Rape Culture

The Power of Silence

Seventh grade was supposed to be set in a brand-new school. Instead, we were sent to attend school in the National Guard Armory. I'm not sure where the National Guard was. After the Kent State shootings, it seemed like everyone was either an anti-war protester or a soldier. That year, the US Selective Service started the first draft lottery date for the Vietnam War. On December 1, 1969, men aged nineteen to twenty-six would be drafted based on their birthdates. The National Guard kept getting photographed looking overwhelmed and miserable at the prospect of beating up more college students.

We invaded the Armory; over one hundred feral seventh graders were set free in a building intended to house soldiers. The walls on wheels meant to create classrooms failed to contain us as we climbed on the tanks, bought candy and cigarettes from the vending machines, and attempted to pick the locks into the storerooms that possibly contained weapons and made the plots of novels like Lord of the Flies and A High Wind in Jamaica seem likely. We were fearless and happy, and our teachers were a breed apart from the junior high school teachers; they were young and funny and did little to maintain order. Cindy and I were in love with each other, but our classmates, angry black kids waking up in a country that just made desegregation mandatory, to a country that was racist to its core, viewed us as “honky bitches.” We didn't deserve their hatred, but they didn't deserve to be called names. One of my best friends from kindergarten, a girl who had attended all my birthday parties, threatened to kick my ass, and I was devastated.

After Christmas break, the soldiers returned, and they housed us on the top floor of the high school, where we continued our wild, lawless ways and were so scary the high school students were afraid of us. One day, Kenny Stovekin, a boy who had supposedly impregnated a girl in our class that fall, decided he wasn't going to take the detention the science teacher gave him, and he opened a window and threw a chair through it. This signaled all the windows to open, and more chairs, a desk, books and bags, and other stuff were flung to the grass below. Finally, we were visited by the local police, who ordered us to stop rioting. I was happy. Cindy and I spent nearly every weekend together at her house or my house, more often her house because she didn't live in the Appalachia of New Jersey but rather in a development full of other kids. We both had crushes on John Pollen, who was painfully skinny, inarticulate, and rode a mini bike. He had a too-big black leather jacket and greasy hair and didn't embody anything we wanted in a boyfriend, but he was there, lurking, combing his icky hair, wearing stupid aviator glasses that made him look like a big bug, slouching on his mini-bike, silent and entitled. We were clueless virgins, silky-haired, long-limbed, giggling girls who thought love and sex would transform our lives. Neither of us felt the cold breath of death on our soft skin, but we were sure we would live forever.

Cindy had a slumber party, and we put avocado masques on our faces, dressed her dog in doll's clothes, teased her little sister until she cried, made crank calls to our crushes, and at the height of the hysteria, ran outside in our baby doll pajamas and received a major shock from the electric fence that bordered the neighbors' property. After we all shrieked and giggled, we joined hands and ran down the hill repeatedly, loving how we felt when the shock entered our bodies through our bare feet, ratcheting up our spines and out the top of our heads. Something happened to our muscles, and we collapsed in a heap, screaming until Cindy's mother came outside and suggested we do something less noisy. Mind you, back then, we also chased the DDT trucks begging to be sprayed, deliberately broke thermometers to play with the mercury, the boys next door lobbed firecrackers at us, and no one wore seat belts or helmets or any form of protective devices. People tanned on aluminum foil, coating their bodies with baby oil and iodine; they smoked and drank when they were pregnant, and few breastfed. Almost everyone except our freaky family consumed vast amounts of red meat, sugar, salt, and artificial ingredients. Sex held no danger except for pregnancy, for which you took the pill or VD, which was easily cured. Cocaine wasn't addictive.

We had watched three assassinations, men walking on the moon, and an entire war on television. If we were going to die young, it would not be from drinking diet soda. It would be like Hiroshima, shadows left on a wall to document your existence, the snap of a light turned off, the crack of lightning, a bullet fired from a crowd, the gloved hand closing around your throat. I was afraid all the time. I thought my father would kill my mother, the Boston Strangler would kill my grandmother, a policeman would kill my sister, a car would kill our dog, and a tornado would descend on New Jersey and, in a moment, cancel all my hopes and dreams for the future.

I wanted to be a writer, an actress, a teacher, and a mother. I wanted everyone to be happy and well. I wanted world peace and no more hunger. I wanted an end to racism and domestic violence. I thought people should be nicer to one another and more aware of how fortunate they were to be alive and not slaughtered by Nazis. I wanted everyone I loved to be safe. I tried praying again, but I felt stupid and alone. I threw away my stuffed animals and started writing bad poetry about darkness and wolves and ice and wool blankets. I was fourteen, and things were about to get terrible. My oldest sister would try heroin, and I would be alone again. Although she was always mysterious, I knew she loved me no matter what. Catherine would leave for college, and I would stand in her empty bedroom, missing her very much.

Cindy's father was transferred by his job back to Ohio, and she would have a single month before she returned to her former life and left me. I came home from school and told my mother. "She's my best friend. I don't want to be alone again."
My mother was flattening a chicken with a mallet. "Stop it. Don't feel so much. You'll find someone else."
"I won't! She was my best friend."
"Well, Frankie Brady was my best friend, and he died when I was seventeen."
I had heard about Frankie Brady, who died of some mysterious disease since I was six. At that moment, I just needed her to say she was sorry.

Cindy and I rented a canoe and sat in the middle of the Delaware Water Gap, crying. We promised we would stay best friends, call, write, and visit, and nothing would change how we felt about each other. "You're my Molly," she said, tears spilling from her huge blue eyes, tears for me, for the loss of me. We paddled in circles, crying and laughing, remembering the things we had done together, renting horses that tried to kill us, fighting over John Pollen, and then both realizing how small a thing our feelings were for him compared to how we felt about each other. I told her about how my father acted when drunk and my sister taking drugs. She had told me how her father didn't think women should work and how he forbade her from saying bad things about the president.

She had chosen me first, checked to make sure I was at school, ate lunch with me every day, remembered things I told her, and listened. With her, I was claimed, found, welcomed, and safe. I had been lost at the London Zoo for half a day, on Fire Island for an entire day and evening, in every large city and every large store where a small child could wander away, I wandered away. Cindy waited for me in front of the school, saved me a seat, lent me a pen, shared her lunch, and waited for me to catch up. She didn't turn away when I was sad; she called me and shared her belief that our destiny was to be happy, famous, and of use. If I were lost, she would find me. If I fell behind, she'd wait.

The last summer I spent with Cynthia, we devised a way to go on a six-week bicycling trip together sponsored by the American Hostel Association. I lied and said her parents said yes; she lied and said my parents said yes. No one had said yes, but it didn't matter. What could be more wholesome than riding sixty or seventy miles a day with eight other fifteen-year-olds chaperoned by a reliable adult? But it was 1972, and our fearless leader was an ex-Hell's Angel who fell off his bike two days into the trip, breaking his collarbone. We tried to manage for a few days, but he was finally replaced. This new leader was handsome and funny and chose me as his special friend. I fell madly, hopelessly in love.

That summer, I had my braces removed, the baby fat had disappeared, the sun turned my skin brown, and my hair streaked with blonde. Standing in a department store in Maine, Cynthia and I had become Amazons with muscular legs and bike locks around our waists. We were being stared at, catcalled, and asked out by men of all ages. We bicycled, partied, and I pined across three New England states, eight adolescents, and a boy-man who, when I took my shirt off in his tent and suggested he marry me, kicked me to the curb, never mind that the assignation was his idea. Cynthia found me sitting by the dying embers of our campfire.
"What happened?"
"He doesn't want me."
”He's stupid. Come sleep."
We lay together in our tent, head-to-head. Cynthia told me about a boy she liked in a marching band who played the trumpet while I wept at the unfairness of being fifteen.
She turned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Someday, someone will love you as much as I do."

View fullsize

Molly with John Henry

The second half of that fateful summer was to be spent on a rock outcropping on the Penobscot Bay in Brooklin, Maine, spending my second August as the nanny of one perfect child belonging to the fiction editor of The New Yorker and his lovely wife, Roger and Carol Angell. John Henry was E. B. White and Katherine White's grandson. Andy White, E. B., brought us fresh eggs and stayed to talk about death and the horrors of old age. Summoned to tea with Katherine White, we discussed books, and I tried to sound both smart and well brought up.

I was no longer the teenager who loved her job and read a novel a week. My rage at my chosen groom's rejection and hurt feelings made me ripe for chaos. I had written my older man a love letter, and he replied by explaining that what we felt for one another was "animal attraction." The burn of my humiliation spread across my face. He thought I was an animal; he saw me as a child, and he barely acknowledged any of the things I had told him in my letter.

"When's your day off." It was one of the local boys, a lobster fisherman who had been watching me for weeks.
"Tomorrow."

Roger was displeased with the news I had a date. He mumbled something about the wrongness of my dating a hometown boy, but wrong was fine. Wrong was exactly what I wanted.

On the first date of my life, I got drunk, was slapped around, and then raped. I downed several beers, a shot of tequila, and most of a bottle of wine on an empty stomach. When he pushed me flat in the back seat, I resisted, and he hit me hard. Before I could see past the stars, I was having sex, his hand pushing my face against the seat smelled of fish, and the sounds made me think we were animals. My resistance came with the realization that I deserved so much more, so much better, so much kinder, and sweeter, and this would be a terrible mistake. I sobbed as he fucked me, sobbed for the mistakes I had made already, for the understanding this experience could never be undone.

"Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you're alone, if you're with a stranger, if you're in a group, if you're in a group of strangers, if it's dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you're carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you're wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who's around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who's at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn't follow all the rules it's your fault." —Brandon University

Rape kits weren't invented until the mid-seventies and were barely used until the eighties.

I made it home with the family asleep in their beds, took a bath, and transformed back into the perfect babysitter. I became the perfect babysitter who drank at night, given any opportunity. I so loved that little boy, but if I didn't drink when he was asleep and I was alone, I replayed the worst of that terrible night. The rapist told me it was my fault I had made him rape me; I was slutty, beautiful, and way too smart. I was a beautiful bitch, a cock tease, a whore. Maybe, but I was also fifteen, had just had my braces taken off, and had no idea the effect I had on men with my sophisticated chatter about D. H. Lawrence. I was breathtakingly ignorant about sex, and while I had imagined a flower-bedecked seduction à la Lady Chatterley's Lover, nothing prepared me for the cruel, sweaty, painful experience of male rage. I felt cheated, but I also discovered denial. If you pretend you don't feel, you cease to hurt.

photo by Transly Translation Agency

Listening to the raised, angry voices of drunken adults had been the flipside of my happy, privileged childhood. Years spent traveling on ocean liners, living abroad, meeting famous writers and artists, summers in Spain, and Christmas in Paris had abruptly ended when my oldest sister went to Radcliffe, and the glass house shattered. And it wasn't a glass house but a brown-shingled, tenant farmer's abode, which, until I started high school, had no heat in the attic or air conditioning anywhere. During hunting season, we were told to wear bright colors and sing, "I am human, please don't shoot me." It was paradise for younger children with brooks and barns full of high beams we'd scoot across, hay bales to jump into, and fireflies to chase. Nature was cruel but less cruel than the social life of Princeton. Despite poison ivy, falls, scratches from burrs, and puncture wounds from rusty nails, until Catherine went to college, there was a sense of family, of a shared sense that we were connected to each other.

But that would not survive the Vietnam War, my sister's pursuit of drugs, my father's drinking, my mother's denial, and insistence that you reject pain as proof of loyalty. The summer before Catherine left for Radcliffe, there was a mural contest held in downtown Princeton to decorate the fence that hid a giant hole in the ground dug for the new University Library. The Yeats poem, Leda and the Swan, was written in perfect cursive, accompanied by a very explicit depiction of the event with the swan clearly raping Leda. Someone had written in huge block letters on the next blank space, LIBERATE ULSTER. At that stage of the Irish troubles, my family still supported the IRA. After too much wine, my parents would listen to The Travelling People and talk about Ireland as if they'd been born there when in fact, only my Grandmother Molly, my namesake, had.

I was lost, marked by loneliness and fear that love would ultimately fail. Barefoot until the snow fell, my hair a wild tangle, so Catherine used to whisper "lait," referencing Truffaut's Wild Child raised by wolves. My daydreams focused on abduction, innocent at first but then sexual, the Snow Queen became a terrorist, reading about Patty Hearst, I wondered whether it was a relief to stay alone in the dark, away from the yelling. Neglect wasn't abuse, I told myself. Nothing I did much mattered, but the wolves occasionally told me I was pretty or smart, and that should be enough. Attention frightened me because it signaled that something was wrong or something terrible had happened.

In the winter of my senior year in high school, I went to Vermont with Catherine to stay with Natalie, her friend from Radcliffe, and Natalie's brother, who was in his mid-twenties and very charming. We went snowshoeing alone, leaving Catherine and Natalie to drink before the fire. The moon was incredibly full and bright, with stars piercing the blue-black sky. We walked through the woods. The air was as sharp as a blade against our skin, the sound of invisible creatures scattering as we approached, and the crack of frozen branches. We stopped in a clearing and he looked down at me.

"How pretty you are," he said. "Are you the family beauty?"
I shook my head. "Brigid's the family beauty," I said.
He laughed. "Ah, labels! Well, Catherine's a genius, so what's your label?"
"I'm a whore, and I read too much."

He kissed me, and we lay down together briefly to look at the stars. When we returned, I sat with Catherine in front of the fire.

"Mom and Dad should pay more attention to you. Is it hard being an only child? Are you okay?" Catherine asked, softly touching my face.
I shook my head. No one ever asked me that.
"They're so selfish," she said. "Unless you really hurt yourself, they don't care. If you try to escape, they pull you back."
Did she want to escape? The idea of Catherine disappearing filled me with fear. "I miss you so much. I hate being the only child."
"Listen, Molser, just hold on. When you leave, you'll understand things better, and you'll realize it isn't your fault that they don't care whether you're safe or happy. When you don't need them anymore, when you feel whole, everything will be better."

I missed the connecting bus to Princeton from the train I took from Vermont. I had told my parents when I'd be back, but they didn't remember. I spent the night sitting against a wall in Port Authority, watching as junkies, prostitutes, and street people roved around searching for business or someplace to sleep. In 1974 New York City was very dangerous. I had called my parents to say I had missed the bus, but no one would make the drive to pick me up. I was in Hell's Kitchen, a seventeen-year-old girl alone in the night.

Years later, my therapist said, "Your parents were monsters. Terrible, beautiful monsters."
"But I love them. They are my monsters."

That night, when I returned from Maine, I sat on my bed, drinking warm vodka, and felt my heart become ice, like my favorite fairy tale, The Snow Queen; everything was ruined and ugly because of the splinter of glass that had pierced my eyes. No one seemed to notice that I had been away or come back. My father was missing, and Catherine was gone.

—Molly Moynihan