Sex Object (9 page)

DOING THE RIGHT THING HAS NEVER COME EASILY TO ME. I
cheated on almost all my boyfriends with regularity and without remorse. I lied to my parents about failing out of my freshman year at Tulane University, choosing to tell them that I wanted to transfer rather than disappoint them with the truth. I don't believe that right and wrong are black and white.

So when a close friend, a married friend, suggests he wants to fuck me I'm surprised to find that I am not flattered. Still, I tell him that I am. Despite my feminist bluster, I am the kind of person who hates to say no or to disappoint. I would really like for you to like me.

When a stranger on the street says something sexually shocking, you can curse him out or keep walking. There are fewer options when it's someone you host for brunch. Someone whose wife you like and whose sons play with your daughter. Someone who calls himself your husband's friend.

So when D messages me that there was a moment almost a year ago at a book party when he felt the overwhelming desire
to be with me—and that this feeling has stuck with him since then—I'm not sure what to say. To make matters worse, he tells me this a half hour after I've taken an Ambien and the screen is a bit fuzzy and I wonder if I'm really reading what I'm reading.

But I do remember the moment he's talking about. I was wearing a crop top and a high-waisted skirt, so that a small sliver of my upper waist showed. I was glad to be out of the house, and glad Layla was spending the night with a babysitter so Andrew and I could have a fun night out in a city that we didn't know all that well.

A few drinks into the party, I snuck out with D to have a cigarette—a half cigarette, really, the limp last vice of boring married people. While we talked, he briefly put his hand on the exposed part of my waist. He stood closer than he should have and said we should sneak out for cigarettes more often. He had always been a flirt. Months before this, when I told Andrew that D kept looking at my breasts when he got drunk, he thought I was imagining it.

You think everyone is looking at your breasts!
he joked. This is true.

D is well-known in his field and good-looking. But he is not someone who oozes sexuality. I was not remotely interested. Yet when he started to message me online not long after that party—it began with a note about a dress I wore at an event: “way to bring your A game,” he said—I didn't tell him to stop.

Somehow, miraculously, my propensity for self-destruction did not win out, and I did tell Andrew about the messages. He
wasn't pleased, but the come-ons were innocent enough that we could choose to see them as an idiosyncrasy—he was flirtatious. Big deal. It became a joke between Andrew and me—D as the inappropriate uncle or friend who gets handsy when drunk.

The truth is that we liked him.

We liked having friends with children. We liked having friends in Boston. It was easier this way. When D messaged me about a photo of myself that he liked or sent a random compliment, I tried to change the subject. I asked how his wife was. Were they still coming to dinner next week? I did act amused, though. I did say thank you.

But when he tells me about this moment he first decided that he wanted me, tells me that wanting something different is like an itch he needs to scratch, I am terrified. I erase his messages moments after reading them—as if my deletions can will them into nonexistence. I don't tell him to fuck off or to stop, though. I write that I'm flattered but what he's saying is dangerous. That our families are friends. Earlier this same evening he emailed Andrew and me about bringing a cheesecake to dinner at his place the following weekend.

I don't tell Andrew that night, but I can't sleep. So in the morning—to remedy whatever sleeping-pill-induced nonchalance I may have relayed—I write D a clearer message: I do not want to keep things from my husband. I need to be around your wife and not feel terrible. He apologizes profusely, says he was drunk and that he is mortified. I believe him but wonder if I had answered differently if he wouldn't be saying these things now.
Still, to my great shame, I want to make him feel more comfortable. I tell him it's fine. That I'll think of it as a drunken compliment and we'll leave it at that. I do not feel complimented. I would really like for you to like me.

I struggle for days over whether to tell Andrew: I know it is the right thing to do, but I also know that it will mean losing our friends and I don't want to cause a fuss. I am afraid of what he will think. But still, I can't sleep.

I can't figure out why I'm so distressed. He apologized, I had no interest—I could leave it at that.

But it occurs to me that D said this thing not because he was that drunk or to get it off his chest, but because he must have thought I was open to hearing it. That maybe I would respond in kind. He believes I'm the type of person who will dirty-talk with you online and then show up at your house days later to present your wife with a fucking cheesecake.

So when I finally tell Andrew, I can't stop crying. Not because I'm upset that I waited days to tell him and not because by telling him I know we are losing friends. I'm crying because I am thirty-three years old and I can't escape the feeling that men see that I am the kind of person for whom doing the right thing does not come easily.

It's why they approach me on streets or in bars or through messages on Twitter. They see me as the worst version of myself, the version I've worked hard not to be—or at least not to display too often.

I realize that I wasn't alarmed by D's first messages to
me—the seemingly innocuous ones about a dress or a photo—because the primary way I am used to communicating with men is through some form of flirtation. It did not feel immediately wrong or abnormal for him to be saying these things to me because these are the things that men say. And I cannot believe that so long after I first experienced a man making it clear that his desires trump my comfort, I still accept it. The only thing that gives me some hope is that I'm talking to my husband about it, about the way it makes me feel disgusting and cheap—even though it was not me who said the cheap thing.

I ask D to get a drink with me and tell him that I think he is blowing up his life—that you don't say something like this to someone so close to you unless you want to get caught, unless you want something to go wrong. He talks about the stress of his job and life, and I come to see this was never about me—not really. That his messages had nothing to do with his smelling my moral ambiguity a mile away gives me some comfort.

Still, I feel like I have done something terrible. As if I have betrayed D rather than the more solid truth that I have done the right thing. For everyone.

After decades of life and feminism, I still somehow believe that my job is to protect men at all costs—and that not doing so is a crime greater than keeping secrets from my family. Doing the right thing has never come easily to me.

I DON'T REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME AN ANONYMOUS MAN TOLD
me to go fuck myself or said I was a cunt. I know it was probably by email, since social media wasn't in full swing in 2004 when I started a blog. I remember the first time I called the FBI, when a man wrote us a few years after we launched to say that he wanted to rape us and cut our breasts off.

I remember that I thought about what his real name could be.

I suppose these kinds of men have always been anonymous, since even before the Internet. The men on the subways, the men calling from their cars or the streets—the man whom my friend Christine caught taking pictures of her exposed back on a hot day when she decided to wear a sundress. The police told her there was nothing they could do—taking pictures of people's bodies in public isn't illegal. Even if they do plan to use them to jerk off afterward.

We don't know who they are or how dangerous they are or what they really want. We don't know, but we presume, that
they go home to families at night. Families with children, wives, mothers. Families with people.

On the street, as a teen, I learned quickly how to act. How to react. I don't believe that this is just a thing that girls in New York City learn, but I do imagine that we are advanced students in the topic. I knew, based on what time it was, what street I was on, and how many people were around, what I would say when a man would inevitably tell me on my way to school that he wanted to fuck me. Women know that this sentiment isn't always expressed audibly; men can say it without words, just with sounds, hand gestures, and facial expressions that stick with you the full day after you see them.

Talking back becomes a game of strategy. Figuring out if it's safe, or if there are enough people around, and if those people care enough to intervene if the man you want to talk back to decides to follow you or get violent.

I started off timid, nervous, and unsure. I shook my head, frowned, walked to the other side of the street or avoided their gaze. I walked faster.

If they followed I would go into a bodega or walk up the steps on a stoop, as if I was going home and there was someone waiting on the other side for me. The longer it went on, though, the angrier I got.

I tried shaming them: I'd ask them if they would say these kinds of things to their mother or their sister. Sometimes it worked but I stopped asking this question when one day, after I asked a man who said something about eating out my asshole
if he had a daughter, he replied:
Yeah, and I'll fuck her too if I want to
.

That's when I started just giving the finger. Didn't look up, didn't break stride, just left my middle finger up and out and kept walking. No one tried to hurt me, which was lucky. I keep reading about women who get killed for the things they say to men on the street. Women who refused to hand over their phone number or declined propositions. A man in Queens who slashed the throat of a twenty-six-year-old woman who wasn't interested. A woman in Detroit with three children who was shot and killed after she refused to give a strange man her contact information. These two acts of violence happened within days of each other.

I have rejected men and I am okay, though sometimes I wonder how much that has to do with ridiculous, extreme luck and privilege. Once in New Orleans—as a seventeen-year-old freshman in college—on Halloween I dressed up like a “sexy nurse” and a boy kept following me and then started yelling things from the street below to the balcony I was throwing beads from, calling me a bitch. I told him he probably had a tiny dick. The crowd beneath laughed around him.

His face turned a deep red and he said,
I'm coming up to find you
, and I mocked him further.
Go for it
, I said.
I know your dick won't weigh you down.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had come face-to-face with him after that.

I think about the young man who killed people in Santa Barbara because he thought it unthinkably unfair that he was still a
virgin and that beautiful women didn't want anything to do with him. Before going on a shooting spree he made YouTube videos about “slaughter[ing] every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut” he saw.

Still, somehow, inexplicably, “man-hater” is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no real word for men who kill women. Is the word just “men”?

We say “misogynist”; I've written that “misogyny kills,” but the word falls flat on your tongue—it's too academic sounding, not raw or horrifying enough to relay the truth of what it means. Besides, there are plenty of misogynists who don't kill—more than I'd like to think about.

Sometimes we call these men domestic abusers when the victim is someone they know, but when they kill strangers to them we just call these men crazy. Lone wolves. Unbalanced. But here's the thing—what is crazy about killing a woman in a culture that tells you that women's lives are worth nothing?

Women are raising children, picking up socks, and making sure you feel like a man by supporting you when you need it and looking sexy (but not trying too hard, because that would be pathetic). We're being independent and bad bitches while wearing fucking lipstick and heels so as not to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibility, yet even just the
word
“feminist” pisses you off. How dare we.

Still, no name for the men who kill women because we have the audacity not to do what we're supposed to do: fuck you, ac
cept you, want you, let you hurt us, be blank slates for your desires. You are entitled to us but we're not even allowed to call you what you are.

When the words and threats come into your inbox or onto your timeline, assessing the danger is different. You don't know if the person behind the
cunt
or
you need a good dick
is a teenager who is showing off—though teenagers are capable of hurting women too—or if it's someone you know or someone who will show up where you work to get a better look. Once someone left a comment under a picture of a meal I made for my daughter that called me a bitch, and when I went to look at the man who had said this, the profile picture showed the hairless chubby face of a boy, thirteen years old at the most.

I have become too exhausted with men online to interact with well-meaning information seekers in real life. I get to speak to students, tell them about my work. Always, without fail, after the talk is given the first question is asked by a man. The first question is always some version of “What about me?” Ignoring men—whether romantically or rhetorically—is existential violence to them.

When my daughter was one year old some men decided to do a podcast about me, “revealing” who I am. The death threats started coming and so we left our house for a little while and stayed with friends in Manhattan who happened to have an extra bedroom. I knew these men's names, the ones who incited the threats. The ones who made videos of groups of them chanting about not wanting me to suck their dicks, as if that was the most
offensive thing in the world to me. But their lack of anonymity didn't help me—I could report them to the authorities, and I did. But some men, men who have names, are careful. They don't say outright,
You should kill her
; they say,
I'm not saying someone should shoot her,
but . . .

It is easy to pretend this is funny. That it rolls off your back. Online especially, where sexists misspell regularly and sound ridiculous and silly. And so I will answer your obnoxious tweet calling me a whore or a cunt with a GIF of Jennifer Lawrence giving a sarcastic thumbs-up. I will mock your misspellings; I will make a joke of them. Because it's what people want to see—that you can handle this hate in stride.

In the same way that as a teenager I knew what men liked and became an expert in feigning whatever it was that they wanted to see, now I do the same for everyone else. You perform your strength, your sense of humor, your personality so that it is palatable, easily consumed in small, sweet, bite-sized pieces. The Internet is good for that.