Naming Assault

Trauma is a flash. Fractured memory. It sneaks up on you, when you see scars on other people, when you are reminded of splintered pieces of those memories by the present. An Access Hollywood tape. A hearing. A news story that doesn’t call assault assault. Trauma continues to affect us long after the event takes place, lingering on, like fingertips on your scalp that never really go away. When you bury trauma, when you do not name it, you wither from the inside out. 

When I first met him, it was at a party that I felt so cool to be able to attend. I was in middle school, and my cousin and her friends were sophomores or juniors in high school. At the party, I remember my skin crawling when he told me that if I put on twenty pounds, he would want to fuck me.

I have always had large breasts and been curvier than my peers, though my actual weight has fluctuated my whole life, from a 2 to a 12 and everything in between. This particular body seems to invite others—my mom’s boss, men at the Gasparilla Parade in Tampa, classmates, professors, managers, other women, and co-workers—to comment on it, to stare at it, to monitor the different versions of my body that ebb and flow with the years and my bipolar moods. From reminders about “carbs” and what “healthy” is (skinny), to drive-by “nice tits” to a “I love bigger girls,” to “I had to get used to your body.” I was taught this very pointedly when, as a slightly chunky 4th grader, I was enrolled in Weight Watchers, the meetings for which constituted public weighing and announcements of losses (which came with praise) or gains (which came with sad affirmations that next week would be better).

My body has always been open season for aggressive, sexual, and demoralizing language, deployed by both strangers and people who love and care about me, from childhood through adulthood. This affected how I viewed my body and others’ access to it for the majority of my life. 

In the years that followed the party, he commented on my body most times I had interactions with him in group settings. I had no idea that years later he would make me feel more unsafe, and I wouldn't know what to call it or how to talk about it for over ten years, after I came out as gay (with bi traits).

More than ten years after that party at my cousin’s, I had completed three years of graduate coursework working towards my PhD. Immersed in theory, I considered myself a proud feminist, even if deeper understanding of intersectionality came later. I talked about bodily autonomy, empowered my young women and gender non-conforming students to stand up for themselves, shared articles about the curbing of abortion rights, and railed against men who violated women. But, with all that objective knowledge, I still never internalized it. Additionally, I did not really have a handle on my bipolar disorder until my 30s. 

A woman, a feminist, should be in control of her own body and her mind, so I was not sure where that left me as I was dealing with the tyranny of my moods and insecurity in my self-perceptions. If I had these intense feelings, which ones were legitimate?

I had spent my life disconnected from my body. Hating my body, I tortured it—starving, purging, over-exercising, looking at food as a necessary and unsatisfying evil. I hated my body so much that I felt like someone was granting me a favor if they wanted to touch it. Something I should accept because, if they could see past this body I hated, it meant they really cared about me. Come on, a girl called "carny arms" in middle school (according to boys on the bus) and parents whose psyches are grounded in a belief that skinny is healthy and food is the enemy, had no hope. I look at pictures of myself from different periods where I was objectively “small,” and I get angry and sad because no matter what size I was, all I saw was “bigness” when I was living in that body. It took a lot of unlearning to be able to remind myself that “big” is arbitrary: All bodies are good bodies. Including mine.

But this strong intersectional feminist who tries to love herself as she is was not who I was that spring, when I was cowering, cornered in the shower, wrapping myself in the shower curtain while he grabbed at my wet, naked body and laughed, cackling with eyes darting all over my bare flesh—flashing, gleaming, erratic. I can still hear the sound bouncing off the walls of the tiny, dingy bathroom, the scrape of the shower rings when he flung the curtain open. But more than anything, the laughter. 

Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony at the Kavanaugh hearing mentioned the laughter of Kavanaugh himself and his friends the night she was assaulted. I froze, hearing that detail and then sobbed. There's so much I don't remember about that night. But I can hear the laughter still.

Because the sound of laughter when you are terrified of what's next is jarring and unforgettable. You can’t shut it out when you close your eyes hoping that when you open them, he is gone. I know that her story is true, that my story is true, even though it hurts people and ruins reputations. That is the cost for the abuser; the cost to the victim is much greater and takes much longer to repair.

There's a lot missing from my journal from that week, too. I couldn't reconcile it on the page, not in text messages or Gchats with my friends or cousin, not to my boyfriend, not to myself. I thought I'd invited the violation. We'd gone to a bar. We had drinks. I had two, he had more. I remember mostly talking to him about my boyfriend, how I was so in love with him and hurting because I felt empty from giving and not getting in return. I was hoping for some insight, from his best friend and roommate, an easy or fix to alleviate this unrequited love. But instead, he told me that my boyfriend was no good, that I should move on because he didn't really care about me much. I thought that sounded about right because I didn’t feel good about myself. 

Being disconnected from self, from my body, gave me problematic axes from which I structured my relationships. Mentally ill and committed to seeming “fine,” gay and committed to seeming “straight,” struggling with eating disorders and committed to seeming “healthy”: at all costs, the performance must go on.

These were the hinge points of my identity, combatting with each other on the night I was assaulted as I tried to find written and oral words to pin down an experience that haunted me for a decade. At the same time that I was counseling students who had faced sexual assault, I was burying mine, my sexuality, and my warped view of my body. 

I remember getting in the shower. Leaving my clothes on the floor. He came in. The laughter. The grabbing. Asking to see more. Laughing. Asking to see my body piercing. I didn’t remember telling him I had one. I am still not sure I did. Did my boyfriend tell him? Were they conferring about my body without my consent?

I remember myself saying “get out” over and over. I might have laughed too, but it wasn't because it was funny or I enjoyed it. My own laughter is a thread in the moments I have been harassed and assaulted, a survival mechanism incited by a lack of safety that pushed me to be a part of the “humor” of objectifying me. I know I told him to leave; he eventually did. I didn't know whether to stay in the shower and hope he went to bed, or if I should hurry and run to my boyfriend's room.

I can't remember what I decided, but when I opened the door he was there, grabbing again, laughing again, lifting up the folds of my towel. I blamed myself for not grabbing pajamas first and his access to my naked body. I don't remember how I got away, but I crawled into bed with my guy, cried, and squeezed my eyes hard. I barely slept. I hoped that it was alcohol. If I just never drank with him again, then I would be safe, then I would not be in this position. I blamed myself. As victims often do. 

But it wasn't the alcohol. I realized when he came in the morning after my boyfriend left for work and crawled into bed with me. I woke up with his arms around my waist, squeezing tight like a snake. I couldn't breathe.

I told him he needed to get out, but he didn't let go. I froze. I was paralyzed thinking about what could happen next. He was holding on so tight, it was uncomfortable, but I said nothing else. I can't remember how he left. I can't remember if I said something or if he couldn't go through with it or if he was just fucking with me because his best friend didn’t like me much and he didn’t value me in any real way. But he left, and I was safe.

When I wrote in my journal later, what I said over and over was that he saw me naked. He saw me naked. That was the great sin for me. He saw my body, my weakness, without permission. This expression, “he saw me naked,” showed action that I couldn’t accept. I didn’t write it in a passive voice, but my mind still interpreted it that way. At the time, I couldn't write about his fault in this. How his fingers touched my skin, how I worried about how much more it could be.

The day after I was sexually assaulted in and out of the shower by his friend, my boyfriend and I were supposed to go to dinner, where my assaulter worked. I was dreading it all day. I was screaming in my head, but I said nothing. I acted as if I had a normal night with a normal shower and a normal morning where a boa constrictor didn’t squeeze me until I was almost out of air.

We go to dinner; he is our server. Over dinner I tell him what happened. I told him in bits and pieces, he is horrified, I think, I don't remember. I do remember him saying he was “sorry it happened.” It happened. It wasn't done to me. I felt this to be true too.

I assume at some point they talked about it, they lived together for over a decade. But maybe not. Maybe they did and he didn't tell me. Maybe he did, and he did tell me, but it didn't validate me, so I buried it. I just wanted to forget and it seemed like my boyfriend did too. 

I think about all the times I was in a group with my abuser. All the things he said about my body, about other women’s bodies. I have no memory of anybody ever calling him out on it, holding him accountable. Some of the women in his gaze objected, but I remember no male friend of his saying to stop. Usually, it was passed off as who he was, and even the people I reached out to after—fellow women and feminists who loved me—were dismissive of his behavior.

This is what we heard when the Access Hollywood tape came out. When women came out against Kavanaugh and the slew of men who have harmed women. Boys will be boys. Locker room talk. But what does it mean when that locker room talk is a philosophy and an ethics, a way of moving and being in the world? What does it mean when this philosophy so often leads to violence? When is the abusive nature the crux of who somebody is, when their sexist worlds and objectification of women become tangible actions, become harm, become part of the trauma story of a woman? How many women’s traumas are buried, questioned, gaslit, and self-silenced because the world has confused us so much about our worth and bodies that we can’t even say out loud that someone did something to us we did not want before we will hold the perpetrators accountable?

I never put the event in the shower and what happened a few weeks later together, but my boyfriend of nine months broke up with me shortly after that night, just before I was moving back to the same city as he was to be with a terminally ill family member. So maybe there was another narrative that entered the void that was my missing truth. I was worried about ruining someone's reputation. More than that, I was worried about my own physical safety and mental wellbeing.

Even though this person said something disgusting to me at thirteen, was offensive to me and many people in my presence, and would send me disconcerting messages over the years on Facebook, I never unfriended him. In life or on the internet. I never blocked him. I saw him in groups over the years. I gave him access to me even after the repeated harassment, assault, and trauma he caused. Why? Perhaps due to my own low self-worth, but perhaps because nothing happened to him. Perhaps because other aggressions from men that plagued my life made me feel like this was what becoming a woman was.  

He died last year. He was in his 30s, and he was not sick. It was shocking, but the biggest shock for me was how both visceral and fragmented the returning memories of that night were and the deep-seated feeling that lingered in my bones, reverberating from the assault ten years ago to the present. When he died this past summer, everything came back. When my newsfeed was flooding with essays about his love, his kindness, his amazing partnership, I crawled inside myself. I felt the terror and the pain and then the seething anger that developed as I had started to name what happened over the last few years. 

I texted my ex-pseudo-boyfriend. I told him I was sorry for his loss, and I was. I didn't say anything nice about his friend, I didn't tell him I wasn’t sad in the same way. I don't know what I wanted in reaching out to him. But the biggest memory I have of the three of us is that night in the shower. The tension. The terror. The rupture. And then the abandonment. 

Society guards men's reputations. Downplaying comments about grabbing women by the pussy, electing a misogynist with a history of sexual violence and harassment to the highest office in the land, and, like Kavanaugh, validating them when in false indignation they raise their voices and cry about their innocence, drowning out the steady, measured, sometimes pained, sometimes angry tone of the women stating their truths. And now I am stating my truth.

Perhaps it sounds like I am being punitive, that I am working to tarnish a multifaceted individual who should not be reduced to his (I hope) worst deed. And he was multifaceted. And I am sure the people who loved him loved lovable qualities. But both things are true. He was a caretaker and a friend and partner, and he was also the cackling man in the shower devouring my vulnerable body and fear with pleasure. Both are true.

And just because he was capable of good, doesn't mean that what happened to me was not serious, or not another, darker part of what he was capable of. 

I write not to ruin his reputation, though people close to me will read this and perhaps deduce who he is. I doubt many who knew him would be shocked given how vocally he sexually harassed others when I knew him, but maybe he changed. I never responded to the last message he sent before he died, a month before I came out as a lesbian and less than a year before he died. I looked at the thread when he died, to see the proof of who he was, but there was only the one message there: “How long you in town for? How’s life?”

I unfriended him a week after he died. I didn't have the courage until he was gone and there would be no repercussions, no anxiety, no societal pressure to explain unchaining my existence from his. For so many years, I felt like what happened was my fault, that I deserved it. Because this is what comes with bodies like mine. Because no one else named it—and I couldn't even name it—it didn’t really happen in the way I remember.

This is the way you remember when trauma affects your brain. And it was trauma to experience, and it was also trauma to relive when he died. But now I have named what happened. For so many years, we have been taught that predatory behavior goes along with masculinity, that in fact, oppression, power, and control are largely what masculinity is centered on. But the history and language of trauma is more important, more truthful, than the reputation and narrative of the oppressor; it is more important than seeming fine. 

What he did to my body does not define its use or my worth. I was sexually assaulted by a friend and man who the world thinks is kind. What I have learned is that my body is for joy, in touch and self-praise. I love my body, I love women, and I am working to love myself more every day.

Casey Catherine Moore is a bipolar, bisexual activist, writer, and high school teacher in Washington, DC. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina with a focus on Classics, Women’s and Gender Studies, and queer theory. She has published articles in academic journals and volumes that focus on gender and sexuality in the ancient world, particularly queerness and gender divergence, pop culture, LGBTQ+ rights, educational equity, and other social justice issues. Her work appears in the Comparatist, Cultural Perspectives on Language and Film, S/tick, and is forthcoming with Sinister Wisdom and Horrorscope, and she has been a featured poet with Mind Gravy Poetry and Day Eight. Casey uses her background in theory and commitment to activism and justice to teach writing with an intersectional lens that incorporates real-world issues and promotes equity.