#MeToo

Today, Time magazine announced its "Person of the Year." Or more to the point, it named a group of women who stepped forward to denounce predominate abuse of females by males as its top choice for great applause.

I haven't read the article. I don't know who these women are. I am not even sure who they stepped forward against. Maybe they spoke out against our current sexual predator-in-chief. Maybe they spoke out against some senator or congressman or local council person. It doesn't really matter.

What matters is, they spoke out. And they created a movement, one that we all saw move around the world with the Women's March back in the early part of the year, and one which continued when women in Virginia took more seats in the House of Delegates, and more women ran for office, than ever before.

It's a movement that has long been in the works. It goes back before Anita Hill spoke out against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It goes back into the annals of time to voices long forgotten and drowned out by the muscle and upper body strength of the patriarchy, whose belief in the power of the penis has overcome, with brute strength and great hypocrisy, the delicate sureness of the power of the womb and the heart.

It is past time to take that power back, ladies.

I was five when a man first showed me his penis and asked me to touch it.

My Jane West dolls became targets for my slightly older uncles, who drew bulls-eyes around the breasts of her blue shirt, and colored on the insides of her thighs.

At 9, as my breasts began to bud out, a boy four years my senior dared me to take off my shirt and let him touch me.

In school, boys snapped my bra, backed me against doors, slid their hands down my pants. My cries of "leave me alone," were laughed off and ignored.

When I was around 12, my father took me to a doctor who slapped me across the face, telling me not to talk back to my dad. I don't remember what I said to cause this, but I do remember my father's reaction. He did not defend me. He just said, "You deserved that." A good parent would have hauled me away from that doctor and out the door, but my father laughed it off. And the doctor was an asshole and I refused to see him again. When I learned years later that he had had a bad motorcycle accident, I confess, I was glad.

When I was 14, one of my father's friends, visiting from out of state, was constantly cornering me and trying to stick his hands down my pants. I tried to stay away from him. Finally, his wife confronted me and accused me of "luring her husband" away from her by wearing shorts. Like I knew anything about luring anybody at that age. Her husband was just a lecherous old bastard and I was glad when they stopped visiting.

At 15, a biology teacher told every one of his classes that breasts were just "mounds of modified tissue." For weeks, girls all around the school endured boys running around tweaking their titties, and when the girl said something the boy "innocently" said, "Hey, they're just mounds of modified tissue, what's the big deal?" I think the teacher was trying to ward off the very thing that came about, but I hope he never told another class that.

At 16, another of my father's friends cornered me against the fence in the parking lot where I was working that summer as a receptionist at my father's place of business. He stuck his tongue down my throat and rammed himself against me so hard I thought he broke my back as he shoved me into a post.

At 18, working at a job I hated, where I was placed in the back part of the building in the "parts department," the men would come in and leer at me. One of them constantly walked up behind me and cupped my breasts, no matter how many times I slapped his hands away. He thought it hilarious. It made me angry, defensive, and scared. I finally told him I had a steady boyfriend who would come and beat the hell out of him if I told him what he was doing. When he didn't believe me, I had my boyfriend come and pick me up at work one day. Nobody bothered me after that. (Thank you, my darling husband, for being a big guy who looks like he could knock the teeth out of anybody he wanted.)

Another of my father's friends called me at a different job one day, after seeing my boyfriend and I making out in the car. He said if I would sleep with him he wouldn't tell my parents I was necking with my boyfriend on the backroads. I told him to go to hell. (And my father recently asked me why I didn't like his friends. Go figure.)

Married now, suffering from mental exhaustion from overwork and trying to go to college, all while having multiple surgeries and fighting depression and tears because I wanted and couldn't have children, a man in a repair store grabbed my arm when I took my computer in to be fixed and forced me behind the counter, where he slid his hand down my pants. I called my friend who worked for the local sheriff and reported him; after a visit from deputies, the man closed up shop and ran away to another state. I hope I saved some other woman that humiliation.

I also took a self defense class.

In the late 1990s, a deputy backed me against a corner in a courthouse, putting his hand on my waist and daring me to say or do something as he moved in closer. I felt for his hand, grabbed his thumb, and pushed it back as hard as I could, making the asshole fall to his knees. I then gave him a kick where it counts, and ran.

This doesn't count the multitude of male doctors who have belittled me, talked over me, not listened to, or otherwise discounted my health issues simply because I was just a hysterical female. Jerks, every damn one of them. It doesn't count the members of the opposite sex who think they have the right to try to give me a hug, or to otherwise pull me up against them, simply because I am female. (Here's a clue: if you'd just give a guy a handshake, then you do the same with a woman.)

These are just a few of the humiliations I have suffered at the hands of so-called men. I am just one woman with a multitude of experiences, and these kinds of atrocities can be multiplied millions of times over, probably at least 10 experiences for every woman, some traumatic, some tolerable, none acceptable. These perpetrators are not men, they are monsters. And monsters do not deserve to be on the cover of Time magazine, and their exploits should be called out for what they are - crimes against another person.

#metoo