Sex Object (5 page)

THE TWO WORST TIMES FOR DICKS ON SUBWAYS: WHEN THE
train car is empty or when it's crowded. As a teenager, if I found myself in an empty car, I would immediately leave—even if it meant changing cars as the train moved, which terrified me. Because if I didn't, I just knew the guy sitting across from me would inevitably lift his newspaper to reveal a semihard cock, and even if he wasn't planning on it I sure wasn't going to sit there and worry about it for the whole ride.

On crowded train cars I didn't see dicks; I felt them. Pressing into my hip, men pretending that the rocking up against me was just because of the jostling of the train—but you know differently because the rhythm is all wrong.

On the worst day, in eighth grade, I didn't notice at all. The train was crowded but my mind was elsewhere. I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest on my Walkman and thinking about how warm it was and when I stepped out of the subway onto the 39th Avenue platform the sun hit my face and I was happy to be almost home. But when I started to put my hand in my
back pocket, I felt something wet: I had made it the whole ride back without noticing that a man, whose face I would never see, had come on me. I wiped my hand on the lower leg of my jeans and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. I walked the three blocks home with my backpack slung as low as possible so that no one walking behind me could see what had happened or would think I peed on myself.

I peeled the jeans off when I got home and even though most of the semen had landed on the pocket of the pants—giving me two, rather than just one, layers of protection—the skin on my ass was still damp from it. I ran the tub until there were two inches of scalding water along the bottom, squirted in some of my sister's Victoria's Secret vanilla-scented bath gel, and sat in it quickly, my shirt still on.

I wrapped a pink towel around myself when I stepped out of the tub and turned my jeans inside out before putting them in the laundry basket so my mother wouldn't find out. I knew she would cry. I knew her worst nightmare was something happening to me that in any way resembled the things that had happened to her. I piled some sheets on top of the jeans to be safe.

Later I would find out that the guy rubbing up on you in the subway isn't just an asshole—he has a disorder, with a name that sounds more like fancy cheese than a word that means “bouncing into you on the N train until he jizzes on your pants.”

In the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, the American Psychiatric Association describes “frotteurism” as “recurrent, intense, or arousing sexual urges or fantasies, that
involve touching and rubbing against a non-consenting person.” There are online forums for men—because, let's be real, frotteurs are almost exclusively men—who rub on women and girls on the train, in bars, wherever they can do it while getting off unnoticed.

They have handles like “Bum Feeler” and “Rock Hard” and share stories of their exploits and pictures of the women they have surreptitiously dry-humped. Some give advice—like backing away occasionally so your victim gets the impression that you're working hard not to touch her and that any contact is the fault of the crowd.

“Women are forgiving if you can make it seem like this,” writes Rock Hard. “Almost like you can't help it, not like you've preyed on them like a piece of meat.”

I USED TO JOKE WITH MY HIGH SCHOOL GIRLFRIENDS THAT I
must have some sign on my head only visible to men that flashes
Yes, sir, I would LOVE to see your penis!
The first time I ever saw one was on the platform for the N train three blocks away from my house, at the 39th Avenue station.

I had just missed a train on my way to junior high, so I was the only person there other than a man all the way at the other end of the platform. He was so far away that I only saw the outline of his shape, but soon I noticed his hand moving furiously—and that he was walking quickly toward me with his penis in his hand. I had always thought myself prepared for something like
this; I knew I was supposed to yell or run, but I just stood there. I didn't look away or turn around, and even though I felt my knees giving out, my feet felt strongly planted to the ground.

As another train started to pull into the station, he stopped midway down the platform and zipped himself up. The doors of the train opened and he walked on, normally. My feet still in the same place, I tapped a man in a suit coming off the car on the shoulder and asked for help in a small voice but he didn't stop moving. So I stood there. When the next train came, I got on, figuring I should get to school—but got off one stop later at Queens Plaza to call my parents from a station phone booth when I noticed that my hands and face had pins and needles from my breathing strangely.

Every day after that, my father walked me up the stairs to the platform to wait for the train with me. The booth worker let him through the gate without paying after my dad explained to him what had happened. He gave him a bag of cherries from the tree that grew in our yard as a thank-you every week, for months.

As we were talking on the platform under the sun, I noticed an odd shape under my father's jacket. He tried to distract me with a joke but when I asked him about it a second time he pulled up his shirt to show me the metal pipe that was sticking out the top of his pants. He assured me that no cop would ever arrest him for beating a man who flashes children. Today he tells me he knows that was a lie, but he brought the pipe with him anyway.

I invested in a pair of headphones so I wouldn't have to listen to the things that men say to twelve-year-old girls on the subway. But only being able to see the looks they gave me and the way they mouthed the words made the silent come-ons seem threatening in a way they hadn't before. One man in a business suit—whose manicured nails I had noticed as he held the subway bar—lifted my headphone off one ear, came close enough that I felt his breath on my ear, and softly said,
Take care of your titties for me
. He stepped off the train as the headphone snapped back onto my head.

I started seeing dicks so regularly on my school commute—behind newspapers, barely tucked into unzipped jeans, or with just the head peeking out of sweatpants waistbands—I started to assume every man on the subway was thinking about showing me his penis. Any time the man sitting next to me brushed his hands near his pants, I stiffened—ready to get up and move seats or yell at him if I was in that kind of mood. To this day, if I'm on a plane or train, or even in a cab, if a man rests his hands on his lap I become hyperaware, waiting.

When I visited other small cities, or went upstate to Woodstock, I was shocked at how little it happened. No one yelled from their car or walked up close behind me on the street. It felt so silent and strange.

The older I got, the less it happened. By the time I was eighteen years old, I would only be flashed on the subway once or twice a year. That summer, between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I got an internship at a film magazine in
Manhattan thanks to a friend of my uncle's who was working at
George
. I went to Macy's with my mother to pick out a royal-blue pair of pants and a printed, coordinating blue shirt.

On the first morning of the job, I walked the usual blocks down to the station wearing my new outfit and a pair of low black pumps that gave me blisters. I was a few feet from the staircase leading up to the train platform when a car pulled over and a man shouted out from his opened window, asking if I knew where Northern Boulevard was. I pointed toward it—two blocks ahead—hardly glancing over, trying not to break my stride.
I'm sorry,
he said.
I don't understand. Where is it?

I stepped off the curb to get closer to his car. Before I could point again to where he needed to go, I saw that his penis was out and that he was not really rubbing it like most men did, but shaking it. I was annoyed and tried to turn on my right heel to step back onto the sidewalk. But this man in the car grabbed me by my elbow and started pulling me toward the window. His left hand moved up to grab my shoulder, close to my neck, while he still shook his limpish dick with his right hand. He tried to pull me in further, and now my whole arm and shoulder were through his window and in the car. I pushed him on top of the head with my free hand and he let go.

My parents were at work, so instead of going to my internship I walked to my aunt's house next door, where she promptly gave me a shot of bourbon,
to calm you
, she said. I cried that I was stupid to step off the curb and she said,
Yes you were
. My
cousin, who was visiting her, said,
Ma, don't make her feel worse
, but she said now I would remember next time never to do that again. And I did.

The police came, and I rode in the back of the cruiser to help look for his car—a silly exercise in futility that in retrospect I'm sure was to just make me feel better and them feel useful. But I didn't remember if the car the man was in had two doors or four, if it was white or cream. I told them I thought he made a left underneath the train (they're elevated in Queens) but they pointed out that you could only make rights. I was afraid that they would smell the bourbon on my breath and think I was a drunk teen who made it up since I couldn't remember anything, but they wrote things down and gave me an address to go to when I had the time.

I spoke to a detective at the police station a few days later; he called the man in the car a “potato head” and put me at a table with five huge books of mug shots. The label on the books said
HISPANIC
even though I told them I couldn't be sure of his race.

When I asked if they could give me fewer books, I was told that these were all the photos of Hispanic men in our precinct who had been arrested for sex-related crimes. Five books. They were heavy.

I didn't recognize anyone but spent several hours leafing through the books, touching the photos of the men within blocks of me who had been arrested for sex crimes. Young men, old men, very old men. When I asked the detective if they
thought they would find the man who grabbed me, he looked at me across his dirty desk and shook his head.
No, sweetheart, we'll never find him
.

THERE IS A LOOK THAT COMES OVER MEN'S FACES RIGHT BEFORE
they are about to say something horrible to you.

Or make a noise at you, or whistle in your general direction.

By the time I was fourteen years old I could spot this look a half a block away. In the same way I can tell if someone is a tourist by their shoes or if a person has recently done heroin, I can predict that a man is going to be an asshole on the street—sort of like a depressing New York City sixth sense.

And the moment when you take those few steps before crossing paths with the man who you know is about to say or do something is the moment when you look down, or turn your head to face across the street, or put your earphones in—as if to signal that you won't see them no matter what they do. That they are invisible to you.

Of course, they do it anyway. And you see it, or hear it.

Sometimes it's not as bad as you thought, it's a
Hey, beautiful
or a simple hello. But more often than not it's a lascivious intake of breath or a clicking noise, or sometimes just a smirk while they stare at your breasts as you walk by. Once it was a man who came close to my ear and said,
I want to eat you
. No matter the content, the message is clear: we are here for their
enjoyment and little else. We have to walk through the rest of our day knowing that our discomfort gave someone a hard-on.

We're trapped in between huge bodies unable to move, too afraid to yell or bring attention to ourselves. We are trapped on the train, in the crowd, in the street, in the classroom. If we have no place to go where we can escape that reaction to our bodies, where is it that we're
not
forced? The idea that these crimes are escapable is the blind optimism of men who don't understand what it means to live in a body that attracts a particular kind of attention with magnetic force. What it feels like to see a stranger smiling while rubbing himself or know that this is the price of doing business while female. That public spaces are not really public for you, but a series of surprise private moments that you can't prevent or erase.

And so you put your headphones on and look straight ahead and don't smile even when they tell you to and just keep walking.

IN MY JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL, I HAD CUT ONE OF MY
classes for weeks. But my teacher said he could still pass me. All I had to do was give him a hug.

At first I was thrilled to be in a class with a teacher that I'll call Mr. Z. He was a well-known easy grader and kind of a joke in a sad-old-man way; he had what we suspected was a glass eye, a hard time keeping drool in his mouth as he spoke, and walked with difficulty. The kind of classes he taught were normally held on the sixth floor, but administrators made sure he was out of sight on the tenth.

On the first day of class, Mr. Z told us that if anyone came in to observe the class—“an important-looking person”—we should raise our hand no matter what question he asked.

If you don't know the answer, raise your right hand. If you do know the answer, raise your left. I'll only call on you if you're raising the left!

Everyone looked around at each other, smirking. The social currency at Stuyvesant High School wasn't coolness as much
as it was ambition and the ability to get good grades, even if you didn't deserve them—and easy teachers were a necessity for students who had overloaded on calculus and AP science classes. (I was not one of those students.)

Mr. Z didn't really teach as much as he showed movies like
Braveheart
, but one day he had an actual lesson. And though he almost never called on students, he called on me.
Come up to the board, Jessica
. He smiled, small bits of white spit accumulating at the corners of his mouth.
We all want to get a closer look at your shirt
.

He laughed, but the class was silent. I wasn't really wearing a shirt but a brown bodysuit, which was popular at the time—it snapped at the crotch and I wore it with jeans baggy enough to see the cutout above my hips. I remember the way I slid sideways through rows of desks, my arms crossed over my chest. I don't remember what I wrote on the board. I never went back to the class.

When I started at Stuyvesant as a freshman, I went from being one of the smartest kids in my junior high school to being a nominally good student without the same drive and pedigree of my cute and smart girlfriends. Their parents had gone to college, grad school even. They lived on the Upper West Side or in Park Slope in apartments filled with books and paintings and cabinets full of alcohol. One friend had an entire floor of a four-story park-side brownstone as their “room.” I lived in a house where once or twice a week my mom would go outside wearing yellow rubber gloves to clean up the used condoms that littered
the sidewalk from the men who parked there with prostitutes.

One of my best girlfriends was a lithe dancer who had professional head shots for when she did the occasional acting job. She was the kind of WASP-y pretty I desperately wanted to be—the type of beauty that provoked starry-eyed crushes instead of ass slaps. She lived in a duplex apartment with a spiral staircase, and we bonded as freshmen over our junior-year boyfriends. The first time she came over to my house, she remarked how much she liked my mom's “uneducated” accent.
It's cute!
she said, smiling as she helped herself to a soda from the fridge.

That same year I was called to the board in Mr. Z's class, 1995, Stuyvesant started investigating an English teacher for describing sex fantasies and his masturbation routine during class. He talked about having a dream in which he raped a maid who had his wife's face. Another student said he asked her to play Spin the Bottle with him and later let her out of writing an essay because she was “pretty.” He was suspended for a few months, and then four years later—after a different man, an assistant principal, was arrested for fondling and exposing himself to a freshman—he was suspended again. That first time, though, the feigned outrage in the school only lasted as long as the newspaper articles did. We had a brief student assembly on the subject and moved on.

My favorite French teacher also had complaints filed against him. But he was dapper and wore suits to class and asked me and my friends what kind of wine we liked. So while we weren't clear on the details of the accusations against him, my friends
and I felt quite strongly at the time that they were total bullshit. He didn't
need
to harass anyone.

One day, as this teacher walked alongside me and one of my friends on Chambers Street, he told us about the girl—this troubled girl, he called her—who had made up lies about him.

I was trying to help her, to tutor her!
he said.
But because she knew she would fail the class anyway, this is what she said. She is very troubled.

I felt older and important that he was confiding in us, and it never occurred to me that perhaps a teacher should not be discussing the sexual harassment allegations against him with a sixteen-year-old student. That this in itself was a violation of boundaries escaped me. Because we were
so smart
. So we just nodded our heads in agreement.

Yes, she was clearly very troubled.

STUYVESANT'S BUILDING IN TRIBECA WAS BRAND-NEW WHEN I
started high school—ten floors of never-before-used hallways and lockers, classrooms and labs. We walked across a bridge that hung over the West Side Highway to get into the building, on the second floor. Everything was pristine but the escalators were always breaking.

There was a hallway on the third floor of my school where friends and I would meet when cutting class. Chris was probably the only other student there as much as I was. He kept a pillow in his locker and lay out on the floor, his baggy jeans riding up
at the ankle to show off neon socks. He rode a skateboard and carried around a boom box and had huge blue eyes. We joked that we were Cliff and Norm, the regulars.

One night at a friend's house party in Brooklyn I watched from an upstairs window as my friend—yet another dancer—performed ballet moves on the sidewalk and Chris helped her, holding her hand. I tried to find a place to sleep, wandering from one room to the next, but none were empty. So I drank a forty-ounce of Olde English and agreed to go to the basement with a short blond guy named Mick. We were both wearing V-neck white shirts. The basement floor was cold, and Mick kept trying to put his hands down my pants.
You don't even like me,
I told him. He assured me I was “mad cool.”

Mick kept pressing my breasts together with his hands, which I thought was strange but would make for a good story for my friends later. It took a few times of his doing this, then his putting my hands on my own breasts, before I realized he wanted to put his dick in between my breasts as I held them together. I laughed at him.
Are you fucking serious?
I asked. I gave him a hand job instead.

As he was finishing he picked up a white shirt off the floor, came in it, and handed it to me.

Sorry,
I said.
That was your shirt
. A look of disgust came over his face as I picked up my clean V-neck and walked up the stairs. Later that night he hooked up with our host's younger sister's friend. My friends and I laughed about how he was able to pull it off while wearing a shirt covered in his own jizz.

A few months later, after Chris and my dancer friend broke up, I hooked up with him during a party at my house. The light was starting to shine through the windows and almost everyone was asleep or trying to be. We were lying next to each other, in a room where there were five or ten other people sleeping. We made out and I gave him a hand job—surprised to find he was uncircumcised—and wrote in my diary the morning after: “I am the woman. I am so fucking fly.”

He went on to date someone else, breaking my heart, but a few years later I slept with him and continued to sleep with him on and off for a few years whenever the two of us were between relationships or sometimes even if we weren't. I would hang out and watch him DJ at a terrible bar that let underage drinkers in with abandon until he was done, when the bar closed, and would drive back to his basement apartment in Brooklyn to have sex. He told me he thought about fucking me doggy style when he masturbated and one morning when he drove me home to Queens he stuck his hand down my pants and put a finger inside—
I want to think about you being wet on the way back home—
so it's hard to be too sad about how that one ended up.

THERE WERE ALWAYS RUMORS IN OUR HIGH SCHOOL ABOUT AN
apartment that three teachers owned together near the school where they would take turns bringing students, but no one really knew if it was true. And even if it was, we didn't care because we thought we were so fucking cosmopolitan that the idea of
teachers conspiring to molest students didn't strike us as criminal, just pathetic and disgusting. So much so that it became a joke among my friends how a teacher who had known me since I was thirteen years old—a man in his thirties—called my parents' home in Woodstock and asked me to “hang out” a few days after I graduated. I was seventeen years old at the time. He referred to himself by his first name, which I didn't really know, so it took me a few minutes to realize that the man asking if I wanted to see a movie was the same man who had taught me for years. I don't remember what I said to him in return, just that it was some version of no.

It never occurred to me that school should be a sanctuary from the bullshit that was happening outside, the catcalls and subway flashers, the gropers and perverts. This was just what men were like. This was just what being a girl was.

A few weeks before my first semester of junior year was going to end, I ran into Mr. Z in the hallway, and he pointed at me, smiling. He was wearing a striped shirt that was slightly discolored in spots, and his belly was hanging low over his pants.
I've been missing you!
he said as he walked up to me. He was breathing heavily, as if the walk down the hall had taken effort. He asked if I still wanted a good grade. I responded that of course I did.

Just give me a hug, then,
he said, opening his arms.
All I want is a hug from you
.

I aced the class.