Juxtaposition by Nancy Townsley
“thousands of miles to go to reach that elusive place called True Equality”
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Does anyone else find it ironic that within the span of a single week a judge in California sentenced convicted rapist Brock Allen Turner to just six months in jail and Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to clinch a major political party's nomination for President of the United States?
I do. I find it immensely ironic, a juxtaposition females across the country should take more than a few moments to consider. We've come a long way, baby, but whether or not Clinton rises to the White House, we still have thousands of miles to go to reach that elusive place called True Equality, a space and time in which we women are admired for our smarts, our guts and our humanity—independent of the way we look, or dress, or act—and treated as such.
Clinton's feat “bent the arc of history,” a number of observers have said, in a way that even the election of our nation's first black president eight years ago could not. Yet beyond political history, cultural history or religious history, the arcs of our personal histories also bend and sometimes break in the face of events we cannot control.
In 1975, when I was a freshman in college, I was infatuated with a guy named Jim. One Friday night I hitched a ride to his campus, a half-hour down the road from mine, and met him at a party. We both drank rum and Coke. Later that night we went back to his apartment and sat down on his bed. The Moody Blues were playing on the stereo. I still remember saying “no” a lot. Jim did not listen, and he assaulted me. Technically he did not rape me, but he hurt me physically and emotionally, claiming a piece of me that trusted before but did not fully trust after, affecting for the whole of my life the way I would approach and interact with others. I did not have that perspective back then. I only wanted to escape that room and that person. I found the friend who'd given me the ride and she drove me back to the safety of my dorm room. I checked myself over and the next day I went to the infirmary. No one asked any questions—not the nurse, not the doctor, not even me. I was terrified I could be pregnant. I was worried I might have gotten a disease.
I considered myself lucky that neither of those things turned out to be true. But still I did not tell anyone. I didn't tell my parents, because I was afraid they'd make me come home from school. I didn't tell my friends, because I was afraid they'd think less of me. I didn't tell the police because it didn't occur to me there was justice to be won. Mostly, I was ashamed; what happened to me had to have been my fault. That was the way we thought in the 1970s, and it's the way I still think some days, even now. That's what Jim did to me.
Fast-forward 40 years, and the unnamed victim of 20-year-old Turner, a former Stanford University student and star swimmer, has had her day in court. She stood up in front of a room full of people and told them in graphic detail what he did to her the night he took away her dignity, how he pushed up her bra, pulled her underwear down over her boots and raped her while she was unconscious. The alcohol they both consumed wasn't the point, she told them. It was the behavior of the male toward the female, a reprehensible act carried out behind a dumpster, that was on trial. Her story is all over the Internet, and she is being praised as bold and unflinching, a woman who for an entire year before Turner's sentencing fought for herself, for her family, for women everywhere who not only do not deserve to be sexually assaulted but who deserve to live in their own sacred, unique bodies, free of anxiety and fear.
She is, of course, all of those things—and also, no doubt, a zoo of ever-changing emotions connected to her collective life experience, framed in part by a terrible incident that occurred in mere minutes on a night that will always be for her the definition of darkness.
“I don’t need labels, categories to prove I am worthy of respect, to prove that I should be listened to,” Turner's anonymous victim told a Bay Area news outlet. “I am coming out to you as simply a woman wanting to be heard. Yes, there is plenty more I’d like to tell you about me. For now I am every woman.”
In the powerful statement she read aloud to her assailant, a lengthy unwavering missive that has gone viral online, she raised a fist that insists we women are worthy: of equal pay for equal work, of keeping what we have earned, of the opportunity to nurture our relationships, raise our families and reach for our dreams in peace. May her words serve as a source of solace and a beacon of hope for all of us that perhaps—for the first time ever and within our lifetimes, a generation apart—a member of the gender that is half the population will finally occupy the highest office in the land.
The drumbeat is getting louder, and it's a very good thing. I hope that by the time my daughters have daughters, everyone will be dancing to its rhythm.
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Header image courtesy of Brendan Clinch. To view his photo essay, "Flameless Grenade," go here.
Nancy Townsley’s work has most recently been published at Role Reboot, Brain, Child Magazine, NAILED Magazine, The Riveter Magazine, runnersworld.com and Bleed, a literary blog from Jaded Ibis Press. She lives in Scappoose, Oregon, on a floating home along the Multnomah Channel.