wanted, objectified, exploited

“She had gone along with what the piano teacher wanted because she felt sorry for people who wanted things so badly.” ~ Alice Munro, Corrie

There was a time in my 20s when I felt obliged to respond to most anyone who was interested in me. If a man turned to look at me in the street, I checked my posture; if he smiled, I smiled back. This behavior was in contrast to how I was otherwise, which was pretty self-possessed. It was a closet behavior. I don’t think people who knew me knew that I behaved like this.

The irony is that I thought when a man was looking at a woman stranger lasciviously or he made noises or comments, that he was a weak man; infantile, responding to juvenile impulses. And so, like Alice Munro’s protagonist, I felt superior ... but still obligated to respond. This, of course, is crazy logic. Men who ogle women are just ill-mannered boors.

My feeling of power came from being sexually used by men when I was a child and teenager. You'd think that would make one feel powerless, but their lack of control made me feel in control. Underlying the perversions and desperation of unjust people is vulnerability from fear or from wanting something so badly. They seemed like simple brute animals to me. They could take my body, but not my mind, and I quietly watched myself being exploited, like a child sociologist gathering information.

Around 1980, while I was living in West Hollywood, I got an obscene phone call. It started with heavy breathing and “dirty” words muttered in a vaguely English accent. I listened quietly and then he stopped because I neither hung up nor spoke. There was a moment of silence and then I said, “What do you want?” He repeated, “cunt”… “fuck” … whatever he was saying. It was trite, run-of-the-mill. I said, “No, what do you really want?” He hung up.

A few days later he called back. Same thing: breathing, muttering. I greeted him with a cheery hello as if he were an old friend and asked again what he wanted. This time he was quiet and after a moment I hung up. Over the next year he called often and we developed a rapport. He said his name was Jeffrey, which I spelled as “G-e-o-f-f-r-e-y” in my head. Sometimes I’d say that I was busy and couldn’t talk. If I had a friend over I would hang up and casually say, “Oh that’s my obscene phone caller.” But other times I spoke to him for maybe an hour. Our interaction was thus: He told me his sexual interests and I would tell him how mundane they were and guide him toward more perverse, “advanced” interests. He’d give them a yea or nay and then I’d pry into why these things did or did not suit him. It was a power game in which I was the authoritative, confident woman and he was the weak, insecure man. I became the obscene respondent to what became an almost demure caller. He relied on me; I could tell.

I even went so far as to tell him to meet me in public. I chose Book Circus, a pornography bookstore patronized mostly by gay men, at the corner of the street where I lived. I told him we could play a game: we would guess who the other was and when he called next we would tell one another what we thought. I went to Book Circus but he didn’t and when he called again, he told me he was afraid. I felt sorry for him. I was the one in charge of this perverse exchange.

Recently I was reminded that when I was a teenager I had a group of friends who were boys who did not sexualize me (although I was having sex with other guys at that time). Our bond was over music; British rock to be specific -- Humble Pie, Small Faces, Slade, Manfred Man, etc. I was accepted as a person with music knowledge, rather than as a chick. A few of the guys went on to be in heavy metal or punk bands that had minor success and I eventually worked in the music business. The most successful friend was my closest pal, Kevin, who was the lead singer in a Billboard-charting heavy metal band, Quiet Riot. Before all that, before he was even in a band, Kevin and I would sit in his room afterschool listening to albums and studying the sleeve notes, or spend hours in records stores. We also got pretty good at stealing records.

One day Kevin told me he met a girl who said she put lotion all over her body everyday. He told me this as if I were not also a girl who perhaps did the same thing. There was something pantingly, pathetically sexual about his wonderment and it felt like a breach of our unspoken boundaries. It made me feel embarrassed as a girl. After that he paid attention to me differently and one day asked me to take off all my clothes so he could “just look.” This is what I think 4 years old do but he pleaded and I felt sorry for him so I obliged. That was the beginning of the end of our friendship; that, and also because he went to a psychic who told him he would become rich as a singer so he stopped dissecting records with me and spent hours learning how to sing. That was so boring. He died a few years ago of a drug overdose in a Las Vegas hotel room, as a rich singer.

I grew up in that generation in which women were supposed to be delighted and validated by male overtures. I found it really hard to rebuff an advance, or not respond to a hiss, a gratuitous smile, a muttered comment, a direct stare without feeling like I would be labeled a “bitch.” I can’t say why it mattered more -- not just to me, but many women -- what went on in the mind of a male stranger rather than my own peace of mind. Maybe it’s mostly uneducated women, or women who were sexually abused, or feminine women, or proletariat women, or heterosexual women -- but I know I’m not the only one who, in my 20s an 30s, responded to men with a culturally ingrained feeling that I was chattel despite my innate feminism.

In the late 1980s I had to make changes in my demeanor. I had a baby daughter who I was entirely focused on, I really wasn’t paying attention to boorish male behavior. I started feeling panicked about the way men responded to me. At the same time, I had a wonderful husband who I trusted, who treated me and other women as equals, and while I chose him as a husband because he was such a good guy and this is something I knew in my gut, I didn’t have a gut instinct for dangerous or predatory men. In the few short years that I wasn’t paying attention, I was the recipient of behavior that ranged from a man commenting, while I sipped coffee over a book in a restaurant, that he got vibes that I wanted to sleep with him, to being molested twice in stores in broad daylight.

It’s just a basic truth that New York City is a man’s town. Men move way more freely in the city than women do and they commandeer public space. It really is virtually impossible for a young woman to get from one place to another without having her thoughts interrupted by male attention. But that’s just the way of the city. My solution in the 80s, was to be on hyper-alert all the time and ignore every man who paid attention to me. This wound up making me angry. I’m a social person and I need to live socially with other human beings. When I came out in the mid-90s, I went through a spell of “man hating” although that didn’t feel right either because there are several men who I love very much, so I ditched that bad idea.

What I learned fairly recently is that I don’t belong to anyone other than myself. It took decades of lessons for me not just to know this, but to feel it. Starting over again here in New York City was about reclaiming my body, my personhood. I lost sight of that. For too many years I had been able to disconnect, dissociate and go along with being objectified and exploited. When I moved back here six months ago, I made a pact with myself to interact differently with people based on integrity, which I’ve always wanted to have so badly. I don’t let lovers and friends choose me, I choose them. Maybe that sounds callous but it’s about not feeling obliged to owe something to anyone who shows an interest. Basically, I’ve learned how to say no.