Search Results for: California

Ugly, Bitter, and True

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Suzanne Rivecca | Zyzzyva | April 2018 | 84 minutes (16,714 words)

 

The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. –Michel de Montaigne

 

There’s a tiny park on Hyde Street in San Francisco, on the cable car line, and for about a year I half-heartedly planned to kill myself in it. The park is slightly sunken, set off from the street, mostly concrete: one of those wedged-in, rarely utilized “mini-parks” common to this part of the city. There are a few rickety maroon-painted benches, a banner of tattered Mexican party flags, some scattered plants and trees. Sometimes, on warm nights, people sit there and eat ice cream cones from the famous ice cream parlor on the corner. Sometimes people take their dogs there to pee. But most of the time it’s empty.

I zeroed in on it because it’s near my apartment and ill-lit. I’d made only a cursory stab at formulating the logistics. Mostly I fantasized in broad strokes, visualizing the final result rather than the step-by-step labor. I knew this much: I wanted to put my California ID in my pocket, along with a piece of paper with my sister’s contact information, swallow a bunch of Xanax with alcohol, and hang myself from a tree. I didn’t think about what I’d use to hang myself, or what I’d stand on to reach the tree, or what kind of knot I’d tie. I didn’t even know which tree. My reluctance to hammer out these details probably indicated a lack of genuine resolve. Or maybe it was just indicative of the bone-shaking agitation that made it impossible to focus on anything intently enough to make a plan.

I walked by the park almost every day, but found it hard to enter. Sometimes I’d stand on the sidewalk and just stare into it, my heartrate accelerating. I knew this was the place, but I didn’t want to go in and scope out coordinates and vantage points. If it was going to happen, I didn’t want to be methodical about it. I was waiting for some trigger that would make it inevitable: some fresh humiliation, some galling failure. Something that would make it all fall into place, get the ball rolling organically, negate the need for foresight. I may have also been waiting for an irrefutable reason not to do it at all.

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The Next Level of Commitment: Revealing our Money Secrets

Christopher Robbins / Getty, Composite by Katie Kosma

Vanessa Golenia | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,692 words)

 

“Should we tell each other how much we make?” I asked Peter, trying to sound casual while in bed enjoying post-coital ice cream. In the late summer of 2016, after 15 months of shuttling back and forth between our apartments in Ubers and exposing our roommates to the nightly soundscape of our sex life, we decided it was time to move in together. We were having fun deciding what colors to paint the walls, and which pieces of furniture to combine, but had so far avoided any discussion of money.

Part of it was my fault. I had no interest in talking about incomes, believing that when you’re in love, you’re in love — fuck the money. Why talk about numbers when you can instead focus on finding out what he thinks about the afterlife, or learn the juicy details of his last breakup, or memorize how he takes his coffee (a shot of espresso with whole milk in a handmade ceramic cup)?

But the main reason we’d avoided talking about money for so long was that there was a significant income gap between us and neither of us felt comfortable finding out just how wide it was.

Peter is a visual artist and it’s common knowledge that unless you have a trust fund or a wildly successful career, artists don’t make a lot of money, especially in a place like New York City where a pastrami sandwich from Katz Deli costs $22 and a parking space in a dimly lit garage costs $600 dollars a month (enough to cover rent in other cities). Most artists are barely scraping by here — constantly making empty promises to each other about banding together and moving to Detroit.

Like most artists, Peter didn’t make enough money to live off sales of his paintings and photographs alone, regardless of how compelling I thought they were. He had a full-time job as a gallery director and took freelance jobs installing art and curating private collections. I had no idea how much that paid, but the more I got to know him, the more I sensed it wasn’t much.

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Speak Truth to Power

Nastasic / Getty, Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Lacy M. Johnson | Excerpt adapted from The Reckonings: Essays | Scribner | October 2018 | 32 minutes (6,472 words)

The first time I admit in public to having been kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with, I am at a nonfiction reading at the university where I work. I’ve given enough readings now that I’m usually no longer nervous, but as I sit in the front row at this reading, waiting for my turn to approach the podium, I feel profoundly ill. Because I was, some time ago, a graduate student at this same university, audience members include my former professors and mentors—people I now consider colleagues and friends. Also in the audience are former students, current students, future students, as well as people I’ve never met before, and for all I know will never meet again. One reader goes before me, but I don’t hear a word he says. My hands shake as I hold the book I will read from—still only a galley copy then. My legs nearly buckle underneath me as I stand from my chair. My armpits swim. Bile burns the base of my esophagus. The blood rising to my face tells me that what I am about to do is shameful, embarrassing, wrong. But for 14 years, I have kept a silence. Today I want to break it.

The blood rising to my face tells me that what I am about to do is shameful, embarrassing, wrong. But for 14 years, I have kept a silence. Today I want to break it.

The story of Philomela seems relevant here — that ancient cautionary tale against speaking about rape, which is in many ways about the impossibility of speaking about rape. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela is considered a minor character — a princess from Athens who is raped by a somewhat less minor character, who happens to be her sister’s husband, King Tereus, a tyrant from a war-waged kingdom across the sea from Philomela’s home in Greece. After the rape — after she has torn her hair and scratched and beat her arms — she curses Tereus and vows to tell everyone what he has done. Half out of fear, half out of rage, Tereus draws his sword. But instead of killing her, as she hopes he will do, he cuts out her tongue to prevent her from speaking.

It seems impossible to speak about rape precisely because this threat of violent retribution is real, whether explicit or implicit, but also because of the widespread belief in our culture that rape is an aberration: a violence so unthinkable, so unfathomable, so taboo as to render it unspeakable. It is unspeakable, we are told, because respect for the sanctity and integrity of a woman’s body is the norm. This is, of course, not the way most women have experienced their own bodies throughout history. For most women, rape has been the norm and respect the exception.

I learn first from social media that, in the early-morning hours of August 12, 2011, a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, woke up in her front yard, still a little drunk, unsure how she got there. She learned by checking Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr what happened the night before. She got drunk at a party, where she was very possibly drugged, before a group of high school football players also at the party taunted her, urinated on her, carried her unconscious by her wrists and ankles from that party to another party, and to another, while they fingered her in public, in the back seat of a car, on the sidewalk as she vomited into the street. They flashed her breasts to anyone wishing to see, stripped off her clothes, and took turns slapping her with flaccid penises.

When her parents took her to the police station two days later to file charges, the pictures and tweets and videos bystanders recorded of “the incident” had mostly been removed. “My daughter learned about what had happened to her that night by reading the story about it in the local newspaper,” the girl’s mother tells the press. In a video recorded that night, one of the party-goers, Ohio State football player Michael Nodianos, jokes about men raping and urinating on a dead girl. Between each line, each riff, each variation on the joke, he and the person recording the video laugh hysterically.

“She’s deader than Obi-Wan,” Michael Nodianos sputters in the 12½ minute video to his own hysterical laughter.

She’s deader than Andy Reed’s son.
She’s deader than Chris Henry.
She’s deader than OJ’s wife.
They raped her harder than that cop raped Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.
They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl.
They raped her more than the Duke lacrosse team.
She is so raped right now, she is just a dead body.

During the rape trial in Ohio, it emerges that the person who recorded the 12½ minute video, in which Nodianos jokes about the rape, is the same person who recorded a video of one of the defendants molesting the victim in the back of a car. He’s a witness for the prosecution and has been given immunity for his testimony. Although he admits later deleting the video because he realized “it was wrong,” he says he recorded it because he thought the girl should know what had happened to her. It’s something he wanted her to see: how she was naked, molested, exposed. The witness admits it was his basement where the 12½ minute video is filmed. It’s his laughter we hear. It’s his hand trying to steady the camera. In another room of that same basement, maybe even while he is filming the video, another boy takes pictures of the 16-year-old girl: naked, unconscious, lying facedown on the floor.

Two boys, both juveniles, are found “delinquent” (the juvenile equivalent of guilty) in the case. “Such promising futures,” one anchor says on network television. At the reading of the verdict, one of the boys breaks down in tears in the courtroom, sobbing like a child: “My life is over. No one is going to want me now.”

The girl remains anonymous in all of this, though a few reports have carelessly revealed her identity and then quickly redacted it. It doesn’t matter; most of the people in the town already know who she is. She receives death threats. She is ostracized, abandoned by her friends. In the comments section of any of the articles about the case, she might be called a slur I won’t repeat. Her attorney speaks for the girl, says she feels relieved: “She just wants to get back to her normal life.” He’s nodding as he says this, as if this were not already “normal life” for many girls.

Each day, women and girls come forward to voice accusations against men who are famous or unknown, who are powerful or paupers. They voice accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Matt Lauer, and Peyton Manning; against men whose names we haven’t heard before at colleges and prep schools and high schools and middle schools, in hospitals and universities and prisons, in the military, in law offices, even in the White House. We are told that these accusations are the exception, or that this is an affliction particular to our present moment, or that these women are lying or trying to get even or get attention or extort money.

“The finest trick of the devil,” writes Baudelaire, “is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

Each day, women and girls come forward to voice accusations against men who are famous or unknown, who are powerful or paupers.

In Houston, where I live, a 16-year-old girl known simply as “Jada” comes forward to publicly accuse two men of drugging her at a party, gang-raping her, and posting pictures on social media of her unconscious body, one arm tucked behind her back, legs akimbo, naked from the waist down. That these men post these pictures without fear of the consequences is only proof they have no reason to believe there will be consequences. Jada was not the only girl at the party assaulted in this way. These same men, along with other adult men, drugged other girls, raped them, recorded video of themselves raping them, and posted these photos and videos to social media, where they are shared and shared and shared.

After her assault goes viral, Jada appears on MSNBC to speak with Ronan Farrow, who draws connections between her story and the story of his own family’s history of violence and abuse. That February, Ronan’s sister, Dylan Farrow, had penned an open letter about her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her famous and powerful father, Woody Allen. The New York Times published Farrow’s 936-word letter in an online column; six days later, the Times gave Allen 1,800 words in the print edition to respond, a retaliatory account in which he denies the accusations, calls them “ludicrous,” their malevolence “obvious.” According to Allen, the whole thing is a long-enduring revenge plot by Mia Farrow, Dylan’s mother, who was, he says, hysterical and vindictive that he had an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, herself a teenage girl when their affair began. In his account, Mia can’t be believed because of her own history of dating much older men, because of her spite at being spurned, because perhaps she lied about the paternity of her son Ronan — that Dylan’s experience is a fiction created by her mother, that he couldn’t have committed this crime because of his fear of enclosed spaces, that in fact the accusation is a crime and he is its victim.

When two men — Clinton Onyeahialam, who is an adult, as well as an unnamed juvenile — are arrested in December, Jada returns to MSNBC to speak with Ronan Farrow again. As before, she appears with a family friend, a self-described activist named Quanell X, who is her advocate, her spokesperson, helping to call out the police for dragging their feet and to draw media attention to the case. This seems to be Quanell X’s main skill. In 2011 he held a rally in Cleveland, Texas, in support of a group of 21 men who were later convicted of gang-raping an 11-year-old girl. At that rally, he blamed the girl’s parents for the men’s violence, blamed the girl, pointed to her social media profiles as evidence she had already been sexually active with adult men, accused the police of letting the investigation be run by the KKK — all of this in spite of the crime having been caught on video, which had gone viral by the time the girl went to the police. The excerpts of the video that could be shown over and over on the news were extremely graphic, though not as graphic as the portions that were not shown. All 21 men were convicted, but only because they had pled guilty to lesser crimes, some receiving sentences as minor as seven years of probation.

Quanell X is sitting beside Jada when Farrow asks how she feels about these two men being arrested, what she wants to see happen to them. There is a long pause. She blinks several times, then says, “I would like to see justice. That’s it.”

All across the country this situation is replicated with slight variations: a woman reports rape, is told that boys will be boys; a woman reports rape, is not believed. She is shamed. She is ostracized, traumatized, and retraumatized. At best, the woman’s life is forever and irrevocably changed. At worst, she self-destructs. Men, however, seem to thrive in a culture in which they can rape women with near impunity.

I know, I know. Not all men.

One man — a white professor in Georgia — learns his memoir has been rejected by a publisher YET AGAIN, around the same time that I give that reading at the university where I work. “What do I have to do to sell a memoir in this country?” he laments to his female colleague. “Get kidnapped and raped?” His female colleague thinks first of ignoring him, of saying nothing at all, but instead asks him if he is talking specifically about me, about my book. He says yes and makes some kind of James Frey reference, maybe accusing me of making the whole thing up to get attention and a publication. Months later, the female colleague resigns her job — I don’t know if the two things are related — and much later she tells me this story while standing in the kitchen of my house.


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Susan B. Anthony, writing in 1900, twenty years before women earned the right to vote, offers this: “No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized.”

I am on the phone with an editor at a women’s magazine known more for its sex advice than for its coverage of contemporary literature. The editor has a British accent — I think it is British anyway — and she is asking thoughtful, sensitive questions about my book and my life, about what connections I see between BDSM and sexual violence, if any, and about my advice to women who have survived sexual assault and domestic violence. It does not feel strange or uncomfortable to tell her about being raped. I cannot, after all, see her face.

After we hang up the phone, I don’t hear from her or anyone else at her magazine again until weeks later, just before the issue is scheduled to go to press, when the lawyer for the parent company of this magazine asks to see the police reports from my case, claiming they need to do due diligence to protect themselves against a defamation lawsuit from the man I accuse of kidnapping and raping me.

Keep in mind: I do not name this person — not in the book, and not in the interview. I give no identifying information about where the assault took place — not the city, not the state, not even the region. The man is an international fugitive, wanted on the same charges I recount in my book.

Nevertheless, the lawyer for the parent company for the women’s sex advice magazine is concerned this international fugitive might bring a defamation lawsuit against them, so he asks me to provide copies of the police reports from my case. This makes me very uncomfortable. But after gnashing over the idea for a couple of days, I agree to send the reports.

Hours later, the lawyer responds by saying that these reports are insufficient to satisfy their burden of proof. I might have forged the reports, the lawyer says; there’s nothing preventing me. Now he needs the police reports to come directly from the police department itself. I offer a contact name and number. The lawyer calls and the sergeant from the records department informs him that though, yes, she can confirm that there is indeed a warrant for the man’s arrest, and though, yes, she can confirm the exact charges, she cannot send him the records because the state has laws to preserve a victim’s confidentiality rights, which prevent the police department from releasing any information about the case. The lawyer then asks me to waive my confidentiality rights and ask the police department to send the files from my case directly to him. He alone will determine their veracity.

I learn at this moment that there are some people who will believe I am lying about what men have done to my body no matter what evidence I present to the contrary. I also learn it is not my responsibility to convince them.

I learn at this moment that there are some people who will believe I am lying about what men have done to my body no matter what evidence I present to the contrary.

Jon Krakauer points out in Missoula that, unlike murder, which results, very convincingly, in a dead body; or a kidnapping, which results in the clear absence of one; or even a violent physical attack, which results in medically verifiable wounds or contusions; rape is the only violent crime with a victim who is subject, and subjected, to doubt.

We find expressions of this doubt in our long and troublesome history of men deciding what rape is and what it is not. Several years ago, Representative Todd Akin of Missouri waxed ignorant on the phenomenon of so-called legitimate rape, wherein he opined that pregnancy never results from “legitimate rape” because a woman apparently “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Although this claim shows appalling ignorance about human biology, the choice to distinguish “legitimate rape” from other supposedly lesser crimes is not without precedent in the law. Many states, following the Model Penal Code created by the American Law Institute in 1962 to influence and standardize criminal lawmaking, still require prosecutors to prove that a man used force in order to find him guilty of raping an adult woman, and in every state, there is a distinction between the rape of an adult woman and the statutory rape of a girl, which, surprisingly, is a fairly recent development. For most of the history of this country, statutory rape existed only as a crime of “seduction,” punishable not by imprisonment but by fines.

Critics of harsher punishments claimed young girls should be held responsible for protecting themselves or for failing to: “In point of fact, the white girl of twelve anywhere throughout the civilized world, unless she is degenerate and imbecile, is abundantly qualified, so far as intellect is concerned, to protect her virginity if she so desires,” wrote Representative A. C. Tomkins of Kentucky in 1895. He opposed raising the age of consent since “sexual desire belongs equally to the male and female human being, and the law-makers of this state were then, and are now, unwilling to inflict the heaviest penalty of the law on the male when there is a possibility that the female is also to blame.” He goes on to make his case further against raising the age of consent from 12 by drawing on “science”—specifically the “scientific” fact that “negro girls” go through puberty earlier than white girls, become sexually active earlier than white girls, and are more “naturally sensual” than white girls—a “fact” he cites as proof that it is impossible to rape a woman of color.

I refer to this abominable text only because this “science” still survives today. We see evidence of it in our justice system, our literature, our television shows and movies. It survives as attitudes, as biases, as stereotypes, as bigotry.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou writes how, at seven years old, she is raped repeatedly by her mother’s boyfriend, who threatens to murder her brother if she speaks about what they’ve done. What we’ve done? she wonders. When the man’s crime is finally discovered, far too late, and when young Maya, then called Marguerite, is hospitalized with injuries and the man is finally arrested for his crimes, Marguerite testifies against him. The lawyer asks her if it was just the one time or if it was many times, and Marguerite feels herself caught in a trap: if she tells the truth and says yes, it was many times, the lawyer will use it as proof of her “natural sensuality,” that she in fact could not have been raped by this adult man; and yet if she lies and says no, it was just the one time, she fails to convey the full force of his crimes against her. No is what she feels everyone in the courtroom expects her to say, even wants her to say. The lie enters her mouth and she lets it escape.

Her rapist is sentenced to a year and a day in prison, though his lawyer arranges his release later that afternoon. That night, he is found beaten to death, likely by Marguerite’s brothers and uncles, seeking justice where the courts failed to deliver it. She is struck mute with guilt about his death and does not speak for the next six years.

Rape is the only violent crime with a victim who is subject, and subjected, to doubt.

When an institution like a court, or a police department, or a district attorney’s office, or a university, or a family does not listen to a woman who speaks about her sexual assault, they betray an attitude that women’s speech does not matter — not when we give testimony, not when we make appeals, not when we report the violent crimes committed against us, not even when we say, very clearly, no.

Perhaps the lesson isn’t, then, that the violation of women’s bodies is unthinkable, but that men wield immense power when they think about, plan, and perform an act that we are told is forbidden. To be sure, one can often find pleasure in doing things that are expressly forbidden. We can each, no doubt, think of examples from our own youth. And yet I do not believe that the exclusive reason men rape is because they find pleasure in breaking a taboo. There are also taboos against cannibalism, but we hear of people eating other people almost never. But men rape women every day.

* * *

“I don’t hear her say anything,” Bill Cosby tells a team of lawyers during his deposition in the Andrea Constand civil suit. “And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.” Cosby’s euphemisms and innuendoes call to mind an image of the violence without the language of violence. To speak frankly, to admit drugging and raping this woman, would produce horror and revulsion, because drugging a woman in order to rape her is supposedly an unthinkable act. Cosby’s language is playful, as if the woman—what she says, what she does, what she might want for herself, the goals she might have set for her life—are entirely beside the point. It’s as if the fact of his eventual conquest has the power to remove his culpability for committing a crime, to remove the crime from history, to remove it even from the realm of possibility.

This trick, in which a man disappears himself (or is disappeared) from his actions, isn’t magic. We perform it on behalf of men whenever we talk about this violence that is supposedly unthinkable. We talk about the number of women and girls who are raped—in high school, in college, in marriages, in an attic, on a Tuesday—but not the number of men who rape women and girls. We talk of the women and girls who are murdered, kidnapped, found decapitated or frozen or barely alive in the front yard, or on the porch, or tossed on the side of the road, but not the number of men who murder, or kidnap, or maim, or destroy them. Nicole Brown Simpson was a “battered woman” before she was a dead one, but the man who beat her, and very possibly murdered her, escapes our sentences. We call Andrea Constand an “accuser,” a label we apply also to each of the dozens of women, individually and as a group, who have come forward to demand justice for being drugged and raped by Bill Cosby. Our language shields him, disappears him from the scene of the crime, transforms his crime into an allegation, a suggestion, a rumor.

This trick, in which a man disappears himself (or is disappeared) from his actions, isn’t magic.

The lawyers for Owen Labrie — a student at a private preparatory school in New Hampshire — disappeared him in exactly this way from accusations that he had raped a 15-year-old classmate. The girl’s testimony was harrowing: Labrie took her to a locked mechanical room, where he took off her pants and removed her underwear, where he kissed and bit her breasts as she was crying and telling him, “No, no, no,” where he scraped inside her vagina with his fingers, and held her hands above her head, and penetrated her with what she believed to be his penis. On the stand, Labrie denied this version of events, telling jurors, “I thought she was having a great time.” He denied penetrating her, denied that she had said no — although, when pressed by his lawyer about whether he had perhaps kissed the girl’s breasts too aggressively, he acknowledged that he “may have been a little carried away.”

If getting “carried away” is intelligible as any part of a defense, it is because some part of us believes that all men have this inside them — an instinct to which he had simply succumbed. And in the end, that defense succeeded. The prosecutors could not prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” to the jury — made up of nine men and three women — that the sex was “nonconsensual,” so they acquitted him on the charge of felony rape. But they could prove that he used a computer to lure a minor for sexual activity, a felony, and that he endangered a child, a misdemeanor, and these are the crimes for which he was convicted, along with 3 misdemeanor charges of sexual assault. He wept as the verdict was read, even though his defense had prevailed in what it set out to prove: that he was, in fact, just a “normal” young man.

* * *

“One in five women who goes to college will be assaulted,” Vice President Joe Biden says in a press conference. The year is 2014. A presidential task force has just released the results of a study on sexual assault on college campuses. I know these numbers are inaccurately low, since estimates predict that only 13 percent of women who are raped report the assault to authorities. The rest keep silent out of fear they’ll be shamed, fear of retribution, fear of invasive, inappropriate, and insensitive questions. “It’s a parent’s worst fear when you drop your daughter off at college,” the vice president says to his audience. “You say a little prayer for one thing: that your daughter will be safe. You pray that your daughter will be safe.”

The White House’s 1 Is 2 Many campaign launches with a PSA that stars Benicio del Toro, who is seated in a black leather wing chair in front of a fireplace in a wood-paneled room. “We have a big problem,” he begins, “and we need your help.” The problem, we are told by an A-list roster of celebrities like Dulé Hill, Seth Meyers, Daniel Craig, and Steve Carell, is sexual assault. The PSA encourages men to speak up, to act, to become part of the solution to the problem only they can name. The message is important and necessary, although it may be somewhat undermined by its spokespeople. Daniel Craig, for instance, is best known for reprising the role of James Bond, a character whose reputation for seducing women is topped only by his reputation for disposing of them. “If I saw it happening,” Daniel Craig says in the PSA, tilting his head to one side, “I’d never blame her. I’d help her.”

Del Toro continues: “If I saw it happening, I’d speak up.” It’s uncanny, really, because his characters don’t show this same moral fiber. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for instance, it’s Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke who speaks up, who acts, who intervenes when he finds his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo, sequestered in a hotel room with an underage “religious freak,” having plied her with LSD on the plane in order to more easily pressure her into sex once they reach the hotel. In the PSA, del Toro looks directly into the camera: “If she doesn’t consent, or if she can’t consent, it’s rape. It’s assault.”

Which is the real message? The franchise or the PSA? The paycheck or the community service? If our role models tell us they in fact have high respect for women and we all should too, how should we understand the roles they play that reinforce the opposite message: that a man’s value is determined by his virility, by the number of women he’s slept with, by his disregard for a woman’s body, her autonomy, her age? Do they mean it when they say that women matter? Do we matter or do we not?

* * *

I was 14 the first time a man raped me. It was February, Valentine’s Day, and he wore a baseball cap, stood with one hand plunged deep into his jean pocket; the other held out a bottle, offering a drink. We stood in a liquor store parking lot beside the highway. Where did I tell my parents I would be? He was a few years older than me. Tall, like a man, I remember thinking. What did I know? He was on the basketball team, over six feet tall. His mustache and chest hair appeared in earnest patches. He took a drag of his cigarette, blowing the smoke over one shoulder. He never took his eyes off me. What did he see? I lifted the bottle to my lips, tipped it back, and took a drink.

In the morning, my thighs were purpled with bruises from his sharp pelvic bones, a rust-colored stain on the sheet beneath me. My arm was sore at the shoulder, my lips swollen, full and smashed-looking in the mirror. I bent over the toilet while the night returned to me in heaves and waves: our lips met once, and then again, and then he was clawing and desperate. I wanted to move away from him, from what was approaching and unstoppable, and let a “no” fall from my mouth — then a string of them dripping like pearls. Afterward he dressed and slipped out the door. The bile in my stomach surged, acid and cinnamon and sweet.

When people heard what had happened they explained it back to me: “Slut,” they said. “Liar.” “Whore.”

That was ages ago, and very little about our situation has evolved. Then, as now, people will ask questions: What was that girl doing there in the first place? What clothes did she wear? To whom did she talk? At which jokes did she laugh? How did she hold her hand while she was laughing? Did she touch her tongue to her teeth? Did she cross or uncross her legs? What else had she done with her body that day? What about the previous day? What about the weeks or months or years before? What messages did she send, because he must have gotten the wrong ones. He was behaving as boys do, as men do. Men have needs. What did she expect? Then, as now, a community will coalesce to protect him — a chorus of accomplices, of friends, of parents and mentors and law enforcement officers, of district attorneys and judges, of lawmakers and teachers and neighbors, of celebrities and colleagues and football coaches and babysitters — who validate and corroborate and shield the man from the reach of the terrible consequences we might inflict. They have so much more at stake than only him.

* * *

Twenty-one years later, a few months after that first reading in the library at the university where I work, I am standing at the bottom of an outdoor amphitheater in Portland, Oregon, where the seats are filled with people. I feel certain the man who kidnapped and raped me when I was 21 is among them. I am planning, after all these years, to tell everyone what he has done. He’s here, I think. He has come to shoot me with a gun. But nothing, not even that, will prevent me from speaking.

And here I am, alive, still speaking.

If getting ‘carried away’ is intelligible as any part of a defense, it is because some part of us believes that all men have this inside them — an instinct to which he had simply succumbed.

* * *

“Maybe none of this is about control,” Margaret Atwood writes in The Handmaid’s Tale. “Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.”

“Power,” says Foucault, “is a set of relations between two persons.”

“Power,” says Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.”

“Power,” says Hannah Arendt, “belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.”

We all know that men have power as a group, but I want to be clear about something: women as a group do too.

Before Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others in Isla Vista, California, he had a long history of expressing hatred and violence toward women. He planned the crimes, and his premeditation is documented in YouTube videos he posted days and hours before the shootings, citing rejection by women as one of his motivations for the slaughter. In one of the videos he says, “I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.”

When women on Twitter begin pointing out that these attitudes of sexual entitlement are consistent with a broader, misogynistic, sexually aggressive culture, men on Twitter get defensive and assert that “not all men” are misogynistic or aggressive or homicidal. One woman — I wish I knew her name — begins tagging her tweets #YesAllWomen in response to the “not all men” argument, to make clear that, no, not all men are homicidal maniacs, but, yes, all women live in fear of those who are. Within days, millions of women everywhere in the world are tweeting their experiences of fear, intimidation, and harassment. At one point, there are as many as fifty thousand tweets a minute, each sharing an experience of everyday misogyny.

The backlash against #YesAllWomen is harsh, with women being trolled, harassed, insulted, and threatened. It happens again, years later, with #metoo, as women reveal they have been blacklisted, fired, sued. The threats and punishments are intended to silence us. In this, they must fail.

* * *

The phrase “speak truth to power” applies here. Often considered an 18th century Quakerism, a form of pacifist resistance against King George I of Britain, the phrase actually first appears in a letter from civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who was in fact a Quaker and who wrote a letter in August 1942 to the Quaker leadership urging them against providing spiritual support to troops being deployed in World War II. “The primary social function of a religious society,” Rustin writes, “is to ‘speak the truth to power.’ The truth is that war is wrong. It is then our duty to make war impossible first in us and then in society.”

As I see it, to speak truth to power means to struggle against various silences: the official silencing of a criminal justice system that claims to protect us but instead renders us mute; a cultural silence that seeks to discredit us before we even open our mouths; and the smaller, private silences we have sometimes imposed on ourselves. It is this last kind of silence I have found to be the most dangerous.

* * *

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Philomela does not end with Tereus cutting out her tongue. For a year, she remains imprisoned, weaving a tapestry that depicts the crime she suffered at this war-king’s hands — threads of deep purple on a white background. When the tapestry is finished, Philomela gives it to a servant, communicating to him through gestures to deliver it to her sister, the Queen. The servant obeys, not knowing what message the tapestry contains. The Queen understands the message, rescues her sister, and takes her back to the castle in secret. The two sisters conspire together to kill Tereus’s son, Itys, and serve him as dinner to the King. While feasting away, Tereus asks after his son. At this climactic moment, Philomela reveals herself, disheveled, disfigured, smeared in blood, and throws Itys’s head into Tereus’s lap. As he begins to understand what has happened to his only son, he flies into a rage and chases the two women out of the castle, through the woods, and into a field before the gods finally intervene and turn them all into birds.

In some translations, Philomela becomes a nightingale, doomed to sing her attacker’s name for all eternity: tereu, tereu. In others, her sister becomes the nightingale and Philomela is turned into a swallow, a bird that has no song at all.

Two things interest me about this story. The first is Philomela’s metamorphosis at the end, which is either justice or a further injustice, depending on your interpretation. The second, and more important, is her tapestry, an act of courageous speech that is not speech, this way of speaking out despite the impossibility of speaking. There is much to be learned from this.

To speak truth to power means to struggle against various silences.

Perhaps it is useful here to return to those famous lines by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” It is a powerful image. But though I have turned to these lines often, I think what she is saying has proved only partially true. Many women have told the truth about their lives, however impossible that may seem at the time, and the world has gone on pretty much as before.

As you must have realized by now, the world does not shatter after I admit publicly to being kidnapped and raped. My mentors hug me and offer kind words of praise and admiration. Yes, I have a few very awkward conversations in which it becomes clear that others find the subject of my rape a more uncomfortable topic than I do. I now realize this has little, if anything, to do with me and have stopped considering myself responsible for other people’s feelings about that. And though I felt compelled to protect my family all these years from the painful story I carried, my mother and I had the most honest conversation of our lives after she read my book. My husband, whose opinion matters to me more than that of any other person on this Earth, said if anything, he loved and admired me more. Though my fear was that this secret would come to define me as “that woman who got raped,” that I would be shamed, ostracized, shunned, what occurs with far more frequency is that a woman approaches me, soaking wet with her own tears. She says nothing, which communicates a story for which she has not yet found the words.

In the 1960s, Betty Friedan called domestic oppression “the problem that has no name.” We might now call the epidemic of sexual violence against women the problem that has no language.

If we are going to do the difficult work of grappling with these failures, it is not enough that we speak our truth to one another in private or behind closed doors, though this is an important and necessary step. I understand the fear of breaking a long-held silence. It is a fear that holds tremendous power. But if there is any hope for justice, we must speak truth to that power. We must tell anyone and everyone who will listen. And those who will not listen must be made to hear.

* * *

From The Reckonings: Essays by Lacy M. Johnson. Copyright © 2018 by Lacy M. Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

* * *

Lacy Johnson is the author of The Reckonings and the memoir The Other Side, which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Houston and teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University.

 

How I Fell In Love With Ranch Dressing

Tomas Ovalle / AP Images for Hidden Valley

When I was growing up, our refrigerator was stocked with a variety of condiments. From sriracha to sambal and lizano to tahini, the shelves were packed with options to accessorize any meal. We even had a corner devoted to mustards, each picked out on weekly trips to Brooklyn’s beloved Eagle Provisions (RIP) and each capable of tickling the tongue’s various flavor geographies (a favorite was a brand of German honey mustard, which possessed a soft smoothness coupled with a fiery after-taste).

One condiment we never stocked, though, was ranch dressing. Perhaps it was my father’s aversion to all things perceived bourgeois, perhaps he didn’t particularly like the taste of ranch (the only creamy condiment we habitually used was blue cheese dressing), or perhaps he never could quite figure out what exactly was ranch’s purpose — I didn’t fully appreciate the dressing until well after college, when I began to date my future wife, who grew up in western Pennsylvania, an epicenter of the dressing.

As I visited her friends and relatives in her hometown of Erie, PA, I came to appreciate the vitality of ranch on a daily basis. My wife used to sell pepperoni balls to raise money for her Girl Scout troop, and each frozen ball of bread and meat was accompanied by a tin of ranch. Restaurants are chosen based on the quality of their ranch dressing (each spot obviously has its own recipe); grocery stores carry a wide swath of options, ranging from the generic buttermilk-based, to ones flavored with cucumber, chipotle, and avocado. Ranch was inescapable, and with good reason: it’s delicious. Ranch has a beguiling and complex profile; not quite dominated by its spice blend, with enough fat and unctuousness to complement nearly every type of food. Ranch doesn’t just go well with salad — it stands up to fried foods and pizza, gives steamed and raw vegetables a flavorful boost, and complements a wide variety of proteins.

Ranch is as American as apple pie or barbecue (in Europe, the dressing is known as “the American dressing“). Created in the 1950s by a plumber from California, the dried spice mix (born of necessity as its creator, Steve Henson, concocted the blend while working construction in Anchorage, Alaska, lacking a consistent source of fresh vegetables and spices) and the subsequent application of buttermilk to make the dressing quickly attained cult status on the west coast, slowly moving eastward one application — from steakhouses to pizza and wings — at a time.

But for decades, ranch was still very much misunderstood, losing favor in the 1970s during a period in which the dressing was banned from diets because it was considered too fatty — our salads were always topped with the “healthier” option containing some form of vinaigrette. Yet there has been an uptick in recent years, which coincides with when I started to fall in love with the condiment. Ranch isn’t a condiment just for gluttonous hangovers or finicky eaters; as Henson likely envisioned when he began mixing, its range is limitless. Ranch has been the nation’s most popular salad dressing since 1990, and Hidden Valley, the Heinz of ranch, even began to market the condiment as “the new ketchup.”

Grub Street’s Chris Crowley documented how ranch has begun to influence not only the palette of mainstream America but also that of chefs, writing in 2016,

Now, ranch is front and center at some of the country’s favorite restaurants. Popular southern-food specialist Bobwhite Lunch Counter opts for ranch in its buffalo-chicken sandwich, while the sandwich artists at Court Street Grocers serve ranch-topped kale salad. Meanwhile, the trendy Mr. Donahue’s serves it with fried onions. At Chicago’s hugely popular neo-diner Au Cheval, ranch dresses a chopped salad with bacon and eggs. In St. Louis, there’s an all-things-ranch-dressing restaurant called twisted RAnCh.

And that popularity hasn’t abated, as restaurants have since begun to tinker with Henson’s recipe and push the bounds of what constitutes ranch. Take Charter Oak in Napa Valley, which now features a fermented soy dip: ““It’s very different from ranch in the way that it’s made. But it’s creamy and tangy, and it has salt and umami, and it definitely reminds people of ranch,” chef Katianna Hong told the New York Times.

When our son began to transition from formula to solid foods, ranch was one of the first condiments dipped on his tongue. He wasn’t a fan, immediately wiping out his mouth, but he’ll learn. It took me 22 years to finally appreciate the American dressing.

Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People

Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zachary Siegel | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (5,459 words)

After breakfast each Sunday we had the option to attend a spiritual group. The facility’s spiritual counselor was a tall woman with greying frizzy hair who collected vaguely heart-shaped rocks, and always had several on her desk that she’d gift to patients who stopped by her office.

She wouldn’t give you just any old rock; no, the rock she’d choose for you had a story: its color, unique dents and chips resembled resilience, an ability to withstand harsh elements while retaining your heart’s shape. She insisted the Sunday group wasn’t religious. “Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell,” the popular saying around Alcoholics Anonymous goes. “Spirituality is for people who have already been there.” So we sang along to “Let it Be” by The Beatles.

We had mostly blamed ourselves for what landed us inside an addiction treatment facility. But we were young, so we also blamed our parents (thanks Obamacare!). The reason why we were all in treatment and not quarantined in jail is because we were mostly white and upper-middle class. It was the summer of 2012 and young people like me all over the country were developing opioid addictions. The difference between us and the vast majority of others was our family’s resources, namely insurance that covered the $1,000 per day cost for a residential stint at a spiritually tinged hospital-meets-lake-house just outside the Twin Cities (the land of 10,000 treatment centers). The campus edged Medicine Lake, which I always found cruel because the facility didn’t much like to use medicine at the time, medicine that would’ve eased my withdrawal and given me the best chance at kicking for good. “We don’t do that here,” I recall a nice Minnesota doctor saying.

Addiction experienced in the first-person feels like watching a movie shot entirely in extreme close-ups. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see the world beyond the frame. A tolerance builds after a while and you grow used to the shaky, nauseating ride. We couldn’t have possibly known it at the time, that we weren’t the stars in our very own drama. The content of our stories differed in the details, but the tone was uncannily similar: how prescription painkillers first took hold; after pharmaceuticals became scarce and expensive, how we, as a generation in unison, playing a fucked up game of Red Rover, beelined toward heroin. Another thing we had in common was a lot of dead friends. Read more…

Did We Learn From Anita Hill?

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

In the early 1980s, probably the summer of 1982, a teenage girl was at a party in a Maryland suburb near D.C. It was a memorable night, one which she could recall in detail almost forty years later. Two boys pushed her into a bedroom. One pinned her to the bed and groped her, his body writhing on top of hers, clumsily attempting to pull off her clothes and the one-piece bathing suit underneath them. When she tried to scream, he put his hand over her mouth. The boys were laughing. The girl was afraid the boy on top of her might accidentally kill her. His friend watched, then tried to join in, jumping on top of them. All three went tumbling to the ground and the girl fled, locking herself in a bathroom until she heard the boys stumbling away.

The girl — around 15 at the time — did what many girls who find themselves in this situation do: She told no one. In the next few years, she struggled academically and socially, unable to form romantic relationships.

It’s possible she watched on television almost ten years later when Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about being sexually harassed by her former boss, Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee. It’s possible she saw Hill accused of being delusional, or a vengeful woman scorned. “She wanted it” is likely something she heard said of this poised and polished scholarly woman. It’s possible that two years after that, in 1993, she watched as David Brock gained plaudits and wealth for a character-assassinating book claiming to show “the Real Anita Hill,” watched when GOP operatives referred to his mansion as the house that Anita built.” It’s possible she again noticed a decade later, in 2001, when Brock quietly disavowed his entire book and said his writing on Hill was gleaned not from reporting, but from rumors intended to destroy her reputation. He faced exactly zero repercussions. It’s possible she watched Hill, an accomplished legal scholar and lawyer, get reduced forever in history to a woman in the shadow of a man for whom consequences proved to be purely theoretical.

A year later, in 2002, the formerly teenaged girl, now a successful professor herself, married. Early in their relationship, she told her husband she’d been physically abused, but it took ten years of struggling in their marriage before the details came out in couples counseling.

It’s unclear whether she noticed that the boy who watched in that room on the night in question published a book, chronicling his history of alcoholism, and including anecdotes about a friend named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who partied at the beach with him as a teen. According to her husband, she did remember the last name of the boy who held her down: Kavanaugh. In the 2012 therapy session when she revealed the details of the night that traumatized her as a teen, she told her husband that the boy who attacked her was now a federal judge, and she feared he might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

That day came earlier this year. Hesitantly, the woman contacted the Washington Post’s tipline and her congresswoman. Through her congresswoman, she sent a letter describing the incident, and requesting confidentiality, to the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Frightened of the repercussions of going public with her story, she ignored efforts from the Post and others to speak with her. She hired a lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases, and took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent. The test concluded she was telling the truth.

It’s unlikely that gave her much comfort, if she remembered Anita Hill’s experience. After all, Hill took and passed a polygraph test. The man she accused, Clarence Thomas, refused to, was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, and remains on the court to this day.

Those are the details of the story provided by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser thus far, and some of the historical context surrounding them. There are other cultural realities to consider, of course: the current #MeToo movement, which has some women feeling slightly less afraid to speak up about experiences of abuse, and many powerful figures on the defensive, accusing supporters of the movement of going too far. We are in “the year of the woman,” some say. Will that help Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor accusing Kavanaugh? Consider this: 1992 was also “the year of the woman.” It was a year after Anita Hill testified, the same year as the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing states to regulate abortion as early as the first trimester, a ruling that reaffirmed central tenets of Roe v. Wade while beginning the gradual process of eroding the rights granted to women in the 1973 landmark decision.

Ford initially agreed to testify before Congress, just as Anita Hill did after statements she gave to FBI agents doing background checks on Thomas were leaked to the press. Women from her high school have circulated a letter of support. Of the 65 high school acquaintances of Kavanaugh’s who signed a letter of support for him last week, only four have stood by their signatures since Ford came forward. (Many of those 65, though, did not respond when POLITICO contacted them.) Mark Judge, the friend who Ford says was with Kavanaugh when he attacked her, has since written that he never saw Kavanaugh behave as Ford described and he would prefer not to testify. The Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoena power to compel him to do so, but it’s unclear whether the committee will pursue that route. Meanwhile, a woman who says she went to school with Ford tweeted that she knew about the incident when it happened, though she has since deleted the tweet and declined to discuss it further.

Hill had support back in 1991 too. She had four women waiting to support her credibility, but they were not allowed to speak — because Joe Biden, a Democrat, made a deal with his Republican colleagues. Biden has of late taken up the cause of affirmative consent and campus sexual assault, and has twice come close to apologizing to Hill — though not for suppressing her supporters, or for his own role in the attacks she received (he claims he wishes he’d done more to tone down his colleagues’ attacks on her). As Hill herself said: “He said, ‘I am sorry if she felt she didn’t get a fair hearing.’ That’s sort of an ‘I’m sorry if you were offended.’”

Biden has pointed out he voted against Thomas’ confirmation, but if he suppressed her witnesses, how much does that single vote really matter?

Biden has long been praised for his ability to “reach across the aisle” and work amicably with his Republican colleagues. Many of today’s top Democrats have the same reputation. Does that mean Ford can expect to be undermined in back-door dealings the way Hill was? The vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation was scheduled for this Thursday, but after three Republican senators said they thought it should be postponed, Sen. Chuck Grassley canceled the vote. A new date has not yet been set.

At first, Ford’s lawyer said on television that Ford would testify before the committee. But after receiving death threats, having her email hacked and identity impersonated online, Ford said an FBI investigation should occur before she is forced to go “on national television to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident.” While Ford and her family had to relocate from their home for safety reasons, Kavanaugh’s wife was handing out cupcakes to the reporters outside their house. (Hill’s experience predated the internet age, but she too received harassing phone calls from strangers.)

Sen. Orrin Hatch has claimed the FBI doesn’t conduct such investigations, even though they did investigate Hill’s statements about Thomas. Hatch should know this: During Thomas’ hearing, he praised Biden and Strom Thurmond for ordering an FBI investigation “which was the very right thing to do, and they did what every other chairman and ranking member have done.” (The Justice Department has said the allegation against Kavanaugh “does not involve any potential federal crime” for the FBI to investigate, and that the FBI’s role during background investigations is specifically to look for natural security risks.) The Utah senator even doubled down in recent days: When Sen. Schumer criticized the White House for not ordering an FBI investigation, Hatch said his complaint “does not hold water” because Senate Democrats had withheld Ford’s letter from Republicans and the FBI for two months. Hatch’s accusation comes off a little hypocritical, however, considering the White House and Republicans have withheld the majority of Kavanaugh’s record, only releasing about 7 percent of it and blocking subpoenas seeking answers to a variety of questions. (For comparison, when Justice Elena Kagan was nominated, the Obama White House released about 99 percent of her record.)

Why do these details about Hatch matter? He sits on the committee that will question Ford — and was on it back in 1991 when they questioned Hill. He was one of her most aggressive interrogators, and accused her of plagiarizing her statements about Thomas from “The Exorcist” and an obscure decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, Okla. He doesn’t seem to have changed much since then: Ford hasn’t even testified yet and he and Grassley (also on the committee when it questioned Hill) have already said she is “mistaken” and “mixed up.” As Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has sat on the committee for at least a decade, told The Washington Post, “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” which hardly suggests any plan to actually consider any testimony from Ford.

It’s odd that Hatch’s blatant, seemingly blind support for Kavanaugh doesn’t disqualify him from being on the committee considering his appointment. It’s especially worrisome in light of a David Brock tweet claiming that it was Hatch’s staff who selectively leaked part of the FBI investigation into Hill’s claims about Thomas to him. It would not be surprising to hear that Brock is experiencing deja vu these days, harkening back to the days when he was determined to help make Hill appear “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” by printing “virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation” he heard about her. Contradictory claims are making a comeback, it seems: Kavanaugh’s defenders have mounted a wild array of excuses for the man. Sometimes it’s that he wasn’t at the party; other times that there never was a party. Or he was at the party but the incident didn’t happen; or it happened but it doesn’t matter because it was a long time ago and apparently teenage boys categorically sexually assault their female peers and that’s acceptable. Or something happened but it was “rough horse play.”

Hill herself penned an op-ed in the New York Times this week, writing that “the public expects better from our government than we got in 1991.” But will we get it? She doesn’t sound so sure: “That the Senate Judiciary Committee still lacks a protocol for vetting sexual harassment and assault claims that surface during a confirmation hearing suggests that the committee has learned little from the Thomas hearing, much less the more recent #MeToo movement.”

It’s fair to wonder why Republicans wouldn’t want to just pick a new nominee. Ford’s accusation is, after all, not the only problem that has come up during the judge’s hearings. He is accused of lying under oath not only this year, but also in 2004 and 2006. The thing he was allegedly lied about: allegedly stolen documents. (A former staffer for Sen. Hatch now claims that Kavanaugh “knew nothing of the source” of the documents he was provided.) It’s also unclear whether he was truthful about his involvement in the vetting of a judicial nominee whom he recommended for the seat. He may have also lied about his involvement with the appeals court nomination of a lawyer who helped develop the Bush-era interrogation torture policies, and another judge who suggested a reduction of the sentence of a man who helped to burn a cross in front of a mixed-race couple’s home. He may have even lied about his knowledge of the interrogation torture policies themselves (according to Sen. Richard Durbin, to whom Kavanaugh professed his ignorance of the Bush administration’s detention and torture policies during his nomination to the D.C. Circuit court, “…[Kavanaugh] had to know he was misleading me and the committee and the people who were following this controversial nomination”).

While legal scholars say Kavanaugh’s actions likely don’t meet the very high bar for perjury, it’s hardly commendable to give someone who apparently struggles to tell the truth under oath — or fully understand the documents he is given or the actions of people he promotes — a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. There are more than 3,000 federal judges in this country. Is it really not possible for Republicans to find one who has not, willfully or otherwise, said untrue things under oath? The Supreme Court is, after all, the highest court in the land. Wouldn’t it be reasonable, then, to hold the people we put on it to the highest standards?

Moreover, is being the party who insisted on putting not just one, but two men accused of sexual misconduct on the Supreme Court really how the GOP wants to define itself?

Apparently, it is. POLITICO quoted a lawyer “close to the White House” insisting Kavanaugh’s nomination would never be withdrawn. “No way,” the lawyer reportedly said. “If anything, it’s the opposite.” Apparently, the White House is concerned that “if somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”

This is perhaps not a surprising view from a White House that stands behind a president caught bragging on tape that he doesn’t wait before forcing himself on women because “when you’re a star, they let you do it… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” A president accused of sexual assault by at least 22 women. A president who defended his White House staff secretary after claims of the man’s history of intimate partner violence — which the White House knew about for months — was exposed. Or who said, of child predation allegations against Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, “forty years is a long time.” Or who defended Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Corey Lewandowski and so on. In effect, an endorsement from the Trump White House doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that his chosen nominee may have committed sexual predation.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

 

Age Appropriate

igorr1 / Getty, James Woodson / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jen Doll | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (4941 words)

In the summer of 2017, when I was 41 years old, I temporarily lost my parents. This is both less and more dramatic than it sounds. On August 1st, the start of the Long Island beach house rental I’d arranged for the month, I got into a car with my mom and dad, who’d helpfully flown up from Florida to join me for the initial stage of this retreat after I realized I hadn’t driven since I was a teenager, and I wasn’t going to start trying again on the Long Island Expressway.

After we loaded the rental car and I dutifully fastened my seatbelt in the backseat, assuming the position of so many family road trips past, I realized I hadn’t mailed my maintenance for my Brooklyn apartment. “Hang on — I’ll be right back!” I yelled, grabbing the envelope with the check in it and dashing across the street toward a mailbox. My dad waited at the side of the road, but then came a surge of traffic, and then a cop, and he had to drive on. “Noooooooo!” I yelled, chasing after the rental car (what kind was it anyway? I had no idea!) in the heat, knowing even as I did my perfunctory sad jog that there was no way I’d catch up.

I had no phone, no purse, no keys, no way to communicate with them other than to send mental signals: I will be right here waiting for you, a Richard Marx song on repeat. When you lose someone, stay put!, I remembered, a lesson imparted at various times during my childhood. So I waited. And waited. Finally, I saw the rental car heading back in my direction. No need to know the make or model when Mom was leaning out of the passenger side window, waving in the wind, shouting my name at the top of her lungs. They’d found me.

It was not the most auspicious beginning to our trip, and I felt relief and embarrassment in equal measures. I was, by all accounts, an adult. Yet I was never really a grown-up, particularly not when my parents were around.
Read more…

Facebook Isn’t the Same as “The Internet” Except When It Is

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, second from left, poses for a selfie with the crowd following wreath-laying rites at the Heroes Cemetery to mark National Heroes Day Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Davey Alba‘s BuzzFeed investigation into the ways Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s government uses Facebook to spread propaganda and destroy political opponents is a frightening look at what happens when a tool created by a bunch of developers in California becomes the go-to news source for a country 7,000 miles away.

Just how ubiquitous is Facebook in the Philippines?

In 2012, 29 million Filipinos used Facebook. Today, 69 million people — two-thirds of the population — are on Facebook. The remaining one-third does not have access to the internet. In other words, virtually every Filipino citizen with an internet connection has a Facebook account. For many in one of the most persistently poor nations in the world, Facebook is the only way to access the internet.

Which is pretty much how Facebook wants it. Maria Ressa, the CEO of the news website Rappler, told BuzzFeed News that during an April 2017 meeting with Facebook, she mentioned to Mark Zuckerberg that 97% of Filipinos who had access to the internet also had Facebook accounts (which was true at the time). Zuckerberg frowned, Ressa recalled. Then he asked: “What about the other 3%?”

Facebook’s Internet.org effort has floundered embarrassingly in more than half a dozen nations and territories. But in the Philippines, the social media capital of the world according to global media agency We Are Social, Facebook rushed into a culture that unquestioningly assimilated it.

“We were seduced, we were lured, we were hooked, and then, when we became captive audiences, we were manipulated to see what other people — people with vested interests and evil motives of power and domination — wanted us to see,” de Lima wrote to BuzzFeed News. “It was a slow takeover of our attention. We didn’t notice it until it was already too late.”

Neither did Facebook.

Read the story

Mega-drought and Me

Sebastien Gabriel / Unsplash, Paul Robert / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zoe Fenson | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (3,732 words)

I kick my heels against the end of the exam table, feet dangling as if over the edge of a dock. One hand on the opening of the gown, the other holding the drape to my lap.

First time seeing this new doctor, now that the old practice closed. I’d expected older, brusque, lab coat, but she is warm and cheery in her crisp blue scrubs and gray hijab. Legs splayed on the low wheeled stool, elbows on knees, clipboard. Reading.

It’s all there on the form, in my handwriting. Age: 29. Reason for visit: annual exam. Smokes: No. Drinks: two to three per week. Wears a seat belt: always.

The drape slips off my lap — why does it always do that? I catch it, shift carefully, try not to tear the paper liner under my bare bottom.

Number of sexual partners in the past year: one. Gender of partner: male.

“So, you’re in a relationship?” She looks up from her clipboard. “How long?”

“Six years.”

“Wow, congratulations!” A warm smile. “So, are you thinking about kids?”

The gears in my brain catch and stop turning. My forehead is suddenly jelly. The drape slips and I pull it closer, keenly aware of my nakedness underneath.

“We’re kicking that can down the road,” I say.

She laughs. “Understood. Just wanted to bring it up, because …”

“I know,” I say. It’s all there on the form.

* * *

My first memory. I am standing at the far end of the hallway, square in line with the bedroom door and the four-poster bed beyond it. There are lights in the canopy, three yellow hollows, and they reflect spaceship beams in the mirrored headboard. I am small, and the floor is close, and the lights are high and bright.

The walls and ceiling are dark and distant. I can feel them looming, hear fantastic hissing creatures in the corners. The bed is a spaceship, and I am standing in the dark, my heart beating cold.

She’s there, in the bed. My mother. I can just make out the pink swell of her belly over the rumpled patchwork quilt. Maybe a sliver of pale forehead above it, and a mop of pillow-mussed dark curls above that. Or maybe not. I am 3 years old and will remember this only in gulps and shivers.

Her belly is full of my siblings. A brother and a sister. They will emerge soon, my father keeps saying. In the meantime, she’s not feeling well. She needs to stay in bed. Later. You’ll see her later.

I watch her breathing. This is not my mother, my fluttering mother, always dashing from room to room, picking up this, noticing that. This is not my playful, silly mother, who reads picture books aloud with an actor’s breathlessness and uses her bare hands to crush cornflakes for salmon patties.

This still, barely-breathing, exhausted creature is not my mother. She is resting, not quite asleep, and I am not allowed to go to her, to see for myself what she really is. Or maybe I am allowed, but terror roots me to the floor.

* * *

Growing up in Silicon Valley, we learn the word “drought.” Drought comes in cycles. There’s less and less and less rain, over a year or two or maybe three. We ration our water use, turn off the tap when we brush our teeth, time our showers. Then suddenly the winds shift and the currents change and everything is blessedly watered again.

For years, I assume that “drought” is synonymous with “summer.” The season of no water, ending each year with the autumn rains. I watch the grasses in the hills turn from plump and green to dry and brown.

I know intellectually that droughts can stretch over years, that rain is relative, that brown grass thrives in summer. But still, I breathe a tiny sigh of relief when the first raindrop hits my nose every fall.

* * *

I’m kicking my feet at the end of the exam table. My mother sits in a chair alongside. Age: 13. Reason for visit: Missed periods. Number of sexual partners: zero.

This is the doctor I will see for 15 years before the practice closes. Dark hair, pink lipstick, lab coat, stethoscope. White clipboard. Low stool. Reading.

“So, how long has it been since your last period?”

“Ten months.”

The doctor raises her eyebrows. “It’s good you waited this long before coming in. At your age, menstruation can be extremely irregular. Just … not this irregular.”

“I know,” I say. It’s been over a year since the first streak in my underpants at summer camp, so dark I mistook it for dirt. Since then, I’ve menstruated twice: once in September, once in January. It’s now October. I’ve started wearing red sweatpants on airplanes, just in case. My mother tucks menstrual pads into the pockets of all my jackets and suitcases, a habit I will keep up — unnecessarily — for years.

“Well, there’s a couple things that could be going on. If you’re OK with it, I’ll do a visual assessment here and then send you to Pat down the hall for a blood draw.” She pulls a pair of blue vinyl gloves from a box on the wall. “Do I have your permission to conduct an external pelvic exam?”

I have no idea what an external pelvic exam is. “Sure.”

She pauses, puts her hand gently on my arm. “Oh, one more thing. You’re not pregnant, right?”

My forehead is jelly. “Right.”

“OK, good.” She breaks out in a hearty laugh. I laugh too, as cheerily as I can manage.

* * *

Throughout my childhood, there are galloping fires in the mountains each summer. We hear about them on the news: ignited by a lightning strike or a smoldering campfire or a cigarette butt, fattened on the sticks and straw left from months of waning water. Sometimes, on road trips, we see the aftermath of a smaller fire: a swath of black hillside, pierced by naked trees.

Each fire is a renewal, I’m told, a violent stripping of the old to make way for the new and green. There are some plants in the California chaparral that reproduce only after the intense heat of a wildfire. Pine cones release seeds; oak trees sprout fresh stems from burnt trunks; wildflowers germinate and bloom.

Her belly is full of my siblings. A brother and a sister. They will emerge soon, my father keeps saying. In the meantime, she’s not feeling well. She needs to stay in bed. Later. You’ll see her later.


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* * *

“You see these two numbers here? The ones labeled FSH and LH?”

The lab sheet is dense with text. I follow the doctor’s pen as it traces around the two numbers. I am 13, and last week I had my feet in stirrups for the first time and needles sipping blood from my veins.

She explains, scratching diagrams and doodles on the back of the lab sheet. Hormone ratios, triglycerides, body mass index (I press my hands together between my chubby, chafing thighs). She draws a little ovary studded with cysts — a string of pearls winding around a grape.

Polycystic ovarian syndrome, she says. It’ll keep me from menstruating, make it hard to keep off the weight I’m already gaining. The most urgent thing now is to make sure I’m shedding the uterine lining each month; if it sits undisturbed for too long, it could grow cancerous.

She hands my mother a prescription for progesterone. “Just to get things started, and then we’ll switch to oral contraceptives for the long term.” And to me, “When you want to get pregnant, we’ll need to talk.”

I nod. My siblings and I were conceived via fertility treatments when my mother was in her 30s. I have time.

* * *

The progesterone makes me sob furiously. My hormones swell and peak each time I take a pill. When I switch to birth control, the crying eases. In its place I feel a growing restlessness, an urge to move out of my body and find a new one.

Over time, I get used to the routine. Every year, a pelvic exam, a panel of tests. I learn to grit my teeth and look away during the blood draw, waiting for the deep sting of needle meeting vein. Sometimes the phlebotomist misses — my veins are slim and deep — and I walk away with bruises.

I stay on birth control throughout high school and college. Twice a month, I get vicious cramps; once a month, I bleed. Each time, it becomes easier to pretend it’s the real thing.

* * *

I am 3 years old, standing in the hall, and there are things I do not understand. I do not understand that my mother is small too, only five feet tall, and that my siblings are straining her body to its limit. That the contractions began in month five — before the babies could survive outside her body — and start up again every time she stands. That she is lying in bed because her body is in revolt, and bed rest is what’s keeping my siblings alive.

I do not yet understand that she has been through this before. A fraught end to her first pregnancy with me, a first bodily revolt. In her seventh month she began having trouble removing her wedding ring. The vision in her left eye slowly dulled, until she couldn’t see out of it.

I was due in March; her water broke on New Year’s Eve. When she arrived at the hospital, the doctors diagnosed preeclampsia, a dangerous spike in blood pressure that had inflated her fingers and muted her vision. The only cure was to birth me. But I was too small to be safely born.

The philosophy behind bed rest is simple: Counteract gravity. My mother was laid flat for a week in the hospital, kept in a state of suspension while the doctors carefully dosed me with steroids and waited until my tiny lungs could pump air on their own. Then they let her contrary body take over, pushing me into the stark hospital light, scrawny and wide-eyed and — fortunately — screaming.

‘Polycystic ovarian syndrome,’ she says. It’ll keep me from menstruating, make it hard to keep off the weight I’m already gaining. The most urgent thing now is to make sure I’m shedding the uterine lining each month; if it sits undisturbed for too long, it could grow cancerous.

* * *

As I grow older, I can feel the summers getting longer, hotter. The rain takes longer to arrive each fall. The hills dry up faster, turning from spring green to summer brown before I can fully register the change.

There are fewer small fires. When the forest ignites — as it inevitably does — the fires leap up hotter and higher. We hear of flames crawling closer to the homes and towns that push into the forest.

* * *

The summer before my senior year of college, I go to Russia for six weeks. Without consulting my doctor, without telling my parents, I decide not to bring my birth control pills with me. I’m 21, single, and curious. Just curious.

Without a complaint, my body simply dries up. No bleeding. No cramps. For a whole summer, no movement in my reproductive tract.

* * *

We’re on our way from Pskov to Nizhny Novgorod. The van bumps and rattles on the rutted road. The other students are asleep or lost at the windows.

I’m chatting with the director of the program, an elegant lady with close-cropped dark hair. We talk about the cold summer rain that lashes St. Petersburg, how I still get startled seeing rain in the summer.

I lift my eyes to the view outside, watch the chilly mist collect on the van windows. “If I ever have kids, I’m going to adopt,” I say, more decisively than I feel.

Her eyes widen. “Good for you,” she says.

* * *

I come home from Russia and start the pills again. My body obediently bleeds.

* * *

Mega-drought. A drought lasting decades instead of years. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the area that we now call California went dry for hundreds of years. We see the evidence in the ring patterns of thousand-year-old tree trunks; the trees grew tall in dry lake beds, then drowned when the rains returned.

In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl — our closest memory of catastrophic drought — scorched the Great Plains for most of a decade. It turned farms into windy wastelands and sent families fleeing west to California. That was an ordinary drought. Mega-droughts last three, four, five times as long. We do not remember what it’s like to live for 50 years without rain.

* * *

“Are you in love with him?”

If the question came from anyone else, I would bristle. But this is my mother’s childhood friend Pam, whom I’ve known all my life. She’s the daughter — adopted — of my grandmother’s best friend, a woman with a raucous laugh and wild storytelling streak. I grew up knowing Pam’s vivaciousness, so like and yet unlike her mother’s. She has a daughter my age who shares her soprano speaking voice, her waterfall of red hair.

I’ve been seeing this guy, the guy who will eventually inspire the new doctor to ask me the question. Pam holds her wine glass with both palms, looks at me expectantly.

“I guess I am,” I say.

* * *

We’re driving in the rain, the two of us. The road is slick, headlight reflections blurring into lane lines. I’m 26, he’s 27, and I’m testing him.

“So, if you end up wanting biological kids, that’s going to be … complicated with me. Because of my health stuff.”

“I mean.” He shrugs. “I’m not opposed to kids, but I’m definitely not ready for them right now. We have time.”

“I understand that. But we’ll need to decide eventually, and it will actually be a decision, you know? We can’t just wing it.”

“That’s fine. I’m happy to take my cues from you.”

“But that’s the thing. I don’t know what I want. And you’ll have equal say in whatever path we decide to follow, so …”

“Now, hold on.” He turns to look at me. “I do not have equal say. It’s your body. We can do exactly as much or as little as you want.”

He’s passed the test. And yet I’m slightly deflated that he’s not throwing me a rope.

* * *

“So, that’s why I’m not eating honey right now. Because of the baby.”

I hear my friend over my shoulder, from the kitchen where I’m pouring myself a drink. At first I think I’ve misheard her, or she’s making a joke. She’s sitting neatly tucked into the table, so I can’t sneak a peek at her belly.

I thought I’d imagined her looking fuller and smoother, though her complexion is of the luminous kind anyway. It all clicks together — the new wedding ring on her finger, the house she and her partner just bought.

“I thought the honey thing is after the baby’s born,” I offer, feebly. We’re all so clueless, the people at this party. Young, urban professionals with cats instead of children.

She’s telling someone the story. It was an accident, a hiccup in birth control. She didn’t realize it for months, until the doctor at her annual exam said, “You didn’t tell me you were pregnant!”

I cup my wine glass in my palm and stare numbly across the room. I can feel the weight of my dry uterus, remember what happened when I played fast and loose with my pills.

When I get back to my boyfriend’s house after the party, I drop onto the couch and sob.

As I grow older, I can feel the summers getting longer, hotter. The rain takes longer to arrive each fall. The hills dry up faster, turning from spring green to summer brown before I can fully register the change.

* * *

There’s a mega-drought coming, scientists say. It’s the swing of a natural cycle, made more violent by the weight of humans on the earth. Dust Bowl refugees sought relief here in the West, and someday we will be seared hotter than they ever were.

I wonder how long California will be livable, how long we’ll be able to drag water into the desert.

* * *

She knew, going in. After me, after the illness, the early birth. She chose to become pregnant again, not easily, with medical help. And in my first memory I am forever 3 years old, standing in the hall, and there are two babies in a body that already fought back against one.

Eventually they, too, will make an early entrance under the hospital lights, screaming. My father will take me to see them in their hospital bassinets, one pink bundle and one blue bundle. One pair of brown eyes and one pair of blue, staring back at me through the nursery window.

They are small, too, but larger than I was, pinker-cheeked and plumper. They will be fine. She will be fine.

* * *

He zips the wedding dress up my back. I step back from the mirror and take myself in. They’re all there, the signs of PCOS, written on my body over the years: the heavy hips and arms and face and belly, the thicket of dark hair above my upper lip, the bald spots in and among my carefully pinned curls.

“You look gorgeous,” he says, and kisses my neck.

During the ceremony, our friends’ surprise son — now nearly 3 — begins shrieking with excitement. I’d expected this, half-hoped for it, and I laugh to see the joy in his eyes. The rabbi gently jokes about being upstaged, and the child’s father whisks him away to run circles on the lawn.

* * *

Every so often, I catch glimpses of imaginary children. Sometimes in our bedroom, standing in a pile of clothes, wriggling tiny arms into jacket sleeves. Sometimes in the kitchen, perched on a stepstool, clutching a wooden spoon in one hand.

They never have faces, these children. All I can see is the backs of their heads, the color of their hair. Sometimes dark brown, like my husband’s and mine. Sometimes blond, sometimes black. I try to turn them around, to paste on facial features, my husband’s full lips, my amber-brown eyes. Is the color of their cheeks lighter than mine? Darker? About the same? I never can tell. They evaporate too quickly.

* * *

I am 30 years old. It rained all winter, and in the spring the wildflowers carpeted the hills so thickly you could see them from space. Now it’s summer, and the temperature has shot up and melted the newly fallen snowpack, dried fresh undergrowth into tinder.

Nature seems especially ferocious this year. I am hearing stories of extremes: too much rain in wet areas, and too much heat in dry ones. Along the crowded coasts, hurricanes are striking with frightening violence. Work colleagues in Houston and Florida are living out of suitcases, their homes flooded. In Puerto Rico, residents are living without power, drinking contaminated water.

And there is fire, too, closer to home. In the Pacific Northwest, whole swaths of the Cascades are ablaze. My friends in Portland and Seattle say the smoke is so thick that it eclipses the sun.

* * *

“I keep thinking about time,” says the man I married. “I already feel like I don’t have enough time to do a good job at all the things I’m currently doing. How will I be able to do all of that, and have a kid?”

He’s curled into himself on the couch, his voice thick with tears. He’s afraid to tell me this. Afraid that he’s somehow saying the wrong thing.

I don’t know how to respond. How to tell him that it’s about time for me, too. Time on my body’s clock. Time ticking down until a switch flips and I can definitively say “I want this” or “I don’t.” Historical time, the Dust Bowl, how we don’t know what it’s like to see our home turned from cozy to crucible. Geologic time, and knowing how soon the earth will reject us altogether.

I don’t know how to say these things to him. Instead, I pull him in for a hug, kiss his eyelids, make soothing noises.

* * *

“Twenty-seven years,” my father says. “Can you believe it?”

My brother grins, and my sister rolls her eyes. It’s a familiar script, one we all act out every year around this time. They lean together, two curly, brown heads, and blow. The candles flicker and extinguish in parallel trails of smoke.

My mother picks a candle out of the cake, pops the unburnt end in her mouth to lick off the chocolate frosting. “Of course,” she adds, “it was a challenge keeping you guys inside long enough.” This is it, the closest she ever comes to a complaint. She gives each twin a one-armed hug, a kiss on the head.

I wonder how sharp her early inklings must have been. She fought to become pregnant, twice, and her body fought back. And when her troublesome babies were born, she told us the stories of our births in her amazed actor-voice, full of warmth and wonder.

I have none of her certainty. I have only faceless glimpses of imaginary children, and they frighten me. But if I imagine a life without them, I feel chilled and unmoored. I think of the kindly new doctor in her gray hijab, and exhaustion washes over me. I’m tired of the needles, the questions, cataloging signs of illness in the mirror.

I think of the mega-drought, and of my mother in bed, and of Pam and her lively mother and red-headed daughter. It occurs to me that these things may never truly coalesce into “want.”

* * *

The day after the twins’ birthday, Sonoma County catches fire. 100 miles to the north of us, towns and vineyards burn to the ground. People tumble out of their cozy homes, grand estates, mobile home parks, and flee. Hundreds are overcome by the smoke, or outrun by the flames. Newspapers publish aerial shots of blasted neighborhoods: orderly rows of flattened houses, shade trees stripped of their leaves.

When the winds shift, a soupy haze blows south over our neighborhood. The street lights blur in the evenings, as if the usual morning fog got its daily route confused. The air tastes like ash and rubber.

My husband and I go out dancing on a Friday night, the night of the thickest smoke. We walk down the street with our sleeves held to our faces. The dance floor is nearly empty; he takes me in his arms and we waltz in sweeping circles.

This is a new ash-cloud, a warning. The planet groans with people, and someday it will become too hostile for more. The mega-drought is looming, and my insides are dry.

The world is burning, and I am 30 years old, and soon I will have to decide.

* * *

Zoe Fenson lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays have appeared in Narratively, The New Republic, The Week, SELF, and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

 

Weighing the Costs — and Occasional Benefits — of Ethnic Ambiguity

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | September 2018 | 16 minutes (3,949 words)

 

At the beginning of 7th grade, sitting toward the back of a column of brown laminate desks, I was first told I had an emerging unibrow. Michigan still radiated of summer. The September air hugged my skin. I was lanky and undefined, a soon-to-be teenager who’d bought into the culture of extreme sports, so I wore oversized cargo shorts and a baggy t-shirt that hung down to my knees. At the time, skaters like me were prone to wearing clothes that didn’t fit well, as if swimming around in an extra large negated the fragility of our young bodies.

Our German class, an introductory course more focused on the country’s culture than language acquisition, was mostly filled with young men. It had the reputation for being a blow-off, less intellectually strenuous than Spanish or French. Originally from Deutschland, Mr. E liked to play old clips of Michael Schumacher celebrating Formula One racing victories in glamorous locales — Monaco or Barcelona. This pastime lent itself to the underlying masculinity of the classroom.

One morning, while we were supposed to read a conversation from the textbook aloud with a partner, the boy sitting in front of me pivoted around in his desk. “You have to shave that or something,” he goaded, pointing toward my forehead. I spent the next five minutes trying to convince him he was mistaken. We ignored the scripted dialogue in front of us. He didn’t let it go. From then on the shrinking gap between my eyebrows became a daily topic of conversation. He brought other kids in our area of the classroom in on the joke. I worried that if I removed the fuzz I would only set myself up for more ridicule.

A week or so into that school year, the Twin Towers fell. I was in math class, algebra, which was taught by a skeletal man with a thick mustache and ponytail. He wore corduroy pants most days, a mug of burnt-smelling coffee glued to his right hand. He was the type to squat down next to the desk and talk to students face to face. We knew something was wrong when he turned on the television while we scribbled proofs in our workbooks. The class watched the news in stunned silence. By lunchtime, we were sent home. A few days later, my neighbor in German class gave me a new nickname: “Arama bin Laden.”

By the end of the semester, I started plucking the mess of black hairs bridging the space above my nose. I couldn’t tolerate the worms wriggling toward each other across my face, hinting that I was different. I bleached my hair. I found numerous ways to blend in, but nothing could change the five foreign syllables of my full name, the simple alteration of the first that transformed me into a terrorist.

I did have something of an out, need be. My parents, with remarkable foresight, had given me the middle name Joseph so that I could go by AJ. It was a failsafe designed precisely for such circumstances. A last resort for retroactive assimilation. However, I never used my initials. It always felt unnatural to me, having been called by my given name since I was born. Seventh grade was the first time I realized my name could be used against me. I learned that to be an unknown was to be other, that to be difficult to pronounce was to be threatening, and that to be ethnically ambiguous was to be somehow less American.

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