last had sex and bring up the specific tally every week. On multiple occasions, he said that my lack of fucking him made him miss his abusive ex-girlfriend. In an attempt to quell my anxieties, he told me that if he wanted “just sex”, he could be looking for it somewhere else. That line would always feel like a threat. I spent a year picking up the pieces of myself after we broke up.
I spent a lot of time wondering how the pains I had suffered went under my radar until so long after these relationships. I called both of them “guilt trippy” (true) and “an asshole” (also true). My wonderful, patient friends spent hours listening to me process. For a very long time, I felt like I had been betrayed by my research, or my emotions, or maybe my desire to be loved. How was it possible that I had done the same thing twice? Was I the common denominator? I knew what most of the signs looked like. I had done so much research on what they looked like. I had read testimonials; I had headed the advice. I had looked for good men. They were good men. Which is why even against my better judgement, I believed it when they told me I was doing something wrong.
Sexual coercion doesn’t look like the kinds of assault that we hear about- the kind on busses or trains done by people we don’t know. I give specifics about these two relationships because it’s something I wish I had before/during/after experiencing these things. From an external standpoint, it seems easy to pick out how slimy these conversations feel. But to someone in this kind of relationship, it looks like someone you care about deeply, standing on a tattered mattress with tears in their eyes, telling you how much you mean to them.
As much as I’ve been told by those who I’ve relayed these experiences to that I am too forgiving, I do genuinely believe that neither of these people meant any harm. It seems counter to my whole shtick to genuinely believe that men aren’t the problem, but I do believe that there are good, kind men out there, and that talking about these things might make someone take a long look at their own actions. We were young, and incredibly inexperienced. The guidance that has been given on the subject of consent is minimal, even in spaces that are generally considered comprehensive in their sex education. The argument that people are either abusers exclusively or not at all pushes the voices of people with nuanced experiences to the wayside. I don’t believe either of these people are inherently evil, and I think treating them as such relieves them of the agency required to grow. I had to do it, so can they.
When I was 17 and still in the very early stages of processing, the prospect of writing for #YouToo? was a massive opportunity. It had been my goal to get published before 18 (arbitrary, lofty, fuelled by an ego bolstered by living in a very small town with very little literary competition). It was something I really cared about. I wanted to have something important to say. I had read so much that I felt I should have something important to say. I spent the period between high school and first year, between the first relationship and the second, writing, revising, and clarifying what became Bus Stop Witchcraft. And getting paid for it. The day it got published was one of the most exciting days of my life, and to this day it is a feat I am both so grateful to have been a part of, and so proud of for accomplishing. I stand by a lot of the adolescent musings contained within that piece of writing. However, since growing, and learning a lot, I felt as if an update was required. Looking back on that piece, I see a young girl just before she begins to understand that she’s allowed to take up any kind of space. Before she understands that there is a name to the things that have been done to her. I was that girl for a very long time. I value her inputs on the world, her shameless heart pinned to her sleeve. I understand her willingness to accept the crumbs of love she thought she deserved. I do not feel that way anymore. I have found that is perhaps the condition of adulthood- to spend most of your time gaining new experiences, and then more time processing them. I don’t think that’s something that ever ends. Which probably means I’ll keep writing lengthy essays for the rest of my life.
If you have experienced something like this, I implore you to reach out. Perhaps I’m a hopeless optimist, but I do hope that maybe, when someone like me is looking through the current zeitgeist of feminist academic papers for a lens to view their own life through, I’ll have been able to add a little more source material for them.
Final Comment: if you would like to read Bus Stop Witchcraft, it is in the anthology # You Too? edited by the fantastic Janet Gurtler, a friend and mentor through my writing escapades. The guy I talk about in the first few sentences is my ex boyfriend. I wanted to immortalize our conversations.